Fantastic Conference 2022
May 25, Skellefteå Sweden
Fantastic Conference is the meeting place for streaming services, publishers, producers, artists, authors, VFX or film studios and IP owners.
SPEAKER TRACKS
Meet some of the people from the industry, as well as some of the best authors and creators that share their thoughts about the world of fantastic.
PROGRAM
This track focuses on filmmaking and special effects in film and TV series with both production companies, streaming services, directors, actors, and film enthusiasts on site.
PROGRAM
This speaker track focuses on how to create, license, develop and expand intellectual properties.
PROGRAM
Speakers Fantastic Conference
25 may
Speakers
Fredrik Malmberg | Heroic Signatures
Fredrik Malmberg, hailing from the icy north (Sweden) has been a fan of Robert E. Howard since his teens. Notably, he was a pioneer in introducing tabletop games and was the first publisher of Conan in the Swedish language. Since acquiring the rights to Conan in 2004, and the rest of the REH estate in 2006, Fred has worked with the comics, game, toy, videogame and entertainment industries, bringing Conan and Howard to a broader audience than likely ever before, in particular through computer games, such as the Age of Conan and Conan Exiles games from licensee Funcom. Currently, he is serving as an Executive Producer of a Conan entertainment package at Netflix, and heads up the Heroic Signatures team in Los Angeles.
25 may
Host
Orvar Säfström | Host for the conference
With many years hosting the film show on Sweden’s largest television network, Orvar Säfstrom is a household name in Sweden. Since 2005 his main focus has been games and game culture, writing several books on the subject, as a columnist for numerous newspapers and magazines and has lectured on popular culture and has held a seminar on the importance game culture in Swedish parliament. He has been awarded the Swedish video industry Honorary Award as well as the Swedish Gaming Federation SVEROK “Gamer of the year”. Orvar Safstrom is also the leading producer of symphonic concerts with film and video game music in Scandinavia.
25 may
Speakers
Kurtis Wiebe | Writer and Game Creator
Kurtis Wiebe is an award winning creative expert, writer and director with over 15 years in the comic, prose, tabletop RPG and video game industries. His original works have been translated into 8 languages and distributed world-wide, have landed on the New York Times Bestselling list multiple times and have been adapted into various transmedia projects. He has created eight original, critically acclaimed intellectual properties with Image Comics, Dark Horse, and Oni Press and as well have written for established properties at Marvel and IDW Comics. He has deep creative experience in video games working directly with Ubisoft, The Coalition, Black Tusk, XGen Studios and Fathom Interactive. His specialties are tone, storytelling, character and dialog writing, world building, intellectual property creation and transmedia adaptation and game design.
25 may
Speakers
Jonas Darnell | Herman Hedning
Survived 36 years so far without a decent job, cosplaying “a cartoonist”, mainly producing “Herman Hedning”. Also suffers from an addiction to creating complicated and successful Kickstarters.
25 may
Speakers
Alexander Kenning | Blockmarknaden
Co founder of Blockmarknaden and crypto enthusiast with a passion for games and hairdos!
25 may
Speakers
Jim Kenning | Blockmarknaden
Co-founder of Blockmarknaden, Crypto enthusiast.
25 may
Speakers
Oskar Källner | Imperiets Arvingar
Oskar Källner has previously published several fantasy novels, which also have won several awards. Together with Karl Johnsson he is the creator of the book series Imperiets Arvingar, which will be published in the US under the title Children of the Phoenix.
25 may
Speakers
Karl Johnsson | Imperiets Arvingar
Karl Johnsson is a comic artist and illustrator. Together with Sara Bergmark Elfgren, he created the epic fantasy graphic novel Vei. Together with Oskar Källner he is the creator of the book series Imperiets Arvingar, which will be published in the US under the title Children of the Phoenix.
25 may
Speakers
Agnes & Elias Våhlund | Handbok för superhjältar
Agnes & Elias Våhlund are the creators of “The handbook for superheroes”, one of the most successful book series created in Sweden.
25 may
Speakers
Ervin Rustemagić | SAF Comics
Ervin Rustemagić is a legendary IP rights agent and publisher. In 1972 he founded Strip Art Features (SAF). SAF handles the IP rights of hundreds of graphic novels and characters. They are closely associated with Dark Horse Comics in the US, which publishes many of the European comics that SAF represents. Among the creators that Rustemagić has represented are Hermann Huppen and Joe Kubert, founder of The Kubert School. Originally based in Sarajevo, Rustemagić and SAF is located in Slovenia since the 1990s. During the Bosnian War, Rustemagić communicated via fax to business associates and artists, giving eyewitness accounts on the horrors of war and his family’s escape to safety. These fax messages were the basis for Joe Kubert’s award winning graphic novel Fax from Sarajevo.
25 may
Speakers
Anders Fager | Gottick
Anders Fager is one of Sweden’s leading horror writers. He made his debut in 2009 with the short story collection “Swedish Cults” which has become a modern classic of Swedish horror. He has since then written short stories, novels and and also written for apps and games. The graphic novel “The Crows” by Anders Fager and the artist Peter Bergting is published in the US by Dark Horse Comics.
25 may
Speakers
Maria Fröhlich | Marvel Comics
Maria Fröhlich, is a writer, comic artist and illustrator. She was first published as illustrator in the US in 2013 with the comic The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, based on Neil Gaiman’s short story. In 2021 she became the first Swedish artist for Marvel Comics, when she participated in the anthology Women of Marvel #1 (april, 2021).
