Talk to the Snail

If you missed Tuesday night’s ASIFA-East Random! Cartoons screening, you missed ten shorts and some talk with questions and answers. It was extra cool to see our New York City-based Random! creators. Thanks to all the filmmakers, ASIFA-East, SVA, Dave Levy, and the 100+ folks who turned out.

Three things that came up during the Q&A you might want to know: Frederator’s trying real hard to get another order of shorts; the latest from Nick is that this latest crop of cartoons will air toward to the end of the year; and Bill Plympton animated “Gary Guitar” by himself in about a month.

From left to right, the folks in the above shot are: Bill Plympton, Manny Galán, Dave Levy, Alan Goodman, Dana Galin, Tom Selleck, Fred Seibert, Diane Kredensor, (not in picture, but who were there: John Dilworth and Dan Meth).

Thanks to Ryan Sias for taking the picture.

– Eric
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Someone asked me this past week what was the biggest problem that, in my opinion, I saw in the tons of Oh Yeah! pitches we’ve seen this year. Easy: they’re often too complicated. It seems we’re always suggesting to creators that there’s way too much going on in their pitches, and that the best course is almost always to be as simple as possible (while true for seven-minute cartoons, this really goes for just about any art form, I think). Then I generally use as example one of my favorite shorts of all time: “Bully for Bugs”, directed by Chuck Jones in 1953. Bugs meets bull, bull ticks off Bugs, Bugs belittles bull. Simple. Pretty much just two characters, one of whom doesn’t speak. No B (or C!) story. Of course we wouldn’t want every short to be just like “Bully for Bugs”, and while this cartoon has tons of great stuff going for [Read more…]

Let’s all give a big OY! sa-lute to Mr Pen Ward, the newest creator at Oh Yeah! Cartoons! He’s dripping wet from CalArts and is now busy working on a little short he calls Adventure Time. Out of all the cartoon companies in town, Frederator’s the one lucky enough to have him. I, for one, hope to be riding his coattails to cartoon superstardom for a long time to come.

A) 50
B) 100
C) 150
D) More than 300

A: D, more than 300

Mind-boggling, isn’t it? But remember, Oh Yeah! isn’t a production, really. It’s actually 39 productions, each one with it’s own crew of artists. Sure, there’ll be some crossover between cartoons, but when you begin to add up all the drawers, production folk, post-production people, voice actors, etc., the number grows kind of quickly. Oh, and I’m not even including all our international support from various animation studios overseas.

So maybe it’s appropriate to tip our hat now to Therese Trujillo, OY!’s busy Line Producer. It’s her Herculean job to keep tabs on all these OY! citizens (and to make sure they get paid). Thanks, Therese. Better you than me.