Fred Seibert's Blog

“This 526 page book is told in both words and pictures. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is not exactly a novel, and it’s not quite a picture book, and it’s not really a graphic novel, or a flip book, or a movie, but a combination of all these things.”

I’m just starting this book by Brian Selznick because my son says it’s the best book he’s ever read and my wife agrees it’s one of the most amazing books she’s read (she says the unique approach to storytelling –a little prose interweaved with large format illustrations– makes it a cartoonist’s dream). A few more data points:

* TIOHC is #2 on the New York Times Children’s Best Sellers. And Harry Potter should be enough to make you realize the list doesn’t cater to just “kids’ books.”

* The illustrations (and the format) are amazingly great.

* Martin Scorcese is considering directing the movie. It’s being written by John Logan (screenwriter of The Aviator and The Last Samurai.

* It’s a cool website.

* Filmmakers and animation inspired it.

From the website:

“George Melies is a very important part of TIOHC.

“George Melies (pronounced mel-YEZ) was a famous filmmaker who worked form the 1890s through the 1920s. He made the world’s first science fiction movie. It was called A Trip to the Moon, and it was really magical and strange.”

Hiro Naito is president of New York based AISAP a licensing company working between the US and Japan, representing companies like Nikoli, inventors of Sudoku. He and Michi Kanno, their VP of Project Development were in the other day to see what opportunities there might be between Frederator Studios and various Japanese producers.

Thanks for coming in guys.

I read books.

Sometimes in the interactive world and of moving pictures with sound plain old books are discounted a bit. But, I’m addicted. Good books, bad books, old books, new books.

So I’ve been a decent guinea pig for the electronic readers of the last 10 years, and I’ve finally found one that works good enough, the Sony Reader. The electronic “paper” it uses works like crazy and that’s the key. No backlight, no pixels, no eye strain. You need as much light to read from it as you would any paper book. A battery charge lasts forever and you can stores hundreds of books without strain. Oh, and it weighs a few ounces.

I’ve read dozens of books on it over the last six months and sometimes I wonder what I’m going to do when the thing breaks.

Sure, there are issues. Navigation’s not what it could be, the eBook Connect Store from Sony unfortunately illustrates what’s wrong with modern Sony, and the Apple like closed system is pretty annoying with few of the benifits.

But those are just the nits. The reader saves me on a plane or a subway, and makes me happy to waste my time with previously cumbersome airport trashy paperbacks. If you can admit you like books, this thing may be the device for you.

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.

Hmmmmm….