Ryan Connolly is having his heart ripped out by a woman . . . literally.

In a pouring rain, she starts with his arms, tearing 'em off one at a time, blood spurting out. Just as Connolly voices second thoughts about breaking up, she reaches into his chest and rips his heart out, leaving him screaming in agony.

Then Connolly laughs.

The gruesome scene, played out in broad view at Tree Tops Park in Davie, was part of an episode for Film Riot, a weekly series that the 27-year-old Connolly created, hosts and co-produces in South Florida with his brother and a lifelong pal.

While Film Riot is something you watch, you won't see it on a traditional television -- only on computer screens.

The series runs on Revision3.com, a website that bills itself as ``the leading television network for the Internet generation.''

Revision3 is among a growing number of sites that offer original fare such as series, movies and documentaries. If you believe the experts, Connolly and his team -- brother Joshua, 17, and best friend Tim Allen, 26, plus a loose entourage of other friends -- represent the future of television: independently produced, network-quality shows by a new breed of producers who value the Web more than the airwaves, and who are bucking unwritten rules that Hollywood set decades ago.

``These guys are not beholden to secretive mega-financiers,'' says Damon Brown, an expert on technology in pop culture and author of the book Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture. ``They're not beholden to some numbers cruncher. They don't sign their lives away for favors to some shmarmy studio head. And they don't need access to the back lot of a major studio out there. They know their audience consists largely of young, smart people who manage their lives with computers and only think of traditional entertainment tools like TVs or books as an afterthought.''

LIFELONG PURSUIT

Connolly is a movie buff who grew up on Hollywood, Calif. . . . but in Hollywood, Fla. His parents gave him his first video camera when he was 5 years old. He and Allen became close as teenagers, shooting short films and videos for their church youth group until their taste for horror films began to clash with their church's more sanitized requirements.

Sidestepping traditional film school, Connolly and Allen got degrees from Full Sail University in Winter Park, a school known for producing Web and filmmaking brainiacs.

While both men took day jobs ``to pay the bills,'' Connolly says, what they really wanted was to have their own show and eventually make movies.

In the summer of 2008, Connolly conceived Film Riot, and the series debuted online early this summer.

BEHIND THE SCENES

New episodes are posted every Thursday morning. Each 15- to 20-minute episode -- which includes commercials up front from major sponsors like Visa -- has segments providing how-to instructions for creating the bloody, gory effects found in horror and splatter films. Past episodes have included simulations of people being cut in half, exploding heads and Werewolf attacks.

But it's not all blood and guts; Film Riot also provides a behind-the-scenes look at the horror and sci-fi film industries, and tackles topics such as: Which has the better weapons, Star Trek or Star Wars?

The Star Trek vs. Star Wars episode was the first Connolly and company made for Film Riot, and they shot it in the den of Connolly's parents' Broward County home.

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