Fred Seibert's Blog

Dan Meth, Herb Scannell, and Craig Barlett
find something amusing in a Meth Minute. Hmmm.

Old friend and colleague Craig Barlett stopped by the studio in New York to say Hi to Herb Scannell and me, and chat a little about everything from new projects to Hey Arnold!

Mike Reagan, aside from his various film (Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday or Elmo in Grouchland), TV, and videogame projects, has been our honored composer on Ape Escape Cartoons and the 52 episodes of Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!. He came by the studio the other day and was telling me about the trés cool set up he’s put together for the music on Ape, and rather than my explaining it to you, I thought I’d let Mike do the honors himself:

I am having a BUH-LAST writing the music for Ape Escape! Working with Kevin Kolde and Karl Torge has really challenged me in the best way possible - really getting to stretch my muscles in this series. Their knowledge of music is pretty wide - we’re just a bunch of big kids doing what makes us laugh - it’s just fantastic. They introduced me to the world of Hoyt Curtin, Les Baxter, Bert Kaempfert and so many other great composers - music I’ve heard all my life, just hadn’t taken the time to really crawl inside it.

Each episode is pretty fast paced, with many twists and turns - so there’s just a ton of music to write. Everything from themes to accentuate the stupidity of some characters, to writing music in the style of Bernhard Kaun for the Frankenstein monster episode or 50’s style montages… the list goes on and on. Glad you liked the Frankenstein episode!

To quickly access each theme, I’ve created a system using pictures on a USB device that’s essentially 128 buttons that you can assign to just about anything. So, I basically save markers in Logic for each theme, then assign a series of key commands to a single button to grab what I’m hearing in my head and paste it at the right spot. After 18 episodes I’ve got over 40 buttons programmed right now, but there’s room for 128. I’m going to do the same thing for Wubbzy - get another box of 128 buttons and start organizing themes in the same way. For the pictures, I search through the Ape Escape quicktime movies and capture the screen shot that’s most appropriate for each theme. Specter, Jimmy, Nathalie, Monkeys, and Professor are the main themes, so there’s different (and multiple) pictures for them, but there are also montages, falls, stings, sinister themes, location based music like Paris, Hospital waiting room, Vegas, etc… that get pictures on their buttons, too. For instance, there’s a Paris love theme that has a picture of the Iefell Tower, and the barnyard / Turkey in the Straw tunes have pictures of a chicken.

It’s so much faster associating a piece of music with a thumbnail picture as opposed to remembering a marker number or a folder path… this keeps the creativity at the forefront, and the math and memorization on another planet.

To quote Napoleon Dynamite’s brother Kip:
“…I still love Technology, always and forever”

Animator Ross Bollinger stopped by on Friday for the first time and showed us his film “The Mosquito Who Gave Up Blood.” Nice to meet you Ross. Come back soon.

Ryan Sias was one of our earliest Frederator blogees, so it’s always good to see him. Last Friday Ryan stopped by with his latest comic, Da Beaver: Environmental Hero.

Thanks to Ryan for kind permission to post art from his comic.

Elliot Cowan came by the other day to show us his storyboard for a funny short called “Snake.”

We met Elliot through his membership on Channel Frederator RAW late last year. We featured his cartoons in Episodes 86 & 106 and in our & “48 Frames…” contest, we’ve hung out at the New York Drinking and Drawing’s, and he gave us a nice, thoughtful, Christmas present.

Thanks to Elliot for kind permission to post some of his storyboard.

Ed Ludvigsen & Brian Belanger came by on Friday to introduce themselves. Ed’s an art director for an online agency in Westchester, New York, and Brian’s a comic book artist and writer in Manchester, New Hampshire. They pitched us their project Skullduggery.

Thanks to Brian for kind permission to post his artwork.

Anne Denman came by Frederator a while back to catch up and introduce us to studios she’s working with like MonkeyPaw Media, Sketch Engine Studio, Spank Productions, Harbour Block Productions, and Denman Wilde Productions.

Anne was the delightful person who helped us so much with the Drinking & Drawing event at last June’s Platform Animation Festival (she’s the Director of the Student Program and Panel Coordinator) and put neat bow on things, she’s worked a lot with our great friend Marv Newland at International Rocketship.

We really like monsters here at Frederator, so imagine our delight when the monsterously smart Sarah Szalavitz introduced us to the monsterously cool Daily Monster by Stefan G. Bucher. And then we found out he was publishing a monsterously (OK, I’ll stop now) cool book of his monsters.

Stefan filmed himself for 100 days drawing 100 monsters. The book has them all with 257 stories and all the videos on a DVD. Buy it now, you won’t be sorry.

Eric had his Irish studio visit and I had mine. Caboom produces animation, live action, TV, film, commercials, digital…they *produce*. Creative Director/owner (and animator) Damian Farrell and producer Joanne Roboz stopped by during Kidscreen to show us “A Beary Bootiful World” (bootifully design by the wonderful Anna Chambers) and some of their other projects. (They left a DVD, but I couldn’t rip it properly to show you.)

Thanks to Caboom for kind permission to show their artwork.

Scott Nash has been one of my great friends and closest colleagues for over 25 years, though I don’t think we’ve actually done anything together for at least 15. He not only illustrates and writes books, consults on graphic design, teaches, and produces animation and movies, Scott (and Tom Corey) designed the Nickelodeon logo for my agency.

Scott stopped by with Nancy and Dave to catch up and fill us in on his animated project The Uh-Ohs.

Scott’s been hiding his wife from me for 25 years, so I was thrilled to finally meet the talented Nancy Gibson-Nash, a collage artist. She’s quite lovely, so of course Scott kept her out of sight.

Dave Schlafman is an independent filmmaker designing and directing a great project with Scott, The Uh-Ohs, and he dropped in on Eric at Frederator/West a couple of weeks ago. Dave was working at Soup 2 Nuts when he and Scott met.

It was great seeing everyone, especially Nancy. (Oh OK, it was awesome hanging with Scott and Dave too.)