Finally.
The fall of 2005 was pretty insane.
Random! Cartoons was really heating up (still called Oh Yeah! Cartoons, Season 4) and we were still taking dozens of pitches. Channel Frederator had moved from a vague concept to an almost reality and learning about internet video in those days (ah, those were the days) wasn’t all that easy. And we finally decided to bite the bullet and go for it on feature films.
Like I’ve said before, we were looking ahead to a slowing kids TV market, we’d plunged into internet video, and we looked at the feature marketplace and realized we had just as unique a spot there as in television. Frederator Films would be stake it’s bet on talent; we weren’t going to be working on “properties” or “franchises.” Our strength had always been believing in artists and writers with a vision, a belief in cartoons and cartoonists; it didn’t look to me like the feature world felt the same way. It was often hard for anyone to summon up the name of the driving force behind the popular animated movies, just like when we first got into television.
So we cooked up our feature pitch:
• Rely on great talent. We start with artists who write, but we weren’t going to be limited.
• 2D, CG, claymation, flash, whatever. Frederator Films would be technique agnostic. When we decided to move on a filmmaker’s project, we’d roll with their approach to the movie.
• Let’s stay with budgets under $20,000,000. In the feature world that was called “low-budget” (the popular movies most often are made for $100 million and UP), but to us that was really expensive. Our experience had taught us that budget and popularity are not necessarily linked.
• To market low-budget pictures, you need a built in audience; they’re more loyal and find out about the movies in ways outside the mainsream channels. Those are the audiences for “genre” pictures, and genre pictures was the ticket for Frederator Films. Comedy, science fiction, horror, and even some family films were all ‘genre.’
Simple, right? Well, pretty much no one had ever made any money in Hollywood on animated genre films. I wasn’t sure we were going the right way until one day I had lunch with Genndy Tartakovsky.
–Fred
(More to come…)
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