We had a writer's summit where for 2 weeks we had Weird Al, Emo Phillips, Maja Da Oust, Jason Louv, Johnny Pemberton, Brendon Walsh (Gawd I hope i'm not forgetting someone), come up with ways the world could end. Then we broke the apocalypses we liked best into beats and "hung" the podcast dialogue on that framework. It was REALLY challenging because too much animated plot distracts from the conversation but if a GIANT ZOMBIE is eating the white house you can't just keep talking about weed so we had to figure out ways to pin the dialogue to the animation using VO we recorded after we had pieced together the animatics enough to know where it needed it.
Related posts tagged 'Making a show'
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Related posts tagged 'Making a show'
Technically the debacle started before season 4 because one of the primary things I had intended to do was have Jeff Winger reunite with his Dad in season 3. The beginning of my firing, I think, was when I got a call from one of the compulsively unenjoyable personalities at NBC who just wanted to let me know that he had just had lunch with someone "very, very high up" [by the way, this is the kind of shit I will not miss about network television, why are you WITHHOLDING THE NAME of someone you're about to give me a note from] that was "concerned" because they had recently seen a little bit of Community and it had been Joel McHale attacking the study room table with an axe and so this anonymo...
So cool people talking about this kind of stuff and having all the conversations about race, etc. since the show premiered. As far as Rachel (and other love interests too), we didn't set out to cast someone white and auditioned people of all ethnic backgrounds, and wanted to cast the person I seemed to have the best chemistry with to sell this huge relationship arc. In the end, Noel blew us away. And, for the writing, I'm pulling a lot from my own real current relationship, which is with a "white" person - so we can do interesting scenes like the scene in 109 (Mornings) about the parents (which many South East Asians have told me really resonated with them and they'd never seen an interracia...
Dr. Jan Adams walked off the show, Mel Brooks jumped on top of the desk and sang a song called "Dancing in the Dark" saying it was how old jews die, they jump on the desk, they can't hit the high note, and they die. Or when I asked Heather Mills to show me what an artificial leg looked like, and she took it off. That was a great moment.
It was very taxing, because we didn't get to move around a lot, and we would work 15, 16 hours a day sometimes, and right into early Sunday morning. So it was not easy work. I can tell ya. It's tough to cover 8 people around a table without moving the camera, moving the camera, moving the lights, it takes FOREVER, and you have to do it over, and over, and make it look fresh, so if people realized that - it can be very taxing and very tough work.
The pros and cons of live action and animation are pretty much what you'd expect: in live action, you can shoot the same scene from a thousand angles for a thousand takes and figure out how to assemble the scene in "post," but if you realize that a character should have been looking a different direction or wearing a different kind of hat, you're either CGing their eyeballs or you're screwed. In animation, you can make eyeballs and hats change until the cows come home, but on the other hand, your script has to be darn near finished before the first actor even records their first line. The funny thing to me is that in live action, you can type "a room full of people" and nobody will have a he...
As mean as that was, I thought that was incredibly poetic for a guy like him. Very unexpected. But I guess there are many sides to all of us.
Hannibal and I have very different approaches. I write stuff beforehand; he drifts in and out of consciousness.
90% improvised and about 10% scripted. we sort of write out a storyline, and then we do our own dialogue.
Intuition mostly. I trust the writers I work with and my own instincts. If we all feel like something is hilarious or fresh, I have to assume it is. And those are the things that tend to be well received.
One of the great things about the internet - beyond the amazing reddit AMA experience - is that you can research any voice you want, just by going to YouTube. Which was very helpful in figuring out the Canadian accent, the Pennsylvanian accent, C-Czar (I watched a lot of Riff Raff to get that accent down).
"The Ben Stiller Show" was a crazy ton of fun. In fact, when it ended I had the very conscious thought that it was the most fun I would or could ever have in showbiz and my goal from that point on would be to try to replicate it. "Mr. Show" could have been more fun if I hadn't been such a tight-ass, but we still had a ton of laughs.
The pin really did slip from my fingers and catch on my sweater. That was not something that was planned. But what we didn't show in the episode is that I had a second backup pin taped behind my ear with a band aid (skin color so you couldn't really see it). In practicing, the pin was really easy to drop, so I wanted a backup. If the pin hit the ground, I would have gone for my backup pin.
The audition process for Drake and Josh was very extensive. Three auditions and a screen test. I KID! I auditioned at the Nickelodeon Studios and like every actor's first onscreen role, I shared a scene with a watermelon lamp that my character built for a science fair.
sort of answered above, but PFT and i discussed, and i really wanted the show not to be so impenetrable, you know? Like, this is the first time people are listening, so why can't I show them the difficulty involved in putting together this show, so they can appreciate it? It's like how Bernie Brillstein advised bob and david to come out as themselves at the top of Mr. Show - then people could appreciate how they were doing all the characters.
The Christmas episode where Michael asked Kevin to sit on his lap, and Steve had to pretend to be crushed under his weight. I think I'm laughing on camera.
Question: Peter and Nancy are my favorite characters on the show. What was the inspiration for Peter's pasta addiction and will they go anymore adventures like starting a B&B??
Answer: That came from a real dinner that Carrie and I had in Los Angeles. And we were looking at the menu, and we just thought "well obviously we can't order pasta, so I guess we have to order this." So we started talking about, why do we have to avoid pasta so much? So it was more that we were weighing the difference between the difference between enjoying life and really living, or ordering salmon.
I think the best Seinfeld episode idea I ever contributed was that George pretending to be a marine biologist would find Kramer's golf ball in the blowhole of the whale. Believe it or not, we were doing both of those stories without seeing any connection that Kramer was gonna hit golf balls at the beach, and George was gonna be pretending to be a marine biologist. And it was in the middle of the week that it suddenly hit me of a way to connect the two stories.
So, I think that's probably the best joke I ever thought of on the series. But, I love when people say "regift" or "giddyup", or "yadda yadda". The real and spectacular...I was a very big fan of the show.
The situation certainly is. Half my family growing up were carers of some sort, mostly retirement homes (stroke, Alzheimers), and Derek is like my fictional superhero of an everyday gentle outsider. I suppose they're all little fables about kindness. And possibly, a love letter to my lovely, poor and humble family growing up.
the poker scene in season 1 was very written but then i let the guys go off and fuck around. i used some of that. I don't generally let people improvise though. That works for shows where you have two cameras that are just sort of following the action. i shoot my show like a movie and it would be all fucked up if folks just said things.
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