Fred Seibert, one of my partners at Next New, let a pretty amazing thing slip the other day — that over at his other company, Frederator Studios, he’s making the new Castlevania movie with none other than Warren Ellis and James Jean.

The funny part was how I found out: in one of our regular, free-wheeling meetings where we talk about creative, I was showing him the mini-social network recently set up on Ning for members of Ellis’ message board, The Engine, as an example of an easy way to create basic community features around a show (which, by the way, our friends at JETSET just did) and Fred did a bit of a double take, and said, “Warren Ellis? I’m making a movie with him!”

Apparently Fred had no idea I’m a fan of Ellis’ writing and part of the loose (and large) community of people whom he’s pulled together on places like The Engine and the Bad Signal mailing list. And it wasn’t until Fred blogged about it tonight that I checked out the Castlevania production blog Ellis is writing and saw that James freaking Jean is providing art direction. This is the sort of thing I could completely geek out over, despite the fact that I missed Castlevania as a game growing up — hopefully, by knowing Fred, I’ll get a peek at the process every once in a while.

Drawn by Pain is a new 12-part series on the web, mixing live action and anime, focusing on a girl who can manifest her drawings in the real world. Cool anime swordplay and angsty pubescent drama in the streets of New York, and a pretty darn good trailer… and be sure to check out the video responses fans are posting, which I can’t figure out how to link to directly, but are the first time I’ve seen people using this (Brightcove) feature.

I love that writer/director Jesse Cowell and animator Erica Langworthy just went out and made this themselves; I’m definitely going to be sending this over to our folks at Channel Frederator and Pulp Secret, and if we get a chance to meet the folks behind the show, I’ll post more about it here.