Shot Talk interview

Rodrigo Huerta just released a giant interview with me as part of his Shot Talk series! We talk about Sublo and Tangy Mustard quite a bit, as well as my work on Bojack, Fester Fish and other stuff. Check it out!

Sublo and Tangy Mustard Halloween Storyboards

Since it's Halloween I'm sharing some process work from last year's Halloween episode.

Here are some of the rough thumbnail storyboards drawn in a little notebook. As you can see, Mr. Wubhamer was intended to be in costume (as Ricky from Trailer Park Boys) in this episode but it ended up being too much extra work since I was trying to get the episode done in time for Halloween.

And here's the full storyboard animatic, drawn in Flash. As you can see 58 seconds in, once I'm done the animatic I start animating directly in the same file. It makes it easier to see if the flow is working right once I'm animating, check hookups and make adjustments to the boards as I go if needed.

Sublo & Tangy Mustard Writing Process

People on Twitter have asked about my writing process for Sublo and Tangy Mustard, so this post will break down each step.

BRAINSTORMING
I always keep an email draft going where I can whip out my phone and jot down and collect any ideas I have for plots, gags, funny bits of conversation I overhear, moments I'd like to see, weird character names, etc. Every few months I send it to myself for posterity and start a new draft. I review the notes from the last few months and sort them into things that might be usable, and group those into different subjects, for instance "Sublo and Tangy Mustard go to a friend's party" or "spooky Halloween stuff" or "gross roommate/apartment stuff" and start thinking about how to order them.

Sometimes in this stage, separate ideas come together. With "Bad Guys" I started off with the idea of having rival mascots they had to fight, and the idea for them to glue Katy to the counter when she fell asleep while Wubhamer was out at a drum circle. The two ideas initially weren't connected but I started to think "what if the reason they have to go fight these bad guys is so that they can fix the mean thing they did to Katy?" That kind of thing has happened a few times.

At every step of the writing process many ideas die (and there's even a couple of episodes I abandoned after we recorded them) but this pre-first draft stage has the most casualties.

OUTLINE
Before actually writing a draft, I write a three-line synopsis using the PCR Method, which stands for "Problem/ Complication/ Resolution." I stole it from this site: http://snobbyrobot.com/2014/08/13/how-to-write-a-web-series-script-using-the-pcr-method/

It's basically a very condensed three-act structure, boiling a story down to 3 bullet points. It's very useful in identifying the three main story beats and showing you if you're missing one. In particular it's good to have an idea of the ending before you start writing. My endings on Sublo and Tangy Mustard tend to be abrupt twists or disappointments. Often the joke is kind of that there isn't a satisfying ending. I think it works fine episode by episode, but taken as a whole it's a repetitive pattern I should probably break out of.


FIRST DRAFT
Once I have the basic story beats mapped out, I start writing, usually in chronological order. Often I'll just dump in chunks of text from those earlier brainstorming notes, to block out what will go where.

The first draft is usually about 150% the length of the final script, and tends to be very shaggy and loose. Then I step away from it for a couple of days, look back and see if there's anything especially exciting to me about the script. This is another point where some episodes stop. If I think there's a germ of a funny solid episode here, I'll go back through it and rewrite and tighten it.


REWRITIING
Each episode is a different length. Since I have no set format, I just make them as long as I feel they should naturally be for the size of the story, but I'm generally in favour of being as concise as possible since it's less animation I have to do. An extra page of script doesn't feel like a lot but it winds up being an extra couple of weeks of work when I'm animating later on.

I set a goal - for example, get this 8-page script down to 5-pages - and see if there's any running gags or minor story thread that can just be cleanly lifted out, which usually removes out about a full page. If I can get that 8 pages down to 6, I'm close enough for the highlighting step.

