This is a great article in the Austin Chronicle on the web site Spill.com and the media festival coming up next week!

Spill.com Few post-AICN film websites have been as consistently enthusiastic as Korey Coleman and his gang of rabid film commentators over at Spill.com. They've been so successful at parlaying their original idea (which began as the public access show The Reel Deal back in the mid-Nineties) into a corporate-sponsored but locally run model of How to Do It Right that this coming weekend will see their first-ever Spill Dot Con (see Spill.com for details). Billed as a gathering of the site's far-flung fan-tribe and featuring panels, animation workshops, a site-themed mini film festival, and, of course, afterparties with the legendary likes of Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, De La Soul's Maceo, and Rah Digga, it's a party/confab/meet 'n' greet that serves both to promote the site and spread the love (of film).

"We did The Reel Deal for 10, 11 years," explains Coleman, Spill's top dog and a longtime Austin animator. "It was time to move on. That was right when YouTube was coming up and a bunch of animated online videos started appearing, and I thought that would be something that would be fun to get into and would probably get us a wider audience than what we were doing on public access."

Coleman's stroke of genius – taking the audio from The Reel Deal and coupling it to animated versions of himself and his fellow commentators, who all go by aliases – worked better than even he expected, ultimately resulting in a partnership with media giant Hollywood.com.

Spill.com retains every bit of The Reel Deal's biting, back-and-forth snark-outs, but with some 32,000 members of the "Spill community" regularly dropping in to chat, share info, and view the members' animated (in every sense of the word) gabfests every week, it's left its public access roots in the dust by, well, giving its public even more access.

"My personal goal with Spill Dot Con," says Coleman, "is to have a way for all these people who are already members or fans of the site to gather together and meet each other. And then on top of that they'll be able to learn how the production works, how the site works, and how we all get along with each other. And we're known for interacting with our fans, so it gives us a chance to meet them and take that personal feel that we have on the site even further. It's going to be a laid-back event with a sense of humor, you know? We don't take ourselves too seriously, but at the same time we're pretty serious about what we do."

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