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.
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”
Back to my week. By the way, I don’t want to leave the wrong impression here. My average week is no busier than anyone trying to keep their productions and businesses going. But, for those who wondering…
Thursday, September 20, 2007
I wanted to get this picture from the Nicktoons Studios up. It doesn’t have much to do with the post other than I took it during my trip and it reminds me of the evolution of even the best cartoon shows.
Kent Rice is the new CEO of Starz Entertainment (formerly IDT Entertainment), so he now represents our major production partner on Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! We’d met briefly in New York but I wanted us to get to know each other better, so we met for breakfast at the Graciela, my home away from home, and coincidentally Kent’s too when he first started working in LA.
On my way over to Sherman Oaks for an early lunch meeting, I called into a conference call with Dan Meth, Jeaux Janovsky, Eric Homan, and Carrie Miller about the show packaging for our impending weekly launch of the Meth Minute 39. As usual, we don’t all agree on everything, but I think there’s a solution everyone’s happy with in the end.
Peter Lee is in the LA office of Boston’s Prism VentureWorks. We met for lunch to give me my perspective on Next New Networks and Channel Frederator.
Over the hill from the Valley into West Hollywood to meet author/singer Barney Saltzberg at the Urth Cafe. Barney and I met about 10 years ago and like each other’s work a lot. As with others, we keep struggling to find stuff to do together and haven’t licked it yet.
I didn’t leave my seat for the next meeting, this time on Next New Networks business again with Damien Somerset, the creator/producer of Zaproot, our cool new green show on Viropop. We’d only met briefly before, and in case I haven’t made it clear, I really like getting to know the people with whom I’m doing things. Damien’s a nice, smart, talented guy.
East on Melrose are the Paramount Studios and the production offices of J.J. Abrams‘ Bad Robot Productions. We’re starting work on a movie and this meeting was the first time we’d met in person. Later on, Bryan Burke, JJ’s longtime producer and collaborator, and I had a great first dinner on the Sunset Strip.
Friday
Art’s Deli for a turkey sandwich for JetBlue, and home to New York.
I’ve been rockin’ in Burbank the last few days. The folks from Polygon Pictures in Tokyo (producer Rita Street, Director Hiroshi Chida, President Shuzo John Shiota, Creative Producer Kenji Ishimaru) were in re-pitching Boneheads.
The Oh Yeah! Cartoons creators often have another cartoon or two they’d like to produce with us. Kyle Carrozza’s got Weird Eddie.
Diane Kredensor & Dana Galin were in from New York, working with their art department, and with Director Yvette Kaplan (directing their incredible voice cast).
Oh Yeah! creator Adam Henry pitched another short called Pesky the Squirrel.
And the crew from Bob Boyle’s Wow!Wow!Wubbzy! welcomed me in with a great get together, violating every Film Roman alcohol-on-premises rule.
And then there was the next day.
The Wubblog, one of the godfathers of world class production blogs, is changing hands.
Well, not really. One of Frederator’s productions (via our joint venture, Bolder Media for Boys & Girls), Wow!Wow!Wubbzy, is a creation of the inestimable Bob Boyle (the producer/art director of The Fairly Oddparents and Danny Phantom, and an Oh Yeah! Cartoons creator twice over) started a pre-production blog for his show in Februrary. It has since garnered thousands of readers, even when Bob’s workload had him turn over day to day operations to intern Ariella Kaplan.
Now that Ari’s moving on to better things (that is, college), Bob’s slacker ways have given way to new Wubbmasters (that is, great artists) Sandra Equihua and Kyle Neswald. Welcome them in, and join the crowd enjoying one of the best cartoon blogs in the world.