I don't know if anybody else does this highlighting thing, but it's a really simple step I find helpful in tightening up a script and I recommend trying it. Basically you go through and highlight every joke or interaction that you think is really working well, that you're happy with-- all the solid moments where you think "okay, that part has to stay in." I find it faster and less painful to identify the sections that are good, than to look for what's bad.
 After going through the whole script and highlighting the good stuff, what you're left with is usually a bunch of shaggy connective tissue and maybe some surprising realizations about things that aren't working and might not even need to be in there. Often there are sections with little dialogue exchanges that don't add much, since I try to write dialogue conversationally and naturally. I either trim these down to their bare minimum, or excise these chunks completely if possible. In theory, by the end of the process your whole script will be highlighted and the exact page count you were aiming for.

Here's a highlighted page from an early draft of "Art Show." Yeah, I write without script formatting in OpenOffice and then fix it afterwards. I know you're just supposed to use Final Draft.


Since I write the entire batch of episodes at once before then recording them all together, I have some general practices I apply to all of them as well-- Emma Coats' "22 Rules of Pixar Storytelling" is useful as a reference and easy to find online. I also have my own personal list of things to look out for. To close out the post, here's my "Writing Checklist" file from the current batch of episodes. I hope this was useful, and if you want any additional info let me know either here or on Twitter!

Sublo and Tangy Mustard #11 - Art Show

I released episode 11 of Sublo and Tangy Mustard, "Art Show," last weekend just before going on a trip to Portland. This episode finds Sublo and Tangy Mustard visiting an art gallery opening at Katy's invitation, since some of her paintings are on display. It continues the thread of her artistic aspirations from episode 3, and brings back some familiar faces from episodes 4 and 8 - Katy's friend Ashley and Sublo's roommate Tito Scaggle.

This episode took me a long time, for reasons I won't get into here. So much for the "one a month" schedule I was hoping for when I started this batch, but I never really expected to maintain that pace. At this point what I planned to do over the span of a year will take closer to two years, but that's what happened with the first batch as well.

As the series goes on I want it to have a sense of continuity. The main plot of each episode should be self-contained so new viewers can follow it, but by watching them in order hopefully a larger story emerges, as we see the characters grow, their relationships evolve and the overall world of the show deepens. Many of my favourite shows are short but sweet, with a finite story told through that hybrid approach. Two examples I always think of are the original UK version of The Office, and the first two seasons of Trailer Park Boys. To me they struck a perfect balance of having satisfying standalone stories while rewarding you for watching chronologically and paying attention. Another of my favourite shows, Clone High, is maybe a more relevant example since it's animated instead of doc-style. In all these shows, everything continues to matter and have consequences from week to week.

The characters are the most important part of Sublo and Tangy Mustard but another big element to me is the specificity of the Toronto setting. Since moving from Toronto to work in LA, I'm perpetually homesick and I've come to resent the way LA infects everything in film and TV. Even if a show isn’t explicitly set here, the city and culture are usually an influence because you can't really close yourself off from your surroundings. And a lot of big cartoons are made in LA, so a lot of big cartoons all kind of feel the same.

There are plenty of shows set in LA or New York where they celebrate what makes those places unique, but not very many in Toronto, or Canada in general. And I always value work that has a strong personal point of view. So I want to make Sublo and Tangy Mustard as accurate and real to my experiences in Toronto as possible. I don't want to prioritize personal details over character and comedy, but if there’s a way to make something funny while also being specific and authentic, I prefer to do that.

An example other people have called out is in episode 4-- Sublo and Tangy Mustard go to a house party in the winter where there’s a pile of coats on the couch, and snow boots litter the front hallway. I set it in winter because that's not the default choice you usually see onscreen, and this little detail reminds me of many actual house parties I attended. Hopefully that kind of personal recollection helps to make the show richer. Bringing up The Office and Trailer Park Boys again, I always loved the regional authenticity in those shows, where the filmmakers never think twice about just portraying their world as it actually is, and you wind up with a lot of neat flavour you might not get with a fictional or more generic setting. And even if you don’t get a reference, you can tell what it means in context and you walk away with a larger cultural knowledge.


...Anyway that's all pretty lofty for a rinky-dink internet cartoon, but it's some of the stuff I think about while making it.

