Channel Frederator Blog

Last week we featured Aucklund, New Zealand’s Flux Animation Studio’s “Dominate Wax”, a fun, little, dirty sex-romp of a viral short that was passed around the world.
Dominate Wax was a short that was very well animated, and very daring on the explicit side for us to post up.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure how our audience would react.
I thought for sure we would get banned from the numerous places we slap channel frederator all over because of it. But man! The comments we have all gotten from Dominate Wax, have been nothing but great feedback. I thought we would be chased by a mob of angry villagers carrying torches and attack dogs, but we instead were hoisted on the shoulders of our fans, metaphorically speaking, and were cheered and championed. somewhat at least.

Laban Dickenson Caricature
Here’s the interview:
1) We all wanna know: Is it a real commercial, if so, has it been aired?
The spot was created as an online viral , but I am told it was aired on C4 ( a kiwi music channel ) for the purposes of Awards, a far as the viral aspect goes it bounced around the word and came back to us from a couple of sources.

2) What type of feedback have you guys received over this short?
the content recieved mixed reviews ,but as far as craft goes it has had very good feedback , it was shortlisted at the Cannes Lions and has been recognised at several awards, including double finalist in last fridays “Award” awards in Australia, I think as always our worst critics were here at Flux , there were a few staff members who wouldn’t participate in production (which I respect) but a couple of the guys stepped up and made it a great job of it.
We did quiz whether we wanted to be well known for this type of Spot ,but I guess once you’ve made Mc Donalds commercials ,where else is here to go?.

3) How long did it take you to pump this out, so to speak? From start to finish.
It was a strange one ,we had 6 months, but a very small budget , I guess we recognised it’s award (or head turning) potential, so made a ” special”project of it, and fitted it in among other commercial jobs and series.

4) Did you guys have to “research” for this project? If so, what did you look at? (Nudie magazines, life drawing models, etc.)
We looked at tattoo books, I guess the rest was our filthy minds ,and the drawing Skills of Laban Dickenson who Directed the spot. We did have some hillarious pre production meetings with the Agency ,Colenso BBDO here in Auckland , at the first meetings one or the creative team (both females) stood up and got all the cuss words out of the way before we got started on the brief.

5) What are you working on currently?
We are involved in a large CGI series “Master Riandrop”, and Flux has always had plenty of commercial work, my favourite project which is our current “special” project is a short film “A Dark and Silly night” which was originally a Kids book by cartoon legend Gahan Wilson.

Sounds great. Thanks for submitting to us guys! Keep up the great work!
-Jeaux Janovsky