Channel Frederator Blog

I’m the worst animator in this picture.

As of today, I won’t be blogging for Frederator anymore. It has been a great run, and I thank Fred Seibert and Eric Homan for having me blog for so long.

I started blogging for Fred a few years back (2006?) when Fred asked me to write as a regular on the blog after doing some posts for the 6 Monsters production blog. During my run here, my life has changed a lot. I’ve moved (a few times), added another kid to my family, and changed jobs more times than I care to remember. Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging.

On the blog, I’ve tried to highlight things I thought were important and things that were interesting in the world of animation and entertainment, sometimes causing a stir. I also tried to pass along some knowledge of animation as it was passed to me. I got to [Read more…]

When Bishop Animation did the pilot episode of “Kung Fu Jimmy Chow” for Camp Chaos, I was a bit worried that it was too over the top in the violence area. According to a new study, I may have been worried for nothing.

From the article:

Professor Alison Schwartz, a co-author of the paper, published in next month’s edition of Early Childhood Education, said: ‘The current belief is that violence depicted in television programmes, particularly cartoons, has a negative impact on young children’s behaviour. We found that not to be true.’

She went on: ‘Most pre-schoolers recognise cartoon programmes as make-believe and understand these characters inhabit fictional worlds.’

But Schwartz’s conclusions have been criticised by Professor John Murray, who told the US Senate recently that his research showed that real-life aggression among children may be activated by aggressive acts on television.

‘I found that the brain treats entertainment violence as something real and stores this violence as [Read more…]