View Masters

It's supposed to be the perfect hit.The target: A 130-pound, bleach-blond kid sitting in a dimly lighted kitchen, fiddling with his laptop. He is surrounded by potholder-decorated walls and shelves stocked with fresh vegetables, fruit and a can of Ovaltine. The wrecking crew: a three-person SWAT team of NFL-sized guys dressed in masks and black combat gear. One will crash through the ceiling on a rope. The other two will bust through a pair of closed doors. And the kid? The kid gets leveled.

At least, that's the way it's supposed to go.

Wearing a V-neck T-shirt, a rumpled cowboy hat and a few days' stubble, Matt Fraction stands in a darkened studio at 20th and Main, flanked by a camera crew, TV monitors and swivel-ready cameras attached to rails of track.

Two MTV representatives -- a creative director and a line producer, both looking more skate punk than network -- watch the action on a closed-circuit feed above. Fraction is filming a dream sequence, an imagining of the day record-company execs use special ops to bust teenagers who are downloading copyrighted tunes.

Originally from North Carolina, Fraction jumped around film and art schools before landing at the Kansas City Art Institute -- and then dropping out. A comic-book writer, he's finished a graphic novel titled Last of the Independents and a three-part comic collection called The Annotated Mantooth. Live-action scenes are drawn out on a page in front of him like panels in a cartoon. For this scene, Fraction has readied specific cues for the cameramen, grips and actors: Action. Go dolly. Lights. One. Two. Three.But for the past few takes, his cadence has been off. Once, a camera tracked too slowly to follow the action. Another time, the SWAT guy rappelling from the ceiling got stuck at the bottom and the kid got away. Later, the kid stopped at his mark with his hands up, but had to wait for the commandos to tackle him.

The premise of MTV's advertising campaign is that the world is filled with buzz kills like these music police. Patterned after old-school public-service announcements, each spot is to be an "Anti-Social Awareness Announcement" encouraging troublemakers to challenge established rules or beliefs. On the issue of music piracy, the commercial is supposed to show how getting caught would suck -- and then provide a list of songs to avoid because they're monitored for theft.

This isn't the first time Fraction and his crew have filmed an anti-establishment commercial. On April 12, inspired by the Federal Communications Commission's response to Janet Jackson's Super Bowl performance, Fraction invited Ken and Barbie knockoffs from local talent agencies and a few friends -- who came in realistic shapes and sizes -- to an auditorium-sized room to spout an exhaustive list of dirty but technically unregulated words for television. At one point, Jacob Corbin, a University of Missouri-Kansas City economics major who'd met Fraction 2 years earlier at a comic-book forum, stood beneath a boom mike in front of a white cloth backdrop as Fraction asked him to read a list of words. Corbin, a heavyset guy with short-cropped hair and round glasses, tells the Pitch how he faced the camera as Fraction directed from offstage:

OK, you can get pretty crazy when you're worked up. Give me some of that. Say "assmaster."

"Assmaster."

Louder.

"Assmaster!"

OK. Now make it angrier, dude.

"ASSMASTER!"

Again.

"ASSSSSSMASTER!" Corbin yelled as spittle flew from his mouth.

Corbin worked his way down an alphabetical list of slang nuggets: bone stroker, bukkake, cocksmith, dick, dickweed, frack snacker, ho, jiz, klondike, knob jockey, laying pipe, MILF, MoFo, numbnuts, punani, rim job, rod knocker, snowplow, wank.

Live-action filming is new for Fraction and his friends -- Jed Carter, Tim Fisher, Shaun Hamontree and Ben Radatz -- in the company they call MK12. The five partners, most in their late twenties, have spent the past several years earning an international reputation as purveyors of computer-generated realities. In MK12's studio, computer terminals rest atop a string of hexagonal tables. A Pac-Man arcade game stands in one corner; in another there's a plush couch near a TV and an 8-bit Nintendo. While Fisher and Radatz are speaking at an international design conference in Australia, Fraction has spent two days converting the company's conference room (once cluttered with obscure posters, action figures and garage sale knickknacks) and its adjoining kitchen into sets depicting a car-rental business, a bachelor pad and a suburban kitchen.

Standing in the wings of the dark set, Fraction has given up on the finely orchestrated attack plan. When the sirens start spinning and the spotlights sweep for him, the kid should just run. And the SWAT guys should bring the blitz.

"You're going to be flat on the ground," Fraction tells the kid. "Just completely pancaked out. Just fucking splat.

"All right," Fraction says. "Everybody goes on lights. Go shithouse on lights."

MK12 banks on being able to capture a viewer's attention in 30 seconds or less. In this case, it'll be with a bone-crunching hit.

"Anytime there's three guys your size body-checking a kid that size, it's awesome," Fraction says. "I don't care if that makes me lowbrow. It's golden."