You may not have heard of peripatetic art teacher Mark Kistler, but a great many children have, through Kistler’s travels across the country teaching kids the fun of drawing and his how-to-draw books.
Now his six to 14-yer old fans can learn to draw in 3D, in 26 new episodes of the popular “Mark Kistler’s Imagination Station.”
The current “3D” series is based on the Simon & Schuster books and on-line art academy designed for teachers and children.
Shooting in HD a first for the show and for Neustadt?it’s his first HD project. The show will be offered exclusively to all 330 public TV stations in 2009, and then syndicated or sold overseas.
Over the past 20 years, producer/director Neustadt, who lives here, and art teacher Kistler, who is based in Los Angeles, will have produced 99 half-hour “Imagination Stations” that have been a staple of public broadcasting for years.
The “3D” series was produced in partnership with the Digital Game Design and Animation department at Ferris State University in Grand Rapids. The department head had invited Kistler to teach his summer camp course there and turn it into a TV series.
It marked the first time he had taught in front of a live audience, rather than in a TV studio, Neustadt remarked.
“We brought in a director from L.A. who knows the technology,” he said. “Mark’s shows tend to be around for a while so we wanted to keep it in pure HD. We didn’t go high-end HD but kept it respectable,” he said.
Ferris State students served in various crew positions and will animate brief roll-in clips that explain key concepts of adding depth and perspective to drawing.
Neustadt has been a non-stop producer, director and often scriptwriter of TV shows, events and corporate media, and is currently producing a Cardinal Health sales meeting video. He cites health care as his specialty and has produced series for the Discovery Health Channel and corporate videos for virtually all of the major pharmaceutical companies, and also for Fox, NBC, Towers Productions, HealthAnswers, Hearst Television, among others.
Robert Neustadt Productions can be reached at 847/291-2777. See
