ses www.​serge​sei​dlitz.com

Your recent ani­ma­tion for MTV looks fan­tas­tic! Can you tell me a bit more about it?

Thanks. That was a fun project to work on. I was con­tacted by a pro­ducer who I used to work with at Car­toon Net­work, who had just been given the job of launch­ing the emerg­ing mar­kets chan­nels and giving them a ‘look’ of there own. Emerg­ing mar­kets are coun­tries like Khaz­ak­stan, Roma­nia, Hun­gary, Ice­land etc. We started to talk about these coun­tries and the cul­tures that linked them and we kept get­ting excited by the folk leg­ends and sto­ries that each coun­try had…

We looked at movies like Emir Kusturica’s ‘black Cat white cat’, and ‘time of the gypsies’ and lis­tened to Balkan music like Gogol Bor­dello and Boris Kovac. We thought it would be great to create a world of funny, dark char­ac­ters that would inhabit the chan­nel, devel­op­ing a sur­real eclec­tic mix of folk inspired by ani­mals, musi­cal instru­ments and folk­lore. I then went into MTV for a month and sat in the base­ment doing sketches and devel­op­ing the ideas. Once we had lots of sheets to look at we selected the favorites and started to flesh out scenes for them by doing rough sto­ry­boards, at this point an ani­ma­tor who we had worked with at Car­toon Net­work came on board and started to ani­mate the char­ac­ters, we wanted the ani­ma­tions to look hand made and raw so the best way to achieve this was to painstak­ingly hand-​render them frame by frame and then putting it alto­gether in Flash. To us, the results evoked mem­o­ries of some of the old Mtv ani­ma­tions from back in the 80’s, which was entirely what we set out to achieve.

This was great a project to work on as we were a small team and had lots of cre­ative free­dom. The budget wasn’t great but on cer­tain projects it’s worth sac­ri­fic­ing a bit of money for more cre­ative input.

How much work do you get paid for and how much and how much pro bono work do you do?

I mostly work on paid com­mis­sions. I don’t agree with ‘free work’ – although I have done it, it annoys me – Why should illus­tra­tors con­tribute to mag­a­zines and not get paid to do their job? I sup­pose it’s because they know they can get away with it, because there are so many people trying to get work pub­lished, but its exploita­tive and it shouldn’t be allowed. Some­times, ‘pitch work’ is unpaid, but then you might win and it could lead onto paid work, so I do that (some­times) if I have the time. As I men­tioned before, some projects are worth get­ting involved with, like the recent Mtv project, as I knew it would be fun to work on and I’d come out the other side with a great body of work.

Apart from illus­tra­tion what other things are you into?

Trepa­na­tion and Voodoo

Who are your favourite artists/illustrators alive today?

Blanquet’s dark and twisted, Tadanori Yoko – the king of the screen print, Jody Barton Is quite a funny guy, SoMe from Edbanger records is pretty cool, I’ve recently been very inspired by Saul Stein­berg (he’s dead though), I love Gre­gory L Black­stock an autis­tic illus­tra­tor from the States, there’s plenty I’ve left out…

Will you still be living in East London when you’re 40?

Hell no! I don’t live in that area any more, I stayed for a year and then moved back cen­tral, I prefer it. Every­one in east London fits into a cliche of what some­one in east London is sup­posed to be. I had a studio in Hack­ney near London fields last year, and I felt like such a stereo­typ­i­cal artist walk­ing around that area. There is a def­i­nite ten­sion between the locals and the arty folk, this was the graf­fiti on the wall near my studio… ”CLASS WAR! FUCK OFF MIDDLE CLASS SCUM”

How do you pro­mote your­self and get work or does it all come though your agent?

Mostly through my agent and my web­site, but some­times I hang around out­side peo­ples houses, follow them to work, rum­mage in their bins – that can help get inside the minds of commissioners.

Have you ever con­sid­ered sell­ing your work in gallery for a living?

I’m sell­ing screen prints in a gallery in east London called Nel­ly­duff. It might be hard to earn a living from sell­ing stuff in a gallery.

Are you involved in any col­lab­o­ra­tive projects at the moment and is there anyone you would like to work with?

Not right now – I’d like to do a duet with Sting though.

What’s next in the pipeline for Serge Seidlitz?

I’m play­ing Wesley Snipes in Blade 4, but apart from that I’m prob­a­bly going to keep on trying to get work in the illus­tra­tion world and get involved with fun projects.

TMNT or Mr Bean’s Holiday?

Teenage mutant ninja bean’s

Apples or Bananas?

Banap­ples

Ghost­busters or He-​Man

Ghost-man

You can see more of Serge Seidlitz’s work at
www.​serge​sei​dlitz.com

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Cats: Animation, LCS Interviews
Tags: Bean, Boris Kovac, Gogol Bordello, Gregory L Blackstock, Hungary, Iceland, Interviews, Jody Barton Is, Khazakstan, Kusturica, London, MTV, Romania, Saul Steinberg, Serge Seidlitz, Wesley Snipes, www.sergeseidlitz.com