Fred Seibert's Blog

Frame grab from “Top of the Hour”, by Marv Newland/International Rocketship

“The Fred/Alan television branding execution often started with defining a network’s sound.”

Slowly over the last few years I’ve been putting some of my archives online. For me it’s easier to organize than shelves and drawers.

Anyhow, one of the things I uncovered was this fave that I think regular readers of Frederator Blogs are going to love. My partner Alan Goodman and I took one of our favorite doo-wop groups, Eugene Pitt’s The Jive Five, and built the on-air Nickelodeon brand around them.

Frame grab from “The Jive Five”, by Jon Kane/Optic Nerve

With the help of our producer Tom Pomposello, and animators/production companies Eli Noyes & Kit Laybourne, Joey Ahlbum, Colossal Pictures, David Lubell, Jerry Lieberman & Kim Deitch, Marv Newland/International Rocketship, and Jon Kane/Optic Nerve, we established Nickelodeon’s identity at a moment they were teetering on complete and abject failure. And, we had a righteous ball doing it. (You can get the whole story here.)

Fred/Alan IDs 1985-1991 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Year of the Ox. Series 11, 2008, painting by Randy Saba

Randy Saba’s a filmmaker and artist who’s been a FOF (Friend of Frederator) since he worked as a production assistant on Oh Yeah! Cartoons and ChalkZone in the late 90s, and as he continues as production manager on The Fairly Oddparents. His film Wishy Wormy was featured on Episode 24 of Channel Frederator.

For the last couple of years I’ve been honored to receive his wonderful, annual paintings dedicated to the Chinese New Year. This year Series 11 is the Year of the Ox. Thanks Randy!

Carrie and I were happy to host a New York visit from senior designer Meghan Killeen and owner Robert Feldman from Earworm Media, based in Milford, New Jersey. Earworm specializes in web design and animation for clients, and themselves. Their series Dr. Shroud is hosted over at Joost and you can check out the episodes there. Thanks for coming by guys.

Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! show bible

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Culture wubbzy

Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! is doing so well in it’s second season (so well that it’s a state secret right now; I’ll share the details when I can) that I was looking back on it’s origins (that’s the original pitch bible above). And I was being fascinated with how true to it’s original vision creator Bob Boyle has kept it.

Buy The Animation Journal issues. Read some of the essays online. If you think for more than a millisecond about serious issues in animation you probably already do, but for newbies, check it out.

I read the most recent issue after I was visited with Maureen Furniss‘ class at CalArts (Maureen isn’t just a animation historian and professor, she’s also The Animation Journal editor). An article about black Hollywood animation veteran Floyd Norman fed my continuing interest in the underrepresentation of minorities and women in our industry, and Maureen’s article on television for the under 2 year olds (!) frightened even my liberal attitude about kids and TV. And I caught up on some of the newest books about animation that I’d missed (I miss a lot).

I briefly started working with animation during college, when I was in my most abstract intellectual phase. I came of age over 15 years in the New York indie animation scene, with filmmakers like Eli Noyes & George Griffin. It was natural for my friends to discuss the artistic side of the equation. Reading the Journal and books like Chris Robinson’s The Animation Pimp remind me of one of the less traveled, exhilarating side of what we all do. Maybe you’ll like them too.

The Animation Pimp By Chris Robinson (published by AWN/Thompson, June 2007)

I read an awful lot that has nothing to do directly with animation and that probably wouldn’t really interest our blog readers. So when I do, like I’ve been lately, I don’t post either, which is kind of dumb. The last few weeks I’ve been catching up with stuff I shouldn’t have been neglecting. Like  The Animation Pimp (disclaimer: I think he says a nice thing about yours truly in the book).

Many of you know about Chris Robinson as the director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, but the sharper among you might have read his five years of columns at AWN called “The Animation Pimp” (or his TAP blog) which were edited and collected last year in this book of the same name. Influenced and inspired by writers wonderful and just awful, Chris is that rare thing in animation, a non-fanboy, serious thinker and writer. There’s a glimpse of that kind of thinking (though sometimes shallow in their narrowness) in Amid Amidi’s Cartoon Brew posts , and in The Animation Journal (great thinking, rarely good writing). Chris tries to inject soberness in his editing of the ASIFA Magazine but, geez, serious is as serious does, and it’s a little too dour for me sometimes.

But I have to say, as often as Chris irritates me with his overly stylized prose, he’s a lot of fun. And strangely enough, “fun” is not really a word one thinks of in animation writing. How dumb is that?

Everyone who gives a damn about animation or cartoons (though Chris doesn’t have that much interest in the cartoon subset it seems) ought to just flip over to his columns or buy the book right away. It’s rare that anyone provokes real thought in my head about what we do (unless it’s my own team, or John K, or Amid) and The Animation Pimp sure does. And in book form it’s way different than monthly columns too. Altogether in one spot, read in a short period of time, Chris’ incitement to dare to think differently, to even dismiss the form he’s writing about, is refreshing, liberating, and ultimately exciting. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my thoughts, or maybe I’ve been doing things with them all along, but I’m thankful to Chris for resurrecting them in me. Maybe he’ll do the same for you.

Regular readers of my blog know how much I enjoy Joey Ahlbum’s work, so his 2008 holiday card was a perfect excuse to share some more of it.

Elliot Cowan & Rebecca Angelou from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Elliot Cowan stopped by Wednesday with his new wife (congratulations!), artist/designer Rebecca Angelou. I got to see her work for the first time and go over a few projects with Elliot. Elliot’s “Boxhead & Roundhead” was last seen on Channel Frederator in May on Episode #134 oops, in October on Episode #149.

Find more videos like this on Channel Frederator RAW

One of the highlights of my gig is visiting with college animation classes, and because I live in New York, I get the opportunity to hang at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) more often than some others. SVA is almost unique among schools because the entire faculty is made of up professionals in their given field, and no real full time teachers-only; they give a perspective that only working folks can have. Last week it was my annual trek to Lisa Goldman’s class, where she helps students prepare projects for selling to producers and networks. And yesterday, I spoke with Jim Arnoff’s senior class on getting ready to enter the professional world, along with Alice Cahn from Cartoon Network and Paula Rosenthal from Disney Playhouse. Thanks Lisa, and thanks Jim. As usual.

At the end of Jim’s class we all decided to have a little fun with my new Flip Video Mino HD, and I asked everyone in class to tape me a message (Arnoff’s the last guy). Check it out up above.

PS: And visiting art schools’ bathrooms is always fun:

Not too many folks in animation caught this great story. Check out the Ain’t It Cool News interview with Jon Favreau about his Genndy Tartakovsky fandom and how it ended up with Genndy and his Orphanage Animation team bringing their cartoon sensibility to Iron Man 2.