Carrie and I were happy to host a New York visit from senior designer Meghan Killeen and owner Robert Feldman from Earworm Media, based in Milford, New Jersey. Earworm specializes in web design and animation for clients, and themselves. Their series Dr. Shroud is hosted over at Joost and you can check out the episodes there. Thanks for coming by guys.
Elliot Cowan & Rebecca Angelou from fredseibert on Vimeo.
Elliot Cowan stopped by Wednesday with his new wife (congratulations!), artist/designer Rebecca Angelou. I got to see her work for the first time and go over a few projects with Elliot. Elliot’s “Boxhead & Roundhead” was last seen on Channel Frederator in May on Episode #134 oops, in October on Episode #149.
Andy Schwartz at Frederator from Fred Seibert on Vimeo.
I have an incredible life and I’ve met some amazing people. Including Andy Schwartz, a writer who’s a friend of my wife’s who’s met many more amazing people than I have. This afternoon he came by to discuss the photographic estate of the incomparable music photographer David Gahr, who recently passed away at 85. Andy shows a few of David’s photographs in the video above, and together we plotted to build the public Gahr legacy that David was always too modest to do himself.
Roger Maloney at Frederator from Fred Seibert on Vimeo.
Roger Maloney is a Youth development Specialist for the NYC Board of Education who’s a media specialist; he used to work at BET and MTV. Roger saw me on TV recently and stopped by to ask if I’d come and talk to his elementary school in the Bronx about cartoons. Sign me up! I’ll let you all know how it goes towards the end of January.
Steve Leeds from fredseibert on Vimeo.
Steve Leeds runs Talent and Industry Affairs over at Sirius Radio and is a professor at William Patterson College in New Jersey, and a colleague of mine from MTV. We had our annual catch up yesterday at the Edison Coffee Shop in Manhattan, and I taped him using the new Flip Video HD camera (a revelation of portable technology).
Program cover illustrated by Doug Crane
Over the last five summers, filmmaker Casey Safron has turned his Brooklyn based Animation Block Party into one of the most anticipated festivals (if you insist on calling it that) in the US cartoon community. So it’s always great when he stops by and we talk about ways to do something together. We haven’t figured it out yet, but we’re getting closer!
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.