Sublo & Tangy Mustard #10 - Battlefield

Breaking the record for Shortest Episode Ever, here's Sublo & Tangy Mustard #10 - Battlefield!

In which Sublo can't handle the brutality of war, and Tangy Mustard reigns victorious.

I love Simon Hanselmann's Megg and Mogg comics, and one of the things that makes reading the big collections fun is you never know whether the next story is going to be two pages or ten pages. I like that since I'm doing these cartoons on my own, there are no rules on length, and so I was inspired to make a few mini-episodes for this batch as filler in between the long ones. I thought about doing mini-comics as stopgaps instead, but didn't get around to it... Maybe next batch. Anyway this is the shortest one for now, and probably the only one other than maybe #5 (Opposites) that I really had trouble calling an 'episode'. Still, I hope it was fun!

Studio Ghibli's early 90s "modern" era

I wish Studio Ghibli had done more films with contemporary settings. Obviously they're known for doing fantasy really well, and I would never argue that they don't deserve that reputation, but my favourite Ghibli era is that window in the early 90's when they dabbled in more down-to-earth 'modern day' stories -- mainly Whisper of the Heart, Only Yesterday and Ocean Waves. It was probably the peak of their efforts to become a well-rounded studio instead of just being Hayao Miyazaki's backing band -- it's when they started hiring people as full-time employees rather than freelancers for project-specific short-term contracts, and tried to nurture younger talent. Before that they weren't really financially established enough to risk giving the reins to less experienced staff, and afterwards they increasingly became the "Miyazaki-brand fantasy factory" especially once that brought them a bigger audience in the rest of the world. Not that I can blame them-- I don't know if any of Takahata's movies ever made a profit. But artistically I think Ghibli's 'B-movies' are some of their most interesting films.

[EDIT:
I just learned Pom Poko was the number one movie in Japan of 1994, and the Japanese submission for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. So Takahata didn't always flop financially!]


None of them are directed by Miyazaki, so they're less publicized and consequently I didn't get around to seeing them until after I'd gone through the "main" Ghibli canon. Miyazaki's fantasies are so synonymous with Ghibli that the rest of the catalogue almost feels like the work of a different studio. I wish people were more aware of these great slice-of-life films, but fantasy always seems to be an easier sell in animation. Of course Pom Poko is nothing if not a fantasy film, but it also has some beautiful scenes of urban life. And Whisper of the Heart was written and storyboarded by Miyazaki, and he was a producer on Only Yesterday, so I don't mean to say he wasn't part of these films too. I think in general he was so critical and resentful of modern culture that he avoided focusing on it in most of his work though.

Anyway, this whole post was just an excuse to share some frames I like from Pom Poko. Enjoy!

 

 

Sublo & Tangy Mustard Voice Actor Interviews

When we recorded the current set of episodes for Sublo and Tangy Mustard back in the summer, I filmed quick interviews with as much of the cast as I could. I thought it would be cool for viewers to get to see behind the mascot suits!

Interviewed here are Ryan Long (Sublo), Kevin Doan (Tangy Mustard), Heather Mazhar (Katy), Phylicia Fuentes (Vanessica and other voices), Jeremy Polgar (Chick-Chick in episode 9) and Moises "Mocherz" Jimenez (Night Shift Charlie and other voices).

S&TM#9 "Bad Guys" Backgrounds

Here are some backgrounds I did for the latest episode of Sublo & Tangy Mustard, "Bad Guys." As usual for the show, I drew them in Flash so I could follow and tweak the line art while animating, and coloured the flats in before exporting to Photoshop to add some colour variation, texture and painterly effects.

 

 

And here are a couple of in-progress images.

Sublo & Tangy Mustard #9 - Bad Guys

So much for 'monthly episodes!' Well anyway, here's the latest Sublo & Tangy Mustard episode, "Bad Guys" in which the boys must enter enemy territory to redeem themselves after causing trouble for Katy.

I have more to say about this one but this is a busy weekend (for starters it's my girlfriend's birthday) so it'll have to wait!