Once Within A Time from Oscilloscope Laboratories

Genres: Sci Fi + Fantasy

Duration: 51 minutes

Availability: Limited + Show

Production tags 1993-2020 

MTM’s production tag take off on the famous Goldwyn/MGM lion gave me a clue that these few seconds could be critical “branding” tools for my TV work.

When my Frederator Studios’ first show went on the air in 1998 I realized we didn't have the required four second production "tag" to go at the end of the episodes. My friend, director Jon Kane, agreed to put something together tout de suite. Generally these things are forgettable, so I forgot about it until Jon delivered. Visually, serviceable.

But the audio!

Jon's unidentified intern shouted "Frederator!" on mike, and all of a sudden we had the most identifiable branding in our company's history. Once we started our own internet channels, Arlen Schumer's 'Fredbot' became an official logo icon, and we started finding delightful ways to execute. Stop motion, CGI, cut outs, you name it, we tried to have some fun. Like a surprise in the run out grooves of an old vinyl record, we hope we'll give our fans a quick tasty morsel before they move on to the next binge.

Nickelodeon network IDs from fredseibert on Vimeo.

The Jive 5 on Nickelodeon from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Nickelodeon Camp IDs 1988-1990 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

The MTV network identification work that Alan Goodman and I did that stamped "brand!" all over the channel's launch in 1981, along with the promotion work my team did for the channel, led MTV Networks president Bob Pittman to ask our new, innovative media branding company (the world's first!) to get involved in saving Nickelodeon from extinction in 1984.

We were most excited about the creative work we could do not only with our new indie animation buddies from the MTV projects, but also with some of the newer folks we’d met since that first go. Eli Noyes and Kit Kit Laybourne started us off, but then came Jon Kane, Marv Newland, and eventually David Lubell and Charlex. And, as the years went on our friend, producer/artist Howard Hoffman, who was running a summer animation program at his childhood camp in Maine came in with maybe the most revolutionary idea of our entire tenure with Nick. 

Since Alan and I always started with the sound-before-picture probably the most distinctive and memorable element of these new IDs would be our new friendship with singer Eugene Pitt and his vocal group The Jive 5. (You can get the whole story here.)

…..

Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll [trailer] 1987 

Chuck Berry Universal Pictures

Alan: On paper, it made perfect sense for us to do the movie trailer for the Chuck Berry concert documentary, “Hail Hail Rock and Roll,” directed by Taylor Hackford. It was 1987. We were the “music” guys. The “music-with-video” guys. The innovators and experts in establishing a new visual language for communicating with, and marketing to, young audiences. And if there’s anything the film industry wants more than anything, it’s innovation, right? 

That’s the problem with match-ups on paper. Sometimes it never looks better than the initial idea. We did the job. It was fine. It wasn’t anything better than fine. It certainly didn’t possess those qualities you’d expect from a Fred/Alan project. And what we learned from it was that the film industry had rules, formats, and standard operating procedures within which everyone must operate that leave very little room for change. They call it the movie industry, and like many industries, its products are made in factories. 

There’s a sequence in the film where Berry takes the camera on a tour of his classic cars. He names each one and the price the dealers wanted to give to him to buy them used. As he gets to the final car, he grins devilishly at the camera and says he’ll keep them and later sell them to “you” (he points to the audience through the camera) for $50,000. I wanted that to be the whole trailer, with a small montage at the end. It was seductive. It drew you in. It told another story besides the “here’s what happened” story. I figured that everyone knew the music. This would be an unprecedented look into the mind of the man.  

Universal wanted a far more typical montage of interviews and music. Can you guess where we ended up? 

If your guess was “a cross between the two,” you’d be right.  

The trailer is on YouTube. [And above.] There are remnants of the “look at my cars” scene, interspersed with interviews, rehearsals, and performance footage. Since we just did the off-line edit and Universal finished it up, there’s a typical “movie announcer” guy that we would never have chosen to voice the spot. It’s not compelling in any way. 

My most vivid memory of the job was working through the day with our ace editor Jon Kane, then calling the courier to ship the rough edit overnight to LA so the executives could look at it in the morning. They’d call us with notes, and we’d go to work on another version, which would ship out that night for the next morning’s screening. This went on for weeks — daily re-edits, daily courier runs, daily sets of notes and re-edits. 

There was no streaming video, no site we could use to upload our work for viewing, no zoom link to review the notes. There were courier pouches, car service deliveries, airplanes, and telephones. It was phenomenally inefficient and ridiculously expensive. 

We had other encounters with the movie moguls. Remember the movie “Modern Girls” from 1986 starring Cynthia Gibb, Daphne Zuniga, and Virginia Madsen, about the adventures of three girls who work, go home to sleep a couple hours, then party all night at music clubs? Of course you don’t. Neither does anyone else. But with a soundtrack by Depeche Mode, we got the call to work on the trailer. The studio flew me to LA to screen it, and flew me straight home after it was over. I couldn’t imagine what I could do to help it. The story was not fun. And director Jerry Kramer — primarily a music video and music film producer, not experienced at the time in feature story telling — had shot the entire thing in medium shots, so there was nothing to do with it that would have been visually interesting. Fortunately someone else got the job.

We also did the poster for the Jeff Goldblum Miramax movie, “The Tall Guy.” It was fine. It looked like a movie poster.

 I had a similar “we’ll use a piece of this and a piece of that” experience with Hollywood years after Fred/Alan, when I was hired to consult on the launch of the (long gone) network UPN (which later merged with the WB to become The CW). My presentation at Paramount was the same day the UPN execs were seeing presentations from ad agencies. We were all sitting together in the waiting room. I was called in first. “I’m the only person here today who will tell you the truth,” I told them, “because everyone else in that room wants an assignment. My job ends today.” It was a great meeting. They loved my stuff. They kept me an extra hour over my time to discuss it. My branding line was the first thing viewers heard the day the network launched. That was the last time those words were used. The rest was typical ad agency stuff. 

Looking back, we never fully succeeded with typical clients in typical fields who wanted us to fit in with their typical methods and solutions. They’d hire us because we were known for coming up with outlandish solutions that were successful, but then they’d tell us how they wanted us to do it. We were almost certainly partially to blame. We were spoiled rotten. We wanted to compete with the big guys. We wanted to play in that league. But in the end we were never enthusiastic about doing that work or working with those people. The people who worked that way were the people who used to serve us when we were clients, the people we went into business to replace. We found that clients willing to roll the dice and trust us were few and far between.

...

Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll [trailer] 1987 Producer: Alan Goodman Editor: Jon Kane Client: Universal Pictures/David Sameth

The Tall Guy [poster] 1989 Account supervisor: Ed Levine Client: Miramax Pictures

Once Within a Time

The first FredFilms production tag, by Colin Raff & Jon Kane

Master filmmaker Jon Kane (co-director of the latest film by Godfrey Reggio, scored by Philip Glass, and featuring Mike Tyson!) and I have worked together since... well, since a long time. (The first time in cartoons was for Oh Yeah! Cartoons.) He’s also a music freak and audio master. Jon created the iconic [shout!] “Frederator!,” which branded my first studio with a bunch of animations. Including a few by Berlin based artist Colin Raff. 

So, when I asked Jon to create the audio tag for FredFilms projects, Colin’s unique filmmaking was the first one I thought would be great for the visuals.

Trailer, Once Within A Time 2023

Frederator Studios production tag by Colin Raff and Jon Kane 2018

Frederator Studios production tag by Kirsten Lepore and Jon Kane 2009