Sheldon Lieberman's latest animated short is being featured in three international film festivals. Which is pretty amazing, considering his animation career started as an escape from his job.
"I got bored working for clients and answering briefs," the bigfish.tv founder says. "I woke up at three o'clock one morning and started drawing my family and writing a script and I guess it happened out of frustration."
His latest and most celebrated work is a series of shorts named Spike And Dadda. The series combines real life recordings of his conversations with his six year old son, Spike, with animations from Serbian Igor Coric. The 'real conversation' audio is something that Lieberman thought was missing from the animation market. "We've always looked to rebel against overly scripted material, against The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park; that's really scripted material. We get a bit tired of it so look for ways to make it more filmic and more real."
Lieberman's new short, Mud Crab, is to be played at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film in Germany, the International Animated Film Festival in Portugal as well as here in Brisbane for the Brisbane International Film Festival.
"BIFF is a film festival," Lierberman explains, "rather than the other ones which are just animated festivals, so to get into BIFF and into the broad categories is nice. Three festivals in the one month is exciting. So it's looking good for the future and we have other ones coming out."
Lieberman is launching a new website shortly — spikeanddadda.com — which will host Spike And Dadda for fans to see a new episode every month. "We've actually done ten episodes so we can get ahead and start releasing them. We're committed to letting anyone see them wherever they are in the world."