25 may
Speakers
Sylvain Runberg | Dark Riviera
Born 1971, Sylvain Runberg grew up in Provence (France) and now lives in Sweden. With a master degree in Political History he started his career in the publishing industry before writing graphic novels. His first book came out in 2004. He has since published more than 100 graphic novels, published in 25 countries, creating his own IPs from fantasy, science fiction to thriller, horror and supernatural drama while working on others, known worldwide (“Wonder Woman”, “Millennium”, “Watchdog Legions”, ” Liu Cixin Universe” etc…) He is at the origin of the TV serie “Cryptid” (2020 Cannes TV festival official selection) for Viaplay and is currently working on several other TV series, graphic novels and video games projects. Sylvain Runberg is also the co-founder of Dark Riviera, a Stockholm based intellectual property generator for television, graphic novels and video games
25 may
Speakers
Samuel Fast Hurtigkarl & Philip Engström | Brikk
Brikk is a Stockholm based animation studio & directors collective. Brikk crafts character-driven game trailers and cinematics for big, small, and medium-sized game developers.
25 may
Speakers
Emilie Blézat | Dark Riviera
Emilie Blezat is Managing Director of Dark Riviera, and Intellectual Property company based in Sweden, focused on 360 international premium content. We create and produce books, graphic novels, TV series, films, games and more. Member of the International Academy of Televion Arts and Sciences, Emilie Blezat has been the founder and CEO of Studiocanal China (2014-2019), China Cultural Attachée for the French Government (2012-2014), and the has been a film and TV producer and creator for 20 years in Europe and China, working on films like Paddington, Non-Stop, Shaun the Sheep and Earlyman, with directors like Academy Award nominee Michael Roskam, Grace Jones, Birdy Nam Nam, Feng XiaoYue, Sophie Fiennes, Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker… She produced over 20 European feature films & documentaries, wrote TV series and distributed and licensed more than 600 films and IPs in China. Emilie is also a strategy consultant on media, culture and China working for the like Smithsonian Institute and Ubisoft.
25 may
Speakers
Aymeric Castaing | UMANIMATION
With more than 15 years of experience in entertainment, Aymeric CASTAING is a all-rounder: music producer, music publisher, and animation producer (cofounder and CEO for 10 years of a kids animation prodco). He founded and now runs as CEO of UMANIMATION Group (http://www.umanimation.com), a group of companies developing a catalogueof narrative and immersive content designed for new media (TV, Video Games, VR, AR, MR, Immersive Music Shows). UMANIMATION’s aim is to define the next generation of entertainment content by producing transmedia universes that enlist different technologies and platforms. Interested in new ways to tell and produce stories, Aymeric CASTAING is specialized in transmedia content and shares his expertise and passion through various activities: he is a founding member of the French national transmedia association PXN (www.pxn.fr), he is the co-founder and president of Transmedia cluster CoBo (www.co-bo.org), and he brought Cartoon Movie event to Bordeaux.
25 may
Speakers
Dave Connely | Goodbye Kansas Studios
Dave studied at Game Design at Huddersfield University and did his Masters in Game Development at Abertay Dundee in Scotland. After his studies he started to work as freelancing Character artist before he was approached by Plowman Caven, a company working with Lidar, Cyber scanning and Prop scanning specialising in on-set capture. He was soon working with onset capture for films like “The Great Wall”, ”Dr Strange”, ”Alien Covenant”, ”Fast and Furious 8” and VFX Oscar winner “Blade Runner 2049”. He continued to Dneg, where he revamped their inhouse pipe for scan data ingestion, before being offered to start and set up a lidar department for Clear Angle Studios. This turned into the largest dedicated VFX Scanning department for Lidar in Europe and the list of projects he worked on includes productions like “Black Panther”, ”Ready Player One”, ”Game of Thrones”, “Avengers: Infinity Wars”, “Avengers Endgame” and the VFX Oscar winners “First Man” and “1917”. He also worked on “Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald” and on the new upcoming Fantastic Beast film, before joining Goodbye Kansas in 2020.
25 may
Speakers
Raphael Penasa | Executive Producer
Raphael Penasa was the founder and creative producer of Fauns, an independent award-winning animation studio, for 10 years. 2 years ago, he sold it to AtlasV, an immersive group, renaming the company as Albyon. Since then he works as an independent development executive producer. He spent the last 2 years working on projects for Google, Sun Creature (EP on Splinter Cell for Netflix), and other companies (Noor, Worldcrunch). He works at the edge of narrative and innovation, focusing on new approaches for the market and how to develop new IPs learning from both the wins and fails over the years. Today, he focuses on live-action and animation tv series, video games (AA), and immersive projects. His latest productions are Battlescar (VR experience – 48 awards in 2 years) and Glimpse (VR experience – 13 selections and 3 prizes since the Mostra of Venice last year). Raphael works mostly with authors, directors, producers, and distributors, and offers support to the core team to keep the big picture, fit the scope (with ideas and talents), and define the overall budget. Raphael is currently developing the tv series Orbital, the VR game Amazing Monster! (produced by wowl and Small Studio), the next-gen game Robot+Butterfly, and a young-adult tv series of adventures and dark fantasy… And some others. But everything takes time as you know.
25 may
Speakers
Magnus Widgren | Edisen
Magnus Widgren is Head of Growth at two times Oscars award winning Edisen. A now global Swedish unskippable content company, earlier nominated for the Government’s Export Prize for the Cultural and Creative Industry. Magnus is author of several books in rhetoric and communication and will explain to us how to use AI to optimize moving content and how virtual production now takes major leaps from Hollywood film making into everyday content creation.