he images on pitchtv.com move like water across the computer screen with classic New York glitz. On every page an animated thrill hides beneath the text, ready to jump into action. The site explores Internet possibilities, including digital films, animation and an online magazine.

Pitch is a live-action film and animation studio with a bent toward digital filmmaking and cutting-edge Web content. Ultimately, pitchtv.com aims to be a full-fledged entertainment site complete with short films, journalistic coverage of cultural arts, theater, and film, fiction, humor writing, poetry and more.

"Think of Salon, think of Harpers, think of the New Yorker," says S.D. Katz, one of the company's founders.

Pitch doesn't have the breadth of any of those publications now, but the content is promising. In fact, it's downright cool. The "magazine," called "reportage," which covers media, is produced entirely in Flash animation. When the "pages" are "turned," simple images that help frame the story glide across the screen in elegant colors and although the writing is longer than most Web articles, the layout makes it surprisingly reader friendly.

The animation portion of the site features an attention-hungry dancing television, pitchtv's mascot of sorts, which appears throughout the site. Katz shakes his head when asked about where the "tv" in pitchtv comes from. The company creates some content for television, but the company's founders come from a film background.

Pitch was created two years ago by Katz, Chris Gilligan and Russ Dube, all of whom have worked either as filmmakers, animators, directors or some combination of those jobs. The friends started the company to have creative control and the freedom to make their own work. But now, pitch is too swamped with building its name and establishing itself as a media force for the founders to focus on their own projects.

"Pitch can be called one of the adapters, a real-world filmmaking company with an Internet company, not one tacked onto the other," says Katz.

The site was launched in November 1999. Although the schedule for updating the site is a bit haphazard, the work is polished and it does marry film and the Internet in an innovative way.

Looking at the future of film on the Web, Katz says, "no one really knows what the public response to short films will be. The audience has grown hugely in the last few years, but whether or not it's a paying audience is unclear. There are too many unknowns."

Pitch is heavily focused on film, but the company seems ready to dash in whatever entertainment-related direction the market goes. Katz expects the online film market to be saturated within two years, and that's when only the strong will survive. The Internet is subject to strong Darwinian forces and when the frenzy over online film settles down, only a few companies will be left standing. Pitch is determined to be one of them.