Curriculum Vitae

Ali Murat Erkorkmaz was born in 21^st of September 1948 in Istanbul, Turkey as the first son of a family with two sons and two daughters. After graduating from Moda primary school in 1959, he went to an English spoken secondary school, Kadiköy College. In 1966, he attended the Technical University of Istanbul, faculty of architecture.

While studying in the university, he started making artwork for some major advertising companies. He finished the university as an architect in 1970 and opened his first studio. There he practised both architecture and cartoon animation. He got involved with advertising and opened his own agency in 1972. Concentrating on cartoon ads, he managed to get in the first 3 in Turkey. At that time, he opened a film processing lab and a video recording studio.

Besides making commercials, he released a daily full size colour children’s newspaper, “World Children”. He finished his first full length animated film ESOP during that period but as the economy of Turkey was in a great declination at that time, he couldn’t finalise the project.

In 1980, he moved to Bahrain as a partner of an Arab advertising agency, to form the first animation company in the area. There, he produced many commercials as well as some series for the area. He made the animation shorts for the arabic version of Sesame Street, a future film called “Bahrain Bahrain”, series called “Hazir Fazir”, “Adventures of Jeha”, “Small Screen” etc. He started his future animation project “Woody and May”.

In 1984, he moved back to Turkey to form ARTNET. He started producing educational children’s series both for the Turkish and international markets. Besides the animation, he got involved with computers and started working on high level artificial intelligence programming.
He wrote thousands of programs for both his studios needs and the market. Most outstanding ones are his works on Architecture, textiles and animation.

In 1994, while producing “the Babum Show”, he created a system that could enable 2D characters to be manipulated in real time. Using that technique, he started producing long animated sequences in real time. In 1995, he went to USA to find a broader market for his productions. He took parts in the companies called Cartuna Corp. and Animpression as he produced “the Cartuna Show” , an animated children’s TV show programme and “Animpression, the real time animation device”. Then he produced series called “Tombik and B.B.”, “Magica and the Puzzle Plaza”, “No to Memorize”, “Yuki” , “Mister Simon and Jiggy Jiggy”, “Captain Tripp and Sealyboy”, “Zig’n’Zag” and “Tombik & B.B., Next Episodes”. Besides these series, he started a new project called “Robolab”, an animated 3D future film. In 1999, he formed MARTI, a production house for high tech computer and 2D animation.

Until 2000, he has realised more than 4300 shorts, three features and 32 TV series.

Ali Murat ERKORKMAZ also writes and performs music. He’s got two concertos for the piano, various sonatas for the guitar, banjo and violin. He has hundreds of songs written for the children. “Bekir, Tekir and the Tails” and “the BUGGIES” are his animated rock groups that sing songs, written by himself.

He is the father of Kaan, Pinar and Can.