It was great to see Paul Young, Cartoon Saloon founder, Skunk Fu executive producer, when he stopped by to visit Frederator/NY last week. Cartoon Saloon and Paul were honored by the Prime Minister of Ireland last week, invited as part of an Irish business contingent to ring in the New York Stock Market. Keep your eyes open for their feature debut, Brendan and the Secret of Kells.
Avi Tuchman’s been our loyal intern and colleague for over two years now, working at whatever high or low task we’ve asked him to perform, and quite a few he came up with on his own too (that Ultra & the Lazer Hearts Bat Blaster! game rocked, yes?). His love of all things cartoons and web have completely captivated us, and we all put on a smile whenever he comes in to work. So when we got the call that his Mom and Dad wanted to throw him a surprise high school graduation/goodbye to NY party (he’ll be traveling abroad for year before starting college at SVA) we all enthusiastically agreed. 25 or 30 Frederator/NY and Next New Networks folk came around to an incredible catered lunch yesterday (I did say “incredible,” right?) and warmly wished Avi well on his new life’s journey.
I shouldn’t really say goodbye yet though. Avi will be interning with Eric Homan at Frederator/Hollywood for a few weeks in July, and he assures me he’ll be close enough to a computer during the year to work on some stuff for us if we want him to. Want him to?! We wouldn’t have him really say goodbye for the world.
Michael Grant owns the UK based Yarto Group and we first met a few years ago through mutual friends. He introduced me to cartoonist Bill Houston, creator of the Hackman character (whose comics are collected as a couple of books). We usually get together around the Licensing Show and this year was no exception. He caught me up on a lot of the activity at Yarto, and, as always, we thought about different ways we might work together. And, I got another chance to pontificate about how the internet will save us all.
Karl Toerge has worked a lot with Frederator recently, on his original short (with Jim Wyatt) Ratzafratz, Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, and the Ape Escape Cartoons. And it’s always great when he stops by the Burbank office when I’m in town, like he did last week to show us a pitch for his new series.
Thanks to Karl for kind permission to show some art from his cartoon pitch.
Dan Meth, Herb Scannell, and Craig Barlett
find something amusing in a Meth Minute. Hmmm.
Old friend and colleague Craig Barlett stopped by the studio in New York to say Hi to Herb Scannell and me, and chat a little about everything from new projects to Hey Arnold!
Mike Reagan, aside from his various film (Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday or Elmo in Grouchland), TV, and videogame projects, has been our honored composer on Ape Escape Cartoons and the 52 episodes of Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!. He came by the studio the other day and was telling me about the trés cool set up he’s put together for the music on Ape, and rather than my explaining it to you, I thought I’d let Mike do the honors himself:
I am having a BUH-LAST writing the music for Ape Escape! Working with Kevin Kolde and Karl Torge has really challenged me in the best way possible - really getting to stretch my muscles in this series. Their knowledge of music is pretty wide - we’re just a bunch of big kids doing what makes us laugh - it’s just fantastic. They introduced me to the world of Hoyt Curtin, Les Baxter, Bert Kaempfert and so many other great composers - music I’ve heard all my life, just hadn’t taken the time to really crawl inside it.
Each episode is pretty fast paced, with many twists and turns - so there’s just a ton of music to write. Everything from themes to accentuate the stupidity of some characters, to writing music in the style of Bernhard Kaun for the Frankenstein monster episode or 50’s style montages… the list goes on and on. Glad you liked the Frankenstein episode!
To quickly access each theme, I’ve created a system using pictures on a USB device that’s essentially 128 buttons that you can assign to just about anything. So, I basically save markers in Logic for each theme, then assign a series of key commands to a single button to grab what I’m hearing in my head and paste it at the right spot. After 18 episodes I’ve got over 40 buttons programmed right now, but there’s room for 128. I’m going to do the same thing for Wubbzy - get another box of 128 buttons and start organizing themes in the same way. For the pictures, I search through the Ape Escape quicktime movies and capture the screen shot that’s most appropriate for each theme. Specter, Jimmy, Nathalie, Monkeys, and Professor are the main themes, so there’s different (and multiple) pictures for them, but there are also montages, falls, stings, sinister themes, location based music like Paris, Hospital waiting room, Vegas, etc… that get pictures on their buttons, too. For instance, there’s a Paris love theme that has a picture of the Iefell Tower, and the barnyard / Turkey in the Straw tunes have pictures of a chicken.
It’s so much faster associating a piece of music with a thumbnail picture as opposed to remembering a marker number or a folder path… this keeps the creativity at the forefront, and the math and memorization on another planet.
To quote Napoleon Dynamite’s brother Kip:
“…I still love Technology, always and forever”
Animator Ross Bollinger stopped by on Friday for the first time and showed us his film “The Mosquito Who Gave Up Blood.” Nice to meet you Ross. Come back soon.
Ryan Sias was one of our earliest Frederator blogees, so it’s always good to see him. Last Friday Ryan stopped by with his latest comic, Da Beaver: Environmental Hero.
Thanks to Ryan for kind permission to post art from his comic.
Elliot Cowan came by the other day to show us his storyboard for a funny short called “Snake.”
We met Elliot through his membership on Channel Frederator RAW late last year. We featured his cartoons in Episodes 86 & 106 and in our & “48 Frames…” contest, we’ve hung out at the New York Drinking and Drawing’s, and he gave us a nice, thoughtful, Christmas present.
Thanks to Elliot for kind permission to post some of his storyboard.
Ed Ludvigsen & Brian Belanger came by on Friday to introduce themselves. Ed’s an art director for an online agency in Westchester, New York, and Brian’s a comic book artist and writer in Manchester, New Hampshire. They pitched us their project Skullduggery.
Thanks to Brian for kind permission to post his artwork.
