Unless I committed some type of infraction, and then I had to eat at the top of the basement stairs. What do you think of Portland then and Portland now?
Do you plan on moving back someday? Everything you can experience in Los Angeles, you can have a much better version of in Portland—including, very basically, the air you breathe.
Does your mom still live in your childhood home? If not, when was the last time you visited it? I visited my childhood home about two years ago. I was snapping a picture of it, and the owner came out and invited me in. It was pretty much as I remember it, except what was incredibly spacious to a little toddler now seemed so much smaller. The guy let me go down to my favorite place of terror, which was the basement.
It was the scariest place in the house, and it gave me a lot of nightmares. I had to go back down and look at the dark room, and I realized that it was just a dusty—dark—cobwebbed little room in the corner of the basement.
What did your father do before he became a filmmaker? He grew up on a Mennonite farm in Kansas, speaking only German until he went to school. After the war, he was a surfer, filmmaker and ardent amateur basketball player. He perfected a basketball shot that he could shoot—without looking—over his head and consistently make from the top of the key. He made that shot for 30 years. My father was very worried that I was going to starve in Hollywood. He loved the show. He was really pleased with it.
The only thing he said was that Homer could never, ever be mean to Marge. He said that was a rule, which corresponds with the way he treated my mother. He was very nice to her. I thought that was a good note. Early on your focus shifted from Bart to Homer.
When and why? Did it have anything to do with your own aging? The way I wrote them were Homer being angry and Bart being clueless little jerk, just driven in some weird way to cause trouble. I knew from the moment we decided to turn the shorts into a TV show that Homer was going to be the star.
There are more consequences to him being an idiot. The writers on the show have been there for years. Whatever they want to write about, the animators can draw it. Has your son Homer ever created something with you as a character? Would you be open to that? It was cheap and fast to animate with paper cutouts and computer animation, which allowed the show to comment on recent events. Cartoons at the time, requiring months of costly animation, needed to be comparably timeless in their story and humor, but South Park targeted the present.
Thanks to computer animation and the internet, South Park , the shows of Adult Swim, and countless online-only animated shorts, like Homestar Runner , have made animation faster, rougher, and looser. But The Simpsons , to this day, embraces the formula of the past. While an episode of South Park can now be created in a single week by a lean team, The Simpsons has actually added roles and failsafes to its lengthy process. In the world of animated TV, The Simpsons may be the last of its kind, an expensive, high-touch, slow-paced production built on formulas dating back to Walt Disney and Hanna-Barbera.
The Simpsons is now in its 27th season. This is how an episode of the program is made, a detailed, meticulous look at a process that has its bedrock but builds upon it with the tools and lessons of the future.
The rest of the season, the team breaks scripts in the sterile writers' rooms of the Fox studio lot, but the creative process always began in a home or the big conference space of a nearby hotel.
Each writer brings a fleshed-out minute or so episode pitch, which they deliver with gusto to a room full of funny people. They laugh, take notes, then co-creator Matt Groening, executive producer James L. Brooks, and showrunner Al Jean — a portion of the braintrust from the earliest days — provide feedback. In an essay on Splitsider about the writing process of seasons three through eight, former Simpsons writer and producer Bill Oakley described the pleasure of the retreats :.
You had no idea what George Meyer for instance was going to say, and suddenly it was like this fantastic Simpsons episode pouring out of his mouth that you never dreamed of. And it was like, wow, this is where this stuff comes from. A lot of times people worked collaboratively, too. And so everybody would usually come with two, sometimes three ideas. We split because we had enough writers, and we could get more done.
Getting more done with more tools and more hands is the throughline of the modern Simpsons production process. There are more people doing more jobs with more failsafes at a higher cost on The Simpsons than the majority of — if not all — animated television shows. A writer has four to six weeks to complete rewrites. We rewrite it. In those late night television commercials that promise to make everyone a screenwriter, the script is often called the blueprint of our favorite television shows and films, a term that implies an exacting, blessed, top level instruction which the rest of the dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of artists involved obey.
That notion — as anyone who has seen a summer blockbuster or network sitcom can tell — is false. The script is vulnerable, malleable, and subject to constant scrutiny.
There's a blueprint for animated shows, but it comes later. The completed draft is like a guide through the woods, ready to be supplemented, revised, or outright redrawn if need be.
Each Thursday of production, the cast, producers, and writers meet for a table read of the latest script.
Some of the cast attends the table read, others phone into the room. Occasionally, voice actor Chris Edgerly, who has handled "additional voices" for the show since , will fill in for one of the leads. He describes a critical setting in which the script is judged on its creative value, but also under the duress of external forces. A cell phone might go off or an actor might be fighting a cold, and the read's vibe shifts. The table read is my number one unpleasant experience. On the Monday following a table read, the cast performs the voice recording, typically at the studio in LA.
The actors and actresses record on separate tracks, rather than together — a common method for capturing voice-over. As work transitions from script to animation, the episode is offered to a director, who, if they accept, is given ownership of production and animation responsibilities. The director] takes the audio track, supervises the design, the motions, and what we call the acting of the animation, and [supervises] the whole visual aspect of [the episode].
According to veteran Simpsons storyboard artist Luis Escobar, the animation phase of a new season will begin between February and April, depending on the status of scripts and other production variables. Some animators have a hiatus between seasons; others periodically transition directly from one season to the next. This is what it's going to eventually look like. An episode is assigned to a small group of initial storyboard artists at The Simpsons' work space in Southern California.
Alongside the storyboard, an additional squad of designers is assigned props, characters, and backgrounds unique to the episode, all of which undergo a similar series of internal and external drafts and reviews. In early seasons, storyboarding was done entirely on paper. They read the script and perform the voices to a microphone in a studio. While the voice acting is taking place, the animation is being done. Animation, Inc. Klasky Csupo made the animation in the United States and the rest made the animation at Korea.
Artists at the U. The Korea studios then do the rest of the animