“If I could just take a brief moment of your time. I am a second year animation student currently studying at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in the U.K. As part my course I have to complete a case study report on a company of my choice, and I have chosen Frederator. I think your company is terrific and I have visited your website frequently. Your motto for why you make cartoons, because there fun is an inspiration to me. You have been responsible for some of the best cartoons on television.
“The purpose of the unit is to explore the internal and external structure of a company, to understand it’s market position, operational processes and professional role.
“If you would be so kind and complete the enclosed questionnaire, it would be of great help to my report.
“Thank you so much for your time.”
I’m sure some of you might feel like I’ve sugarcoated the answers here for this student. I’m hoping my colleagues would agree I’m being as true to life as possible.
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Please briefly explain why the company was created and what is the main purpose of Frederator?
After a 5 year run as President of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, developing the studio’s first slate of hits in over a decade, Nickelodeon asked me to bring my development approach to their network. Frederator believed that children’s animation had devolved into an endless stream of animated situation comedies where concept and writers had become more important than animators. And we believed animators wanted to make ‘cartoons,’ not unlike the great films of the 30s and 40s like Looney Tunes.
Our motto is “Original Cartoons since 1998.” Primarily, we’re interested in making cartoons that spring from the vision of an animation artist, and would rather avoid adapting books, movies, comics, or live-action television shows. We just want to make funny cartoons.
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What are the main departments of Frederator?
We do not keep an active full service studio. Instead, we work in multiple fashions, often with production partners who provide studio space and overhead.
Currently, in Hollywood we keep development offices at Nickelodeon’s animation studio and Film Roman. In New York, we have a development office that also produces Flash cartoons.
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How do you go about commissioning projects and what happens afterwards?
This question is probably too long to go into in detail but briefly:
We don’t ‘commission,’ or ‘develop’ in a traditional way. Generally, for television and the internet, we start with making shorts, cartoons under seven minutes long. We call on the animation community around the world (through our blogs and newsletters, through Channel Frederator, and in person) to create a storyboard of the film they’d like to make with us. They pitch us in person at one of our offices in Hollywood or New York. If our team (three to six people) agrees to go forward, we immediately negotiate a budget and royalty participation and begin production. All our shorts are “creator driven,” that is, they are the result of one artist’s (or creative team’s) vision, and are produced under that creator’s direct supervision.
We produce our children’s cartoons for Nickelodeon and adult cartoons for Channel Frederator.
For feature films, we identify projects from a variety of sources, but all films are also a direct result of a creator’s vision. The movie might be a result of one of our original shorts, or from a filmmaker we’ve worked with over the past 15 years.
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On a project, what are the usual production costs?
There are no “usual production costs.” Each medium, each company, and each filmmaker establish a budget level appropriate to their needs.
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Do you feel that you have much competition, seeing as that you partner exclusively with Nickelodeon?
Our competition is enormous, mainly with ourselves. There are hundreds of cartoons made every year, and each one of them has the potential to successfully compete.
To be clear, our “exclusive” with Nickelodeon is only for children’s television in the United States.
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What work ethics do you value most important at Frederator?
Gee, that’s a big question, so for now I’m going to avoid the ethical values implicit there, since I believe they’re what you’d hope (honesty, integrity, respect, etcetera).
Clearly, we believe in the supremacy of a filmmaker’s vision of a project and its execution. We primarily work with animation artists who create, write, design, direct and/or produce their own characters and stories.
The audience is the master we’re most faithful to. Our films are not “art” in the sense of pure self expression, but meant to be enjoyed by a wide audience of viewers. Their happiness and love for our characters is the most important thing of all.
And, we’re respectful of our distributors, exhibitors, and financial partners and their investments in our cartoons.
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What is the work environment like at Frederator?
I’ve always said that in business I’d like to:
• Have fun.
• Make money.
• Feel great about the colleagues I work with every day.
When we’re doing well at our job, our environment reflects those three things.
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What skills do you look for in employees?
That’s a tough question, because it’s actually pretty vague. Different jobs require different skills and skill levels. Basically, I like the magical and sometimes paradoxical combination between motivated self starters and smoothly collaborative team members.
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Generally, how many employees do you hire in a year and are they permanent staff, or just freelancers for the length of a project?
Currently, the permanent staff at Frederator Studios is five, counting me (Channel Frederator is part of a separate company and is staffed independently of the studio). Everyone else comes and goes with the needs of productions.
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What kind of incentives and rewards do you offer employees?
None of your business.
Seriously, we look for every way we can to reward our colleagues. Creative latitude tops the first 100 spaces on the list. Then, generous health benefits (very important in the U.S.), relaxed vacation schedules and work hours, and competitive salaries and participations.
But mostly, we thrive on our abilities to let creative people, whether they’re executives, creators, or production staff, to optimize their working environment to be as productive as they can possibly be.
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Frederator’s main outputs are children’s animated television programmes for Nickelodeon’s core audience of 2-11 year olds but I read that you are also entering other fields, such as feature films. What is the current progress of this?
We launched the original cartoon podcast, Channel Frederator (http://channelfrederator.com), primarily targeted at adults in November 2005. And the world’s first pre-school video podcast, The Wubbcast (http://wubbcast.com) in March 2006.
In July 2007, we announced the formation of Frederator Films, with three animated movies to go into production: Samurai Jack (stereoscopic 2D; written and directed by Genndy Tartakovsky), The Neverhood (claymation; written and directed by Doug TenNapel) and Seven Deadly Sins (Flash; written and directed by Dan Meth).
In September 2007 we launched our first cartoon series of shorts for adults, The Meth Minute 39, which is distributed through our sister, Channel Frederator.
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Frederator has a thriving Internet community with Channel Frederator and the Frederator blogs. What are the reasons behind this form of communication?
The community of Hollywood animators has long been limited by geography and constituency (primarily the US television networks and movie studios). After spending the first 20 years of my career working with the independents of the world, I was feeling a little constrained by the kinds of films Hollywood limited us to. I have a family and a business so traveling throughout the world meeting new people was a bit impractical, so I realized blogging was a perfect vehicle to “meet” new people. it’s exceeded my expectations.
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You encourage student animation, with the online Channel Frederator and the annual Nicktoons animation festival. Do you feel very passionate about animation students and do you encourage them in any other way, if so how?
I vividly remember starting out and looking everywhere for inspiration, advice, and direction. I felt like I could conquer the world with the right push. Many people stepped up to help me (<a target=”_blank” href=”http://frederatorblogs.com/frederator_studios/2007/09/22/bob-altshuler-rip/here’s a remembrance of one of them) and the only way I’ve been able to pay them back is to offer the same encouragement to as many young people as I can fit into my life. I talk at as many school classes as I can visit, in any city I can get to, and to dozens of individuals who come by the office to visit.
Aside from the stories I can offer, I’m well aware students are my colleagues of the future. The first classes I spoke to when I entered animation are still poplulating my productions, often with the most talented and advanced members of our teams. And right now there’s a storyboard artist on one of our shows I befriended at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005.
Alex Kirwan was a high school student in Duluth, Minnesota, when he entered a storyboarding contest we ran. He chose not to enter university and became an apprentice for us a Hanna-Barbera and became the first artist on our staff at Oh Yeah! Cartoons) at 18 years old.
Our most stunning student-to-professional success was from a Rhode Island School of Design student one of my executives met in 1994 and brought to Hollywood right after graduation. He made his first professional short for us and his second one too. During the production of the “Zoomates” short, Seth MacFarlane started work on “Family Guy.”
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Finally, do you have any other information to add; that you feel could help with my case study report?
I think you’ve about got it covered. Good luck.
Best, Fred Seibert
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