My friend, and my wife’s colleague back in the day at Epic Records, Jeff Jones just got the baby boomers’ dream job, CEO of Apple Corps, The Beatles’ record label. (You can read more about it at Reuters.) It’s hard to wrap your head around that there’s even such a job.
Funny how I was just writing about the Fabs the other day.
I know, I know, the Frederator Blogs is no place for the actual news of the world (promise to try and make it last time it happens). But, my other company Next New Networks has just launched a preview epsisode of our newest-network-to-be called Veracifier and I thought the scoop was worth sharing.
In one of his constantly illuminating reports on the Alberto Gonzales/Justice Department revelations, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall (Josh is the reporter who broke the scandal story to begin with) unpeels yet another layer in the continuing saga of the politization of our US Justice Department. Bravo Josh.
Do you like fast cars? (Yes DeGrandis I’m talkin’ to you!).
Somehow I never posted anything from this sister network to Channel Frederator called VOD Cars.
“Send us your clips: Driving, Racing, Crashing, Showing, Drifting, Posing. Anything. We wanna see it! If it’s VOD Cars material, it’ll be featured in an upcoming episode and you’ll be cooler than the guy next to you.”
Zoom, Zoom, Zoom.
When my family vacation moved from London to a couple of days in France I ducked out again for a meeting over at France 3 television with Julien Borde and his team and Jesse Cleverly from the BBC. The subject again was cartoon shorts, and whether they could provide a creative injection into co-productions between France 3 and the BBC.
As you might imagine I said they could.
France’s situation is a bit different than the UK. There are probably 60 active producers in cartoons and 15 are primary suppliers to France 3. Their issue has more in common with Canada than the US or the UK, in that the government broadcasters are almost required to commission programming from them. As one would imagine this situation adds to a bit of complacency among producers.
For me, one of the fascinating joys of travel is seeing what’s interesting to different peoples about culture. Generally, and stupidly, I don’t think of Western Europen media at a great divide from the US, but then I pick up the International Herald Tribune and there’s an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of a typeface for goodness sake (The IHT is owned, of course, by the New York Times, where I could rarely imagine such frivolous writing). Helvetica is at once the most famous font of the modern age, and one of the most dismissed, ignored, and revilled. It’s so common that though I think of myself as a middlebrow type hobbiest, I had no idea it was introduced as late as the 50s, which would mean when I first worked with it professionally it was less than 20 years old.
Read the article, see the movie, use the type.
(Thanks to Richard Rutter for the great photograph of the great Helvetica documentary poster.)
Towards the end of a family trip to London I was able to fit in a little cartoon business. Bruce Steinberg & Christopher Scala at HIT Entertainment and Jon East at the BBC kindly spent a little quality time with me. Over the past year they’ve both shown a lot of interest in exactly how Frederator Studios approaches development and production, particularly our short cartoons; many of the shorts we’ve been involved with over the years have had great success as series in the UK.
One of the concerns they have is the British animation business is pretty small and concentrated around making commercials (often, great commercials too) and that maybe there isn’t a deep enough bench of skilled, talented, and ambitious filmmakers looking to succeed in the world market of hit cartoons.
I’ve heard this worry from literally every country in the world that has an animation business, and I suppose if enough people feel like it’s true, maybe it is. Optimist that I am, I always dismiss their fears. My feeling is given an half a chance creative people will constantly step up and surprise you. After all, they define the future. Hopefully, the UK will help the world cartoon business out of it’s current doldrums.
