Keith Chapman

Keith V. Chapman is a television writer and producer based in the United Kingdom who most notably created Bob the Builder.

Biography

He worked for Jim Henson International, designing characters related to the Muppets, before leaving to pursue a career in advertising.

While freelancing as an agency art director in the early 1990s, Chapman worked on his own creations, eventually showing them to Peter Orton, executive chairman of HIT Entertainment. One of the properties Chapman had produced was Bob the Builder, and Orton, sensing potential in the character, acquired the intellectual property rights and created a television show based on the property. The deal saw Chapman retain a share of the copyright and also a contractual clause which sees his name appear on all merchandise related to the character.

Bob the Builder was produced at Manchester's HOT Animation Studio, with Curtis Jobling's unmistakable character and world designs helping propel the character, and the show, onto a global audience. The show became a huge success, generating around £1 billion in international retail sales. Chapman decided to invest his share of the profits in setting up his own television production and rights ownership company, Chapman Entertainment, stating his belief that "the closer involvement of creative talent can get more out of a property over the longer term".

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Chapman Stick

The Chapman Stick (The Stick) is an electric musical instrument devised by Emmett Chapman in the early 1970s. A member of the guitar family, the Chapman Stick usually has ten or twelve individually tuned strings and has been used on music recordings to play bass lines, melody lines, chords, or textures. Designed as a fully polyphonic chordal instrument, it can also cover several of these musical parts simultaneously.

Description and playing position

Imagine creating music on a stringed instrument that is simultaneously a guitar, a bass, a piano, and percussion. Add unlimited electronic capabilities and forward-thinking playing techniques for ultimate expression. Now, design a tuning to make navigation of the instrument amazingly simple, and streamline the look and feel for optimal accessibility. This instrument already exists as the Chapman Stick.

A Stick looks like a wide version of the fretboard of an electric guitar, but with 8, 10 or 12 strings. It is, however, considerably longer and wider than a guitar fretboard. Unlike the electric guitar, it is usually played by tapping or fretting the strings, rather than plucking them. Instead of one hand fretting and the other hand plucking, both hands sound notes by striking the strings against the fingerboard just behind the appropriate frets for the desired notes.