Fred Seibert's Blog

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.

One of the things I love most about working in cartoons is the grind that makes up the sausage, the early drawings, models, layouts, backgrounds, and, of course, storyboards. It’s great to look at the early work and see what kind of evolutions a creator’s mind and pencil go through.

RHOMBUS!!

It’s so seldom we civilians actually get to see this stuff that I thought it would be fun to take a look at one of the boards we picked from the almost 1000 presentations we got to select the 39 Random! Cartoons.

WE’RE GOIN IN TURBO TIME!!!

It’s amazing to see the intact vision of Pen Ward with Adventure Time. From the board’s first frame it’s obvious this man is reinventing the future of cartoons.

YOU WANT YOUR BOOTIES???!!!

I spent a lot of time with ASIFA-East President/animator/author David Levy this week. Of course, he sponsored our Random! Cartoons screening the other night, but I forgot to mention the NY panel he asked me to be on at New York’s ACM SIGGRAPH on self promotion and how to get noticed in the cartoon biz. My fellow distinguished panels included our friend, filmmaker Patrick Smith, recruiter Ila Abramson, and PR/marketing expert Karma Martell.

Oh, the art above? That’s the fantasticness what happens when I bring our new colleague Jeaux Janovsky comes along to an event. Thanks Jeaux, your notes are awesome.

One of our favorite composer’s young sons were at the great screening of Random! Cartoons at ASIFA-East (join!) Tuesday night and we received this picture in the email afterwards (notice the logo print-throughs from our program):

“It’s not that Sammy’s not interested in hearing about pitching, just that he’s interested in the kind of pitching that’s done in pinstripes and can be measured with a radar gun. I’ve attached what he drew to occupy himself during the panel discussion (I particularly like the textual annotations).

“But he loved the toons, and the rest of us (including [his brother] Jacob, who’s going to do two weeks of NY Film Academy this summer) enjoyed the panel as well.”

Steve Levinson begged and it’s been a while, but I think Dave Levy’s given us a date. On May 22 in New York City ASIFA-East will be having a screening of some highlights from our Random! Cartoons series of shorts produced over the last two years. As we get closer we’ll give you all the exact information. I’ll be there with a bunch of our New York based creators. Eric Homan too. Hope you can join us.

Right around the time we started up Frederator and Oh Yeah! Cartoons my childhood bud from Long Island Jeff Eberhardt (we met when we were three and we were great friends past college) called and asked would I meet with his daughter? Jen had just moved to Hollywood and wanted to get started as an actress and maybe do some voice overs. I don’t think I was much help, though later on I tried to hook her up with Steve Marmel’s stand-up web community, but I remember telling Jeff I thought she had the drive to go the distance.

Fast forward nine years and I didn’t pay enough attention to Jun Falkenstein’s post about her very cool Kyle & Rosemary cast. Or I just didn’t put 2+2 together (What do you want? I’m the doofus producer. Or else I’m just too old.) Because Jeff’s daughter is Jentle Phoenix, the voice of Gothy Rosemary.

Congratulations to all of us. The world’s a small place. I love it when this kind of thing happens.

Justin Simonich was in our New York office today again with his partner Dagan Moriarty with a new cartoon for Oh Yeah! Cartoons called Circus Folks. Justin’s currently writing at USA Networks and Dagan is drawing at Animation Collective.

Thanks to Justin & Dagan for kind permission to post their cartoon artwork.

We met Eileen Brennan during the dot com boom when she was part of a flash animation studio in Scranton, Pennsylvania and then again at our New York office again when she relocated with her very cool band. She’s also a wonderful painter. Eileen has written a few scripts for our show (created by Bob Boyle) Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! and had a cartoon in the very first episode of Channel Frederator.

Today she showed us one of her unique creations –Pilot CoPilot– for Oh Yeah! Cartoons.

Thanks to Eileen for kind permission to post a drawing from her cartoon.

The guys from Charged –Alex Cohn, Adam Pierce, & Kevin Maher– came into our New York office early last week to show us their animated/puppet short called AstroNuts in Outer Space.

Thanks guys-from-Charged for kind permission to post your art.

Lee Corey was by our New York office to pitch his short called Loyd & Floyd. Lee’s studio has lately been concentrating on animated content for mobile phones. He was his usual friendly self, and I must give him personal thanks for his patience in letting my 10 year old son sit through his pitch and give target audience notes.

Thanks to Lee for his kind permission to post some of his storyboard.