Richard Elliott and Simon Racioppa were not your garden-variety film school kids. Dreams of Hollywood glory did not lull them to sleep at night. They were shooting low, never thinking about writing drama, comedy, or animation. To them, film school was practical, a way to learn how to do industrial, wedding or corporate videos.

Natives of Scarborough, a down-at-the-heel Toronto suburb, the pair decided to work together by starting Reptile Films, which eventually "morphed" into writing. "We started having grand visions of making TV shows in school," Elliot says. "'Let's pitch this to networks.' Nothing ever went, but I guess it was good experience."

They graduated in 1999 and went straight into animation writing. Their credits in that genre include George Shrinks, RoboRoach, Hoze Houndz, Marvin The Tap Dancing Horse, Franklin and Donkey Kong Country. "Animation was just something that opened up for us," Racioppa says. "It was the first avenue of writing that we just got into and we love it. We don't just think of ourselves as cartoon guys, although that's pretty much our higher list of credits so far. It brought us to where we are now and we never want to leave it behind, but we want to add other genres to it as well."

The Ryerson University graduates spent a couple of weeks in L.A. in the spring looking for an agent as they try to break into live action. "That's why AMG (Artists Management Group) was pretty logical for us," Racioppa says. "It will help establish us in the American animation market, first of all, but also help coach us for live action."

One of the scripts they were shopping around in Hollywood was a feature script called Marathon. In 480 BC, democracy is emerging in Athens as the Persian Empire comes to snuff it out. "It's a story that we want to do," says Elliott. "If someone like AMG can sell it, all the better. They already sound optimistic because Gladiator just won five or six or seven Oscars, so that kind of a historical drama is coming back."

More recently, they've added another twist to their career path and gone interactive with KidsTime, an on-line game (www.kidstime.com). "We hadn't done interactive before," Elliott says. "It was nice challenge to sit down and say, 'Wow, this isn't traditional script format.' It's still a story, but this time the story has different endings. It's a story that's interactive, so we sat down and created a format and created our own bible for it. It was a bit of a learning process, too."

"The main difference for us was that interactive writing is much more thorough," says Racioppa. "You have so many possibilities to consider. In terms of the user, what's going to happen if they click anything on the screen? A two-minute sequence could be 15 pages because you have all the eventualities to consider. But again, the white board comes in very handy to sketch where you want to go and what's going to happen. Screenwriting sort of came through in writing for both the characters and dialogue. You just have to do more planning."

Working together, one types while the other paces and thinks out loud, then they snowball. "When the actually writing part starts one of us sits down at the computer and the other one paces," Elliott says. "And when the one sitting down gets tired, he stands up paces and the other sits in. It works really well because you've got a second check."

"It's a pretty fast process for us because we very like-minded," Racioppa says. "Having two people is just a great way of removing some of the dumber ideas. Sometimes, we'll just drive out to a park and just bring a pad of paper and toss ideas back and forth until something sticks. Hacking out the structure from there is pretty easy, and that'll be it."

Elliott and Racioppa are hoping Entropy -- an original short film script set in an alternate future in which the right to die is taken away -- will be their ticket to the festival circuit. "It's sort of 1984 meets The Matrix, so I think it's significantly different from a traditional calling-card short," Elliott says. "It's going to be a festival piece, hopefully, for us."

In the meantime, while they're hoping to expand into the U.S. market, they're enjoying the advantages still available here at home.

"The best thing about being Canadian is that you get to be versatile by nature. Work comes up here and you take it. In the States, they want to know, 'Are you a half-hour sitcom? A seven-o'clocker? An hour-long drama? You can't be all of them.' But you can be. You have to cheat the system a bit."