Channel Frederator Blog

It’s that time again! Time to announce our March Cartoon of the Month. We had a really great variety of films that were contenders this month - bears, cars, ghosts, goldfish, narwhals, cupcakes and more. Honestly, though, in the end we all know that cupcakes RULE! So it’s really no surprise that Kirsten Lepore is taking home the totally sweet $100 prize-pack of exclusive Cartoon of the Month Channel Frederator merchandise for her film, Sweet Dreams.
Kirsten was Channel Frederator’s first featured filmmaker in episode #166. Our very own Bailee DesRocher did an awesome two part interview with Kirsten where she tells all about this great film. Make sure you check it out here, and here.
I also asked Kirsten what kind of advice she has for any of you creative filmmakers out there that want to win the Cartoon of the Month prize yourself. She says:

Story is key. Oftentimes you have to [Read more…]

Check it out! Our sister-network, Indy Mogul featured some awesome stop motion animation films in a special episode of “The Best Short Films in the World” today. While you’ll see our very own Dan Meth’s Watermelon Nights, the rest of these animations are exclusive to The Best Sort Films in the World. So get a preview here, but hightail it over to their site to see the shorts in the entirety! - Carrie

I was bopping around the website for The Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angouleme (more about that later in the week) and discovered the work of French illustrator Anouk Ricard. Amusingly awkward and extremely charming, the style is perfect for animation. (As you can see above, in a stop motion adaptation of her book Anna et Froga.)

She also contributed to a series of shorts called Avez-Vous Déjà Vu?, created by French comic Alain Chabat. Who, by the way, dubbed the voice of Mike Meyer’s voice in all three Shrek movies.

Are you afraid of CANDY? Now I am!

Check out her website.

PS: She sings, too.

—Anne D. Bernstein

If you crave an antidote to the sappier side of the Holiday Season, you can find a daily dose of grotesque greeetings over at the Creepy Christmas site. Beck Underwood heads this online project which will release one new short film every day up until Christmas. The series launched December 1st with Electrifying Holiday Spirit by illustrator David Goldin. Read about how he made this film over at his Drawger blog.

It’s all very low-budget and home-spun (yet high quality!) and I will definitely be checking in each AM to see what daily disturbances are unwrapped.

A full list of the filmmakers can be found at the Glass Eye Pix site. Upcoming creators include Voltaire, Peter Sis, and Mary Haron. (Glass Eye Pix is a production company run by Beck’s husband Larry Fessenden. They are a super creative couple and Beck was the publisher of a great kids magazine from the late 90s called ZuZu. They [Read more…]

Yes, this video has been around for a while, but after watching the recently posted interview with Fred, and thinking about the early days of MTV, this video’s visuals popped into my head.

Directed by Ace Norton, this video for the band Death Cab for Cutie has many elements that remind me of early MTV promos.

Much of Ace’s work has a similar feel, from his other work with Death Cab for Cutie (an homage to Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer“), to his newer stuff (like this Coke commercial).

With so much slick CG stuff in front of us all the time now, I really enjoy seeing animation like this. What do you think?

-Floyd Bishop

Last week on The Sarah Silverman Show, Sarah gave birth to a demon baby. How did she do it? With the help of stop motion animation. To watch a behind-the-scenes video go here. (Ignore that fact that there are multiple references to “stop animation”.)

The Chiodo Brothers (Killer Clowns From Outer Space) worked on the demon baby construction. Doug Tennapel (Earthworm Jim, Catscratch) also helped with the project. You get to see some glimpses of the original animatic. They also show how they made Doctor Dick Van Paten’s face melt with the help of low-budget tips from Indy Mogul, which offers instructions on using the crayon-wax-and-heat-gun method.

After the jump, a visit to the toy-packed Chiodo Brothers Studio. That Charles Chiodo sure is a good “drawer”!

[Read more…]

We’re all familiar with the classic “Got Milk?” campaign, which was sponsored by the California Milk Processor Board. Now another scrappy milk-promoting trade group, the British Columbia Dairy Foundation, is promoting a video contest on YouTube.

To enter, make a video with the message “Must Drink More Milk” and upload it to YouTube. Each month, two winners will be named. At the end of the year, one Grand Prize winner will win a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air (with Final Cut Pro). Oh yeah, you MUST BE A RESIDENT OF BRITISH COLUMBIA to enter.

I really like the video above, a stop motion fight scene where our underdog champion is a claymation version of one of those wobblies monsters you stick on the end of a pencil. I wish the BCDF would credit the animators and make it clear that eight YouTube videos most prominently posted were done by pros and had “real budgets” and the supervision of an advertising agency. The fight scene is by at Bent Image Lab. (Chel White, Ray Di Carlo, and David Daniels formed this Portland, Oregon studio in 2003.)

For more information about the contest, go to the milkvids YouTube page or the mustdrinkmoremilk website.

PS: For an online gallery of the classic milk mustache ads, check out this link.

PPS: Here are some earlier spots for the BCDF with animation direction by Curious Pictures.

After the jump, another Bent Image Labs video, starring Russian nesting dolls with very annoying voices. And a few videos by an actual contest entrants. [Read more…]

Thanks to Mark Mayerson for pointing out the presence of two George Pal shorts at Europa Film Treasures, an online archive of important European films. (Mark’s blog Mayerson On Animation is highly recommended, so check it out!)

The first film is “La Grande Revue Philips” (”The Great Philips Revue”). Made to promote the Philips brand of radios, this sassy, stop-motion extravaganza was produced at Dollywood Studio in Holland (where he worked with art director Joop Geesink). (Note: The portrayal of Harlem residents is definitely un-PC.)

Philip funded at least ten Puppetoons. The George Pal Site rounds them up here. (The information on the Pal website leads me to believe that the short on Europa is a combination of footage from “The Little Broadcast” (1935) and “The Big Broadcast of 1938″ (1937). Any experts out there to clear that up?)

Anyway, watch the film here and read more about it on this page.

The other Pal film posted for your viewing pleasure is “Tulips Shall Grow” (1942). It was made for Paramount after Pal fled WWII-era Europe for New York City. The evil Screwballs Army attacks a delightful, cheery, windmill-loving blond couple in a not-so-subtle bit of anti-Nazi animation propaganda. The hardware heavies are ultimately defeated and hardy flowers bloom. YEAH!

Watch it here and learn more on this page.

After the jump, a commercial from post-Pal Dollywood where coffee beans speak in a foreign tongue! [Read more…]

GAME OVER is just one of several art projects developed by the French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond, working with the NOTsoNOISY creative agency. The piece is a series of short films, each one based on a different early video game. Instead of pixels, we see humans in colored shirts moving from seat to seat in a theater.

Other films in the series include Pole Position, Pong, and Tetris.

-Floyd Bishop

On  September 1st, “Life’s a Zoo” will premiere as part of TeleToon’s Detour (the Canadian version of Adult Swim on Cartoon Network). The show’s creators, Adam Shaheen and Andrew Horne, are heading up the production from their studio in downtown Toronto.

The show is about a group of animals living in a mansion as part of a huge reality show.  The animals must either work together or plot against one another, just like a live action reality show. The creators have mixed together aspects of just about every reality show there has ever been, and then went over the top with the material.

Perhaps the coolest part of the show is the music video section. Each episode will feature the music of a different Canadian indie band. This gives the show great music at less of a cost, and gets the band a wider exposure than they might get otherwise.

We’ll have to wait and [Read more…]