The terrific flash animation studio known as Animax Entertainment is looking for people.. A great guy named Burt told me I should show the head of production my work. Thanks a lot dude! So I showed the head of production Ace & Aqua and I was invited to take an animation test. Hooray! Basically I was given these 2 characters, Slammo and Sloshie. They were in a standing pose arms down with very limited symbols. I was also given an audio clip. I had to act out to the audio clip, have good animation, but more importantly have believable/good acting. So after I roughed out the actions i thought fit the audio best, traditionally, and I had to create a bunch of symbols since they were not given. I finished the test, sent it to the directors, and now I’m their newest animator! ( well they may have hired more people since me ).

Watch Test!

So now I’m going to be starting animation on a flash cartoon called “Slacker Cats” that will air on ABC Family. I’m neither an in-betweener, nor am I a fixer-upper of animation already done. I will be animating some scenes. Animax has been hired to do 2 episodes. I’m working on one of them. It seems like a really cool show from what I’ve seen so far. It’s more of an adult cartoon. Think Futurama? This seems like a great opportunity for me, and tomorrow morning I start! I’ll keep everyone updated on the date the show will premiere and other info about it!..like when my episode will be on so you can look for me in the credits!

More soon!
-Steve

And Dan’s a better Platform blogger than I.

I did, today, see my favorite film in long while, but there’s still a few days left of the festival.

Can I make it to tonight’s Drinking and Drawing event without my beauty rest? Time will tell.

– Eric

Bryan Brinkman’s short, Gordy, was pretty funny. I’ve been waiting for someone to do something like this since I first saw Winsor McCay’s original Gertie the Dinosaur. I’m glad it was Brian and crew at Uber Street. Gordy could be a distant relative of Winsor Mccay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, if those relatives mated with eachother and inbred, inbred, inbred. Over time, you are bound to get genes all kinds of messed up. Gordy, lovable and deformed as it is, would be the happy result.
Thanks Bryan!

1. How did you come up with the idea for this film?
This film was actually a collaboration between myself and two other students from UArts, Dan Pinto and Matt Gaston. Dan came up with the initial idea and from there we shot around ideas and watched old reenactments from the original Gertie film. “Gordy” itself was an assignment that required us to collaborate with a student outside the film and animation department. We enlisted Paul Krick from the acting department to play our “McCay” impostor.

2. Who are some of your influences?
Well first off we’d have to say Winsor McCay was the biggest influence. We also watched alot of old cartoons and vaudville acts. If we had to choose some others it would probably be Karl Staven and Chris Magee who both gave us extensive animation history lessons that year at UArts. Outside of this film my bigger influences ranges from Chuck Jones and Tex Avery to Matt Groening.

3. What do you do when you get stuck creatively?
For this film, we looked at old time-y animation, specifically from the 30’s or 50’s. Going to a park and sketching usually helped out. Also we watched alot videos of people throwing up.

4. Can you tell us the process of how you made this film?
After coming up with the initial idea. Dan storyboarded out the idea. Then once we had it all figured out we filmed our actor Paul against a green screen for all of the live action, including a real pumpkin being thrown. After that we went into flash and all three of us worked at animation and clean up of Gordy. Finally I took the task of compiling it all into After Effects, using 3D lighting and planes to create the fake “old stage” environment. Then we just added the effects and the voice overs and we were done .In all it took us about 2-3 months to create.

5. What are you working on currently?
We’ll now the three of us are just out of college working on post-thesis films. We are all on the move up to New York City in hopes of pursuing animation work. My next film I’m working on revolves around the idea of Godzilla having a bad day, we will see how it plays out. Dan is working on an independent music video and Matt is doing professional video editing.

I like it when Gordy throws up. Thanks Bryan!

Channel Frederator. Yr #1 SOURCE for Cartoon News & Interviews!
Doctor Bammington.
<3,
-JX!

Who Do YOU want to see On Channel Frederator?
Click here to subscribe to Channel Frederator or go to iTunes. Please send your suggestions to promotecartoons@gmail.com.

Wanna know what else is cool about Channel Frederator?!?

Seriously. If yr film or short is featured on CH.Fred, what better way to promote yrself than embedding the Fred on yr very own website, blog or myspace page? For the extreme Fredheads, there’s the ultimate “Always Fresh” embedding code.
What are you waiting for? All the cool kids are doing it. I have mine up on my Myspace Page now.
Don’t believe me? Take a look, and add me while yr at it!
Cheers!

I’m not exactly sure how this helps sell their car…

-Steve.

[b]Click here to subscribe to Channel Frederator or go to iTunes. Send us inspiration! promotecartoons@gmail.com

Meet Ginger and Emma. Two best friends with very different personalities. Even so, they still find common ground when solving any new situation that they encounter.
Hey, today was the last day of school here in NYC. Have a great summer girls!

Hey everyone, Portland is great! The Platform Festival has screened amazing film after amazing film and there are thousands of animators meeting each other. I’ve been so busy running around from screening to screening that I haven’t snapped too many pics but here’s a couple:

You can’t really tell from this photo, but it’s our short “The Secret Life of Robots” being screened at the Portland Performing Arts Center on a huge screen. The audience really seemed to like it! There was laughter and applause at the end.

Afterwards we ran into former-Frederator cohort Melissa Wolfe and celebrated with a round of Oregon microbrews. Here’s “Secret life of Robots” co-director Lee Rubenstein, with up-an-coming animators Katie Cropper and Dan Mountain.

and Lee’s strange official clown membership card with the Clown Code of Ethics on the back:

and a game of brackets:

Late last night we went to see Pat Smith’s “Animation from Hell” screening. It went until 1 Am. The cartoons never stop here.

Tonight is the big night, our “Drinking and Drawing”
party will be rocking the Someday Lounge . More on that tomorrow!

-Dan

Martin Wittig is a terrific artist. His illustrations are very interesting and most of them have a very creepy feel to them. The creepiness is what I love about his work. He can take normally cute things and make them into these almost Tim Burton-like characters.

-Steve.

Click here to subscribe to Channel Frederator or go to iTunes. Please send us stuff to blog about, c’mon we’d love to hear what kinda artists you like or are inspired by! Email us at promotecartoons@gmail.com. Hey, even you want to be blogged about? Send us your work and we’ll take a look! Go tell all your friends, neighbors, little sisters and brothers! And DONT send us spam!… it’s mean… ( seriously though that wink doesn’t mean you should send us spam….unless by spam you mean incredibly cool artwork them spam the bajepers out of us! )

Everyone at Frederator Studios has been busy with shorts, series, and now, movies.

Lots of you know how much we admire Genndy Tartakovsky. He created Dexter’s Laboratory, the first series to come out of our first shorts program, before breathing life into The Powerpuff Girls and Clone Wars. And, of course, creating and directing the semial Samurai Jack. I’d always felt it would make an awesome movie, and thanks to the good graces of the folks at Cartoon Network, who saw clear to letting it into our careful hands, that awesome feature film might have a chance of seeing the light of day.

It’ll be written, directed, and creatively overseen by Genndy in glorious, un-PC, 2D.

Doug TenNapel has been a powerful creative force in comics, videogames, and TV series, and Kevin Kolde, always the videogame fan, introduced us to the creative opportunities in Doug’s innovative (“wacky and quirky animation”) back-to-the-future claymation game The Neverhood.

Doug will be writing and directing.

Dan Meth wrote a post about the movie he’s writing and directing based on the Seven Deadly Sins. What we hadn’t mentioned is the involvement of the inimitable Don King. In the year Dan’s been associated with Frederator he’s seen the release of his first big YouTube hit, and the first festival recognition of one of his productions. Seven Deadly Sins will be his first feature.

Our logo’s been designed by Floyd Bishop though I’ve been too busy to get back to him to finish it and even to negotiate a fair price. Of course, he’s been busy having a new baby in his family and moving cross country. Please don’t mention it to him.

That’s it for now. It’s an honor that these world-class creative people would be interested in working with our company. I hope we can live up to their expectations. We’ll be posting more information as we’ve got it for you.

Here’s the full release:

Frederator Films Comes to Life in 2 Dimensions

FRED SEIBERT AND Producers KOLDE AND GARDNER OPEN FILM DIVISION; ANNOUNCE FIRST THREE FILMS IN PRODUCTION SLATE

LOS ANGELES, June 26 /PRNewswire/ — Frederator Studios founder Fred Seibert announced plans today to launch Frederator Films, an animated feature film company with a mission to produce 2-D animated genre movies budgeted below $20 million. Seibert is launching the company with Kevin Kolde and Eric Gardner, with all three acting as producers on the projects.

Frederator Films has over a dozen projects on its initial development slate, the first three of which were announced today, each representing a different genre:

– A feature based on Samurai Jack, with original creator Genndy Tartakovsky attached to write and direct. The seminal, Emmy-Award winning, animated TV series aired on Cartoon Network from 2001 until 2004. The Russian-born American animator is also renowned for the series Dexter’s Laboratory and Star Wars: Clone Wars.

– The Neverhood, a film based on the cult favorite claymation PC-based computer adventure game created by Doug TenNapel and released by Dreamworks Studios in 1996. TenNapel has signed on to write and direct the feature length film, which will be painstakingly shot in Claymation. TenNapel is an Eisner award-winning graphic novelist, has created a number of computer and video games including Earthworm Jim and Skullmonkeys, and the animated series Earthworm Jim and “Catscratch” for Nickelodeon.

– The Seven Deadly Sins is a hip-hop animated feature. The film will be written, designed, and directed by flash animator Dan Meth. Renowned personality and boxing promoter Don King is the first voice actor attached to the project.

Production on the first film, Seven Deadly Sins, is expected to commence in the fall of 2007. Frederator plans to produce two films a year.

Principal production will be located in Hollywood and New York.

“Our studio’s successes have been built on the best creative talents in the animation business. Genndy Tartakovsky, Doug TenNapel, and Dan Meth are continuing a tradition of original cartoons we began in 1998 and moving it
into feature films,” explains Seibert.

Gardner added, “Fred is the master at identifying voids in the
marketplace and filling them with paradigm-shifting content– there has been a dearth of both 2D and genre animated feature product which Frederator Films will be rectifying, much to the delight of young males everywhere.”

Frederator Films’ producers each bring a unique range of capabilities and experience to the company. Fred Seibert, the former president of Hanna-Barbera and the original creative director of MTV, opened Frederator Studios in 1998, an independent American animation studio producing original cartoons. Seibert’s debut production for Cartoon Network was What A Cartoon!, which spun off a number of hit series including Cow & Chicken, Dexter’s Laboratory, and Powerpuff Girls. Moving to Nickelodeon, he continued his streak with The Fairly OddParents, ChalkZone, and My Life as a Teenage Robot. Kevin Kolde is a veteran producer who ran Spumco, John Kricfalusi’s (”Ren & Stimpy”) company, for over a decade. Gardner is Chairman/CEO of Panacea Entertainment, a talent management and production company he founded 36 years ago, repping such diverse clients as Donny Osmond, Richard Belzer, Paul Shaffer, The Sex Pistols, Elvira, Timothy Leary, and members of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and The Who. He has produced over 100 hours of televsion and several features.

SOURCE Frederator Films

Mukpuddy’s newest cartoon “What Now Sparkle Friends: High score: Rock ‘em Sock ‘em” was terrific. Something about it though seemed awfully familiar… I just can’t quite lay my finger on it…Maybe it was just Dejavu for a quick second for me and I’m just taking a guess on this one but also for GREG GUNTHER, DAH VEED, MATT TORODE, RAMIRO OLMOS, ASHLEY DAVISON, DUSTY HAZE, NELSON C WOODSTOCK, TODD RAMSEY, JERRY FUCHSlink, PAUL LALOlink, MICHAEL FOSTER, AARON BLECHA, and NIKO ANESTI. I just looked up random people in the phonebook.. I have a good feeling they experienced the same feeling I did while watching the first part of this Muktastic episode. Why? I just have a good feeling about it…

-Steve.

Click here to subscribe to Channel Frederator or go to iTunes. Please send us stuff to blog about, c’mon we’d love to hear what kinda artists you like or are inspired by! Email us at promotecartoons@gmail.com. Hey, even you want to be blogged about? Send us your work and we’ll take a look! Go tell all your friends, neighbors, little sisters and brothers! And DONT send us spam!… it’s mean… ( seriously though that wink doesn’t mean you should send us spam….unless by spam you mean incredibly cool artwork them spam the bajepers out of us! )

2007 Best in the SW: Flash Animation & Motion Graphics conference

Best in the SW: Flash Animation & Motion Graphics Festival brings Flash animators, motion graphic artists, and broadcast designers together for a full week of non-stop animation, visual effects, motion graphics, and inspiration. Seven great days to learn, exchange ideas, further professional skills, and be inspired!

Hey, if you’re in Albuquerque, New Mexico, check it out!
… that IS how you spell it. Look it up!

More info at www.bestinthesw.com

-Jake