Fred Seibert's Blog

It’s been a long time coming.

Rob Renzetti’s beloved “My Life as a Teenage Robot” played the last episode of its 2nd season a couple of years ago, and by the infinite wisdom of corporations the until now unseen 3rd season sat on the shelf until this week. Go figure.

Well no! Go watch! Every Saturday on the Nicktoons Animation Network.

The team came up with some great stuff, beautiful as ever. It’s a great way to catch up with Jenny.

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Frederator Postcards Series 1, 1998
Frederator Postcards Series 2, 1999
Frederator Postcards Series 3, 2000
Frederator Postcards Series 4, 2003
Frederator Postcards Series 5, 2004-2005
Frederator Postcards Series 6, 2007-2008

I was ‘following’ on my tumblr dashboard and was about to reblog this image when I spied our friend Carlos Ramos peeking out of the upper left corner. Wassup with that?

Find more videos like this on Channel Frederator RAW

Jon Kane and I have worked together for a way long time, and I’m honored whenever I’m lucky enough to get his attention for one of our, ahem, efficiently priced jobs. So it was in 1998 when we were launching Oh Yeah! Cartoons and I thought it would be great to package it with a different vibe than other cartoon show. Calling Kane!

Jon’s company Optic Nerve was one of the leading commercial production shops in New York. Jon conceived the spots, [Read more…]

Amazing illustration made by Kiichi for this month from the New Jenny-San Calendar english site. XJ5 icon created by gashi-gashi. Via the Teenage Roblog.

Four years ago, my partner Emil Rensing suggested I start a blog when I asked him what we should do online for our (Oh Yeah! Cartoons spin off) series My Life as a Teenage Robot. “You’ll learn something,” he said.

Boy was he right. All the Frederator blogs, Channel Frederator, and Next New Networks are all the direct result of the learning, and of course, that’s been in addition to all the great series, movies, and shorts, the great talents have been working on with us during those years.

A particular shout out and thanks should go out to a few folks:

Rob Renzetti created MLaaTR in the first place, inspiring us to create the first blog.

Eric Homan took my challenge to get the thing going, and keep it going.

Scott Peterson, MLaaTR’s story editor, wrote the blog for a couple of years when the rest of us were too scared to try.

Wichobot is the loyal and talented fan who took over the Roblog when the series was over, and has kept it going with our great fans over the last couple of years. It’s better now than we ran it, and proves the complete value of community in the modern, interconnected world.

And, of course, most of all, our loyal fans and readers who have read, suggested, commented, contributed, complained, and supported all of our efforts during the last four years. Without you we would literally be nothing.

So far, My Life as a Teenage Robot (2003) is the last short from Oh Yeah! Cartoons to go to series (read: “so far”). Here’s the final interview and album from Jerry Beck’s and Russell Hicks’ Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons!. And there’s more from the book on Oh Yeah! Cartoons, Random! Cartoons, and The Fairly Oddparents.
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Rob Renzetti, Creator: What made Teenage Robot truly different was the way it looked. Alex Kirwan and my designers gave the show what we called a “future deco” look, which means they brought 1930s influences into designs.

Alex Kirwan, Art Director: We both liked the look of the 1930s Max Fleischer cartoons, and we noticed that no one had really done animation in art deco style. We wanted to see what sort of influence that style could bring to the character designs. We took the “pie cuts” out of the character’s eyeballs, which helped define the genre we were going to use.

Rob Renzetti: We used art deco influences for the architecture and the props, and we tried to get a deco poster feel in all the backgrounds. We made a great-looking and very different world. It’s very sophisticated, but not too sophisticated for kids.

Alex Kirwan: We loved the look of the old Astroboy cartoon series, because you can feel all the cool things that you associate with anime and science fiction. One of the things we loved about Astroboy was the weird hairstyles that made humans look like cartoon animals or birds. We latched onto that right away.

Rob Renzetti: We tried to translate that look into Nora and Brad, and, to a lesser degree, Tuck.

Alex Kirwan: It was as if we could define the personalities of the characters by giving them hair that resembled cartoon spiders or birds, or maybe even cat ears. It was cool.

Rob Renzetti: That includes Jenny too, who is a robot and has no reason at all to have two ponytails stuck up on her head. We gave her a reason by making them into jets. Originally, the ponytails were supposed to give her a kind of Mickey Mouse silhouette, and, in fact, we often mistakenly called them ears.

Alex Kirwan: Some things that became important to the production were not part of the show. Every year Nickelodeon holds a Halloween event where the employees bring their children and their friends into the studio.

Rob Renzetti: There’s an ocean of kids– thousands of them.

Alex Kirwan: Each Nick production would build a haunted house, and every year the houses got bigger and the crews more competitive. In our last year we built a giant flying saucer facade over part of our production area, and a cardboard city that the saucer had invaded.

Rob Renzetti: Kids could walk through our demolished city and then into the flying saucer and see aliens. We had an elaborate diorama with Jenny being attacked and electrocuted by aliens, and we built a life-size replica of Queen Vexus with light effects. We had Eartha Kitt, who voiced the character, record some cackling for our replica.

Alex Kirwan: That haunted house was so elaborate that it took quite a chunk out of our production time to built it. A large portion of our crew was not only working hard to meet our show’s deadlines, but also to assemble and paint these cardboard buildings. We took almost as much pride in them as we did in the show, and the kids were just thrilled.

In 2001, ChalkZone was the second series put into series production out of Oh Yeah! Cartoons. But CZ was one of the first shorts we produced; I greenlit storyboard soon after we started production in 1997, and production chief (and prime OY! supporter) Albie Hecht fell in love with the idea from the board alone.

Here a short interview with the creators and a scan album of the pages from Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons!. Only MLaaTR to go; and here’s Oh Yeah!, Random!, and FOP.
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Larry Huber, Co-Creator: It would be hard to find two guys with such incredibly diverse opinions–political, social, and otherwise–who work so well together that they can make a show as creatively in sync as ChalkZone. We drew on each other’s talents and styles, as well as our own eclectic viewpoints, to produce an entertaining, well-rounded show that features many different perspectives.

Bill Burnett, Co-Creator: Larry is a mountain man who loves to go hunting and camping. He uses flintlocks, like they did in the 1860s, and when Larry shoots a deer, he uses every last bit of it, down to the marrow in the bone. He’s conservative and methodical, always doing things strictly by the rules. The word “virtue” hangs above his door.

Larry Huber: My specialty is graphic drawing, and Bill’s is music. As a musician and performance artist, Bill is a boisterous, outgoing type of guy. I’m a little more laid-back and reserved. But our personality differences are really the strength of ChalkZone, because if two partners think the same way, then one of them is certainly unnecessary.

Bill Burnett: We found ways to work our different backgrounds and personalities into the show. My mother was an opera singer, and so is Rudy Tabootie’s mom. She sings in a high, sing-songy voice when she wants Rudy to come to dinner, just like my mom used to do. Larry’s father was a butcher, and so is Joe Tabootie, Rudy’s dad. Larry actually worked in his fathers’ shop and knows how to butcher animals.

Larry Huber: Bill brings experience from his days in an advertising agency, and he’s kind of like the grandmeister of jingles. I’ve heard kids in the playgrounds humming these songs in English. I’m talking about kids who don’t speak English as a first language–that’s how catchy they are.

Bill Burnett: ChalkZone is where Larry’s interests and mine converge. It’s a high-concept show about an alternate universe that’s really trippy when you think about it. In this universe, any place on Earth–a classroom, the “specials” board at a restaurant, or a hopscotch court–can be a portal to another world, where all the things that people have drawn over the centuries still live. The idea of ChalkZone is very empowering to kids: when they create a work of art, they’re actually bringing something to life.

Larry Huber: I’m a little emotional about the characters on ChalkZone. Rudy, Penny, and all the other characters are like living creatures to us, just like Rudy’s drawings of Snap are real to him. Bill and I are just two big guys who never grew up.

Bill Burnett: With our own magic piece of chalk.

Continuing with our dance through the Frederator productions featured in the new Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons! here’s an interview included in the book and some scans of the pages.
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Butch Hartman, Creator: In 1996 I was working on Johnny Bravo over at Cartoon Network, having the time of my life. Then the first season came out, and they didn’t like it. Fred Seibert, whom I knew from Cartoon Network, had moved over to Nickelodeon to develop a series that featured original animated shorts called Oh Yeah! Cartoons. I decided that I would make up a cartoon for Fred.

Fred Seibert, Creator, Oh Yeah! Cartoons and Random Cartoons: I used to call Butch’s agents once a month and ask if he was free yet, and they would tell me he wasn’t. By the end of the year I stopped calling, because I was tired of being rejected. When his agents finally called me at the end of the year, I signed him, characters unseen. The first thing he brought in was The Fairly OddParents.

Butch Hartman: I wrote the pitch in fifteen minutes. I wanted to make a show about a boy who could go anywhere, because I never wanted to be stuck for a story transition. I wanted to be able to just pop him from place to place. Magic seemed to be the best way to handle that. I drew the boy, and I named him after my youngest brother, Timmy. Then I thought, Okay, how do I do the magic thing? I decided to give him a fairy godmother. So I drew Wanda. I thought that it would be even better if she had a husband. I’d never seen a fairy godfather before, but I drew Cosmo. Timmy is an only child–he’s lonely–which is why his godparents show up to help him in the first place. His enemy is his babysitter, Vicky. Once I mapped out the characters, the show developed from there, with one thing leading to another. I did ten Fairly OddParents shorts for Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Kevin Kay really liked them, so Nickelodeon tested three of them on a focus group. Lo and behold, they gave me six half-hours of an actual series to create.

Kevin Kay, Former EVP, Programming and Production, Nickelodeon: When we looked at The Fairly OddParents, we immediately said, “Well, there they are. Great characters, great frenetic energy.” And nobody has more frenetic energy than Butch Hartman.

Margie Cohn, EVP, Development and Original Programming, Nickelodeon: I went to Burbank for the first board pitch and literally almost jumped out of my skin. It was so funny and felt like it was going to be a monster hit.

Fred Seibert: The series was hugely successful. It is the second most popular show currently on Nickelodeon, and one of our three or four most popular shows since the network began.

Butch Hartman: The cool thing about The Fairly OddParents was that the ratings kept going up every time they’d run a new episode. Nick ordered more shows, and the original six episodes had to run by themselves for about a year. In that time, I took the original Oh Yeah! shorts that I did and reformatted them. By the time the new ones came out, The Fairly OddParents really started doing great. The show was just pure fun to work on. It was everything I had wanted to do as a kid. I got my wish.

Oh Yeah! Cartoons creator Bill Riling dusts off his comic strip as a comic blog.

“If I could just take a brief moment of your time. I am a second year animation student currently studying at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in the U.K. As part my course I have to complete a case study report on a company of my choice, and I have chosen Frederator. I think your company is terrific and I have visited your website frequently. Your motto for why you make cartoons, because there fun is an inspiration to me. You have been responsible for some of the best cartoons on television.

“The purpose of the unit is to explore the internal and external structure of a company, to understand it’s market position, operational processes and professional role.

“If you would be so kind and complete the enclosed questionnaire, it would be of great help to my report.

“Thank you so much for your time.”

I’m sure some of you might feel like I’ve sugarcoated the answers here for this student. I’m hoping my colleagues would agree I’m being as true to life as possible.
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Please briefly explain why the company was created and what is the main purpose of Frederator?

After a 5 year run as President of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, developing the studio’s first slate of hits in over a decade, Nickelodeon asked me to bring my development approach to their network. Frederator believed that children’s animation had devolved into an endless stream of animated situation comedies where concept and writers had become more important than animators. And we believed animators wanted to make ‘cartoons,’ not unlike the great films of the 30s and 40s like Looney Tunes.

Our motto is “Original Cartoons since 1998.” Primarily, we’re interested in making cartoons that spring from the vision of an animation artist, and would rather avoid adapting books, movies, comics, or live-action television shows. We just want to make funny cartoons.
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What are the main departments of Frederator?

We do not keep an active full service studio. Instead, we work in multiple fashions, often with production partners who provide studio space and overhead.

Currently, in Hollywood we keep development offices at Nickelodeon’s animation studio and Film Roman. In New York, we have a development office that also produces Flash cartoons.
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How do you go about commissioning projects and what happens afterwards?

This question is probably too long to go into in detail but briefly:

We don’t ‘commission,’ or ‘develop’ in a traditional way. Generally, for television and the internet, we start with making shorts, cartoons under seven minutes long. We call on the animation community around the world (through our blogs and newsletters, through Channel Frederator, and in person) to create a storyboard of the film they’d like to make with us. They pitch us in person at one of our offices in Hollywood or New York. If our team (three to six people) agrees to go forward, we immediately negotiate a budget and royalty participation and begin production. All our shorts are “creator driven,” that is, they are the result of one artist’s (or creative team’s) vision, and are produced under that creator’s direct supervision.

We produce our children’s cartoons for Nickelodeon and adult cartoons for Channel Frederator.

For feature films, we identify projects from a variety of sources, but all films are also a direct result of a creator’s vision. The movie might be a result of one of our original shorts, or from a filmmaker we’ve worked with over the past 15 years.
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On a project, what are the usual production costs?

There are no “usual production costs.” Each medium, each company, and each filmmaker establish a budget level appropriate to their needs.
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Do you feel that you have much competition, seeing as that you partner exclusively with Nickelodeon?

Our competition is enormous, mainly with ourselves. There are hundreds of cartoons made every year, and each one of them has the potential to successfully compete.

To be clear, our “exclusive” with Nickelodeon is only for children’s television in the United States.
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What work ethics do you value most important at Frederator?

Gee, that’s a big question, so for now I’m going to avoid the ethical values implicit there, since I believe they’re what you’d hope (honesty, integrity, respect, etcetera).

Clearly, we believe in the supremacy of a filmmaker’s vision of a project and its execution. We primarily work with animation artists who create, write, design, direct and/or produce their own characters and stories.

The audience is the master we’re most faithful to. Our films are not “art” in the sense of pure self expression, but meant to be enjoyed by a wide audience of viewers. Their happiness and love for our characters is the most important thing of all.

And, we’re respectful of our distributors, exhibitors, and financial partners and their investments in our cartoons.
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What is the work environment like at Frederator?

I’ve always said that in business I’d like to:

• Have fun.

• Make money.

• Feel great about the colleagues I work with every day.

When we’re doing well at our job, our environment reflects those three things.
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What skills do you look for in employees?

That’s a tough question, because it’s actually pretty vague. Different jobs require different skills and skill levels. Basically, I like the magical and sometimes paradoxical combination between motivated self starters and smoothly collaborative team members.
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Generally, how many employees do you hire in a year and are they permanent staff, or just freelancers for the length of a project?

Currently, the permanent staff at Frederator Studios is five, counting me (Channel Frederator is part of a separate company and is staffed independently of the studio). Everyone else comes and goes with the needs of productions.
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What kind of incentives and rewards do you offer employees?

None of your business.

Seriously, we look for every way we can to reward our colleagues. Creative latitude tops the first 100 spaces on the list. Then, generous health benefits (very important in the U.S.), relaxed vacation schedules and work hours, and competitive salaries and participations.

But mostly, we thrive on our abilities to let creative people, whether they’re executives, creators, or production staff, to optimize their working environment to be as productive as they can possibly be.
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Frederator’s main outputs are children’s animated television programmes for Nickelodeon’s core audience of 2-11 year olds but I read that you are also entering other fields, such as feature films. What is the current progress of this?

We launched the original cartoon podcast, Channel Frederator (http://channelfrederator.com), primarily targeted at adults in November 2005. And the world’s first pre-school video podcast, The Wubbcast (http://wubbcast.com) in March 2006.

In July 2007, we announced the formation of Frederator Films, with three animated movies to go into production: Samurai Jack (stereoscopic 2D; written and directed by Genndy Tartakovsky), The Neverhood (claymation; written and directed by Doug TenNapel) and Seven Deadly Sins (Flash; written and directed by Dan Meth).

In September 2007 we launched our first cartoon series of shorts for adults, The Meth Minute 39, which is distributed through our sister, Channel Frederator.
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Frederator has a thriving Internet community with Channel Frederator and the Frederator blogs. What are the reasons behind this form of communication?

The community of Hollywood animators has long been limited by geography and constituency (primarily the US television networks and movie studios). After spending the first 20 years of my career working with the independents of the world, I was feeling a little constrained by the kinds of films Hollywood limited us to. I have a family and a business so traveling throughout the world meeting new people was a bit impractical, so I realized blogging was a perfect vehicle to “meet” new people. it’s exceeded my expectations.
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You encourage student animation, with the online Channel Frederator and the annual Nicktoons animation festival. Do you feel very passionate about animation students and do you encourage them in any other way, if so how?

I vividly remember starting out and looking everywhere for inspiration, advice, and direction. I felt like I could conquer the world with the right push. Many people stepped up to help me (<a target=”_blank” href=”http://frederatorblogs.com/frederator_studios/2007/09/22/bob-altshuler-rip/here’s a remembrance of one of them) and the only way I’ve been able to pay them back is to offer the same encouragement to as many young people as I can fit into my life. I talk at as many school classes as I can visit, in any city I can get to, and to dozens of individuals who come by the office to visit.

Aside from the stories I can offer, I’m well aware students are my colleagues of the future. The first classes I spoke to when I entered animation are still poplulating my productions, often with the most talented and advanced members of our teams. And right now there’s a storyboard artist on one of our shows I befriended at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005.

Alex Kirwan was a high school student in Duluth, Minnesota, when he entered a storyboarding contest we ran. He chose not to enter university and became an apprentice for us a Hanna-Barbera and became the first artist on our staff at Oh Yeah! Cartoons) at 18 years old.

Our most stunning student-to-professional success was from a Rhode Island School of Design student one of my executives met in 1994 and brought to Hollywood right after graduation. He made his first professional short for us and his second one too. During the production of the “Zoomates” short, Seth MacFarlane started work on “Family Guy.”
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Finally, do you have any other information to add; that you feel could help with my case study report?

I think you’ve about got it covered. Good luck.

Best, Fred Seibert

Tuesday night, September 18, 2007
Eric, Kevin and I went right from our feature meeting with Doug TenNapel to the last screening for Random! Cartoons, featuring Doug’s Squirly Town, Karl Toerge & Jim Wyatt’s Ratzafratz, and 6 Monsters. We’ve now screened all 39 Random! shorts for the LA studio (as well as a New York ASIFA screening in May), and it’s sad they’re over, everyone did such a great job on their films. Nickelodeon’s been having a hard time scheduling an air date, so in the meanwhile we’ll do with the good feelings from our private screenings.

Karl and Jim prepped a great surprise for their honored guest June Foray when they pulled out a cake for her 90th birthday. My pictures weren’t too great, but they capture some of the wonderful mood, June looking better than anyone has a right to look, and many others having a good time.

Wednesday
Early day again when I make a reference call on one of our great interns to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. It’s always feel good to give a solid recommendation for a hard working intern. Then it was breakfast with my former Hanna-Barbera colleague, Julie Kane-Ritsch who now, as part of the Gotham Group, represents creators like Bob Boyle, Dana Galin, Diane Kredensor, and too many others to mention in a blog post less than 1mm characters long.

I’d met Baby Prodigy creator Barbara Marcus at New York’s BrainCamp two years ago, and she came by the studio to chat on Wednesday.

Afterwards, I zoomed over to Cartoon Network Studios to take Ramsey Naito, head of their long form development, to Starbucks. As we’re getting fired up on the Samurai Jack feature I like to keep her up to date.

The Market City Diner was across the street from Starbucks, and lucky thing too, since that’s where I was to meet Scott Greenberg, Film
Roman/Starz production president, and our fantastic partner on Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! We never seem to spend enough time together in the office, so this lunch was a good chance to catch up.

Director/artist Howard Hoffman and I have worked together since back in the day starting on MTV and Nickelodeon network IDs. we’re working together again on Ape Escape Cartoons, and it’s always good when he drops by Frederator when I’m in Hollywood.

Speaking of back in the day, Bill Burnett, creator of ChalkZone and eight other Oh Yeah! and Random! cartoons came by too. We first worked together at Fred/Alan in New York, and then again at Hanna-Barbera and Frederator. We’re working on a lot of stuff at Next New Networks. We have so many things to talk about, cartoons and more, I won’t bore you with all of them.

Finally, it’s a great dinner at Firefly in the Valley. With great friend Rita Street, our Radar Cartoons colleague on the Nicktoons Network Animation Festival, Boneheads, and more.

A little sleep, and Hollywood continues Thursday.