Channel Frederator Blog

If you missed Pictoplasma NYC last weekend, there’s an excellent round-up of speakers by Matt Sung at the design:related blog.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Highlights:

1. Gangpol Und Mit’s presentation in charmingly fractured English. With catchy jingles!

2. Tim Biskup’s revealing talk regarding his recent “The Artist in You” exhibit. He talked about the need to constantly recreate his characters in order to figure out what they “really mean”. He’s discovered that Helper is not as nice as he first appears–in fact, Biskup compared him to Tony Soprano. “The Monster is what you become when you believe in yourself too much.” (Helper statue photographed by me, at the last Comicon I could bear to attend.)

3. Nattily dressed Fons Schiedon (at top) discussing his work, both commercial and personal. (The character design you see is from Kika and Bob, an animated series that sounds like it was designed to give the animation staff breakdowns, as they travel to a different elaborate location in every single episode!)

4. Studio AKA’s screening of their touching and breathtaking new film Varmints.

5. A kinetic finale by Friends With You, complete with giant bouncing inflatables.

6. And the big revelation of the pow-wow: David O’Reilly’s announcement that he is behind the YouTube phenomenon known as Octocat! If you’ve never seen it, Octocat is a bizarre and seemingly naive series of animated shorts that were posted to YouTube under the name Randy Peters. Some may feel punked when they find out that they were created by an actual “artist”–not an obscure and naive adolescent channeling some kind of Freudian nightmare– but that does not mean that they aren’t strangely moving.

Here’s the first episode of Octocat. The rest are on the jump, including the mind-blowing revelations of Adventure Five.

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As the hoards converge on Comicon this weekend (and I sit in sticky, hot Brooklyn, recalling the days when the Gaslamp District was still scuzzy and you didn’t have to book your hotel room two years in advance) let me tell you about an upcoming, far more intimate event that promises to be fascinating: Pictoplasma NYC: Conference on Contemporary Character Design and Art at New York University’s Skirball Center, from September 5-6.

Described as a “character design Mecca”, Pictoplasm will spotlight “the importance of character design in contemporary visual culture.” Today’s popular graphic personalities cross cultural and commercial borders and it’s becoming commonplace to see the same character on both museum walls and pencil sets. This is an opportunity to learn, talk, and schmooze with some of today’s most innovative icon creators.

Guests include Tim Biskup, Gangpol Und Mit, and Friends With You. Saturday has the bulk of the animation talk with Akinori Oishi (Japan) and Studio AKA (UK) appearing.

Registration info and more after the jump. [Read more…]