Fred Seibert's Blog

It’s kind of hard to believe that I’d never met Joe Murray, creator of Rocko’s Modern Life and Camp Lazlo, but there you go. Our friend Khaki Jones put us together yesterday and we started getting to know each other at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in beautiful downtown Burbank. It was a great first step because, at least for me, a conversation is usually the first step to figuring out work to do together. Nice meeting you Joe (and thanks Khaki).

Frederator Postcard Series 8.15, mailed February 5, 2010   

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More Frederator Postcards: Series 1-8, 1998-2010

Eric and I went over to the Dreamworks Animation campus to catch up with director  Mike Mitchell (who’s Shrek Forever After  is being released in May) whom we’d worked with on developing Mike Bell’s Super Santa into a live action feature over at Paramount. And who should we run into but Mike Bell himself, who working on Dreamworks projects too. It was great catching up with both of them, two of the nicest (and yes, stunningly talented) guys in our business. And now that we’ve got the Super Santa script back, one never knows what can happen.

George & Lilliana Seibert at the Harbor Pharmacy, 1958

Most of the mentorsI’ve written about have been work companions and no one I’ve worked with has had the same impact as George and Lilliana Seibert. It would have been their 60th anniversary today (George passed away in 2002) so it’s a great day to honor them.

Yes, Lilliana and George are my parents. And yes, most people can point to their parents as the prime influence on them, but I’m not going to completely bore you with too much personal biography. This blog is focused on work and my folks were my first bosses at their suburban pharmacy. The takeaway from my first work experience has shaped most of what I’ve done since. I picked up my complete love of work with them, and found out that for me “work to live” is not an option. “Live to work” is much more like it. I didn’t become a workaholic –I like my personal time as much as anyone– but I absorbed the real joy of the process of work itself.

I worked* in their store for more than 20 years. [Read more…]

Frederator Postcard Series 8.14, mailed January 29, 2010    

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More Frederator Postcards: Series 1-8, 1998-2010

Optic Nerve’s Jon Kane and I met because I really loved the pioneering mix “No Sell Out” by Malcolm X & Keith LeBlanc, on Tommy Boy Records. (It’s too long a story to recount here right now.) After a bumpy start we’ve worked together awesomely ever since.

Carrie and I visited Jon at his Red Hook (Brooklyn) HQ yesterday. We canceled the project that had initiated the visit to begin with, so I thought we’d just be BS’ing about this and that. But as usual with a great creative collaborator we ended up agreeing to work on a project together. Can’t wait to get started.

Animation director Kevin Lofton was back at Frederator/NY, and this time he brought a special guest star, hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy. We were all discussing feature projects, and maybe we’ve just about got one. Thanks for coming over guys.

Just as I was about to post, Bailee Desrocher’s Lego “Click” post popped up on the Channel Frederator blog. It must be the Lego animation moment.

Carrie Miller and I went around the corner late last week to visit artist Nathan Sawaya’s studio. I was virtually introduced to Nathan’s work when I saw a commissioned piece on his work on my friend Liz Gebhardt’s blog. I immediately contacted him for a top secret Frederator Fredbot project. More in a month or two.

Lego artist Nathan Sawaya

The visual Craft of William Golden

Talk about unsung heroes. For those of you interested in graphic design or broadcasting or branding or marketing –or you’re just a media freak like me– you really should read this book, The Visual Craft of William Golden (hit ‘Full Screen’ up above, or download a PDF; it’ll be easy). [Firefox users, please note: there seems to be an issue where the  Scribd embed for the book isn’t visible. We’re on it, but just click the link instead to it properly.]    

William Golden is the father of broadcast design, having been completely responsible, under Frank Stanton and owner William Paley, for the look and feel of the television network of the Columbia Broadcasting Company (CBS to you younger viewers), the first network to take into account every single aspect of it’s image and vocabulary. Most famous for the most famous TV logo of all time, the CBS eye, Golden was a philosopher and an artist in the most philistine moment of the 1950s. He was the man who was able to make one believe Paley’s conceit that his network of “I Love Lucy” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” was actually “the Tiffany Network.”

Golden wasn’t just about the logo, as a quick visual inspection of the book will bear out (but, check out the cool ways it was used, obviously but subtly, like on page 32). But, read it instead, you’ll get some great insights as to how a great creative work is done even at a behemoth like a TV network.

One quick, related, digression. George Lois used to tell me the story of his early job working under Golden’s art director Kurt Weiss, the man who actually designed the CBS logo. His gig was redrawing an original CBS type font, a Didot variation. Lois told me he worked for weeks on the “8″ alone because Golden insisted that the cross lines couldn’t actually meet, and George had to do it over hundreds of times to meet his exacting expectations.

Sadly, Golden is only known among broadcast design freaks like me (I had to become one to figure out how to do my job at MTV). He passed away (young, at 48) and the reins were handed to senior designer Lou Dorfsman who, unfairly, got the lion’s share of the credit for origination as the network matured and publicity accrued in the 60s and 70s.

Like I said, take a little time to read this hard to find book. It was rewarding to me the first time I sat down with a rare copy in the 80s, and it’s wisdom has only become richer over time.

Frederator Postcard Series 8.13, mailed January 22, 2010   
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More Frederator Postcards: Series 1-8, 1998-2010