While it hasn’t achieved the notoriety of powerhouse Internet memes like otters holding hands or sneezy panda, TheAVClub.tv’s web series Psycho Bob employs an innovative visual style that deserves a closer look. The show’s creators describe Bob as “the video equivalent of a Sunday comic strip,” and while Charlie Brown never picked up hitchhikers with the intention of dismembering them, the comparison is not without merit.
Each episode of Psycho Bob presents a vignette from the life of a psychopathic murderer named Bob. These vignettes consist of a series of shots that scroll across the screen, right to left, creating a facsimile of the eye scanning over the panels of a newspaper comic strip. The videos generally feature very little dialogue and rely heavily on sound design to tie the visuals together. Bob himself, played by Sean Bury, never says a word and always remains completely motionless, regardless of what’s going on in the frame around him. It’s a device that the series manages to use to both comic and unsettling effect.
Director Andy Cochrane and cinematographer Craig Bauer deserve credit for developing an experimental storytelling style that is both uniquely suited for the web and is unlike anything else out there in terms of form and tone. While primarily a black comedy, Psycho Bob does occasionally veer into the realm of horror, ground not often tread by a medium that prizes brevity over suspense.
Psycho Bob premiered in mid-2007, and while the series has never been a huge viral hit, it has garnered its fair share of attention. In the fall of 2007, it was selected to screen as part of a special series at the Rome Film Festival dedicated to the evolution of cinema via online video. Other participants in the festival series included web video luminaries like lonelyGirl15 and SNL Digital. Comcast cable subscribers can also see several episodes of Psycho Bob on their televisions via StupidVideos.com’s on-demand channel.
It’s a shame that Bob hasn’t received more attention in its native medium, but TheAVClub.tv should be commended for producing top-notch, innovative work like this, and on their own dime, too. It’s a nice reminder that even as studios and networks push further into online video spaces, independent creators like AVClub.tv are still producing the bulk of the best stuff out there. Hopefully TheAVClub.tv will continue to make Psycho Bob and other shows in the Bob format. In a world lousy with web videos of lip-synching fat kids and cute animal hijinx, this sort of creative storytelling is a welcome breath of fresh air.
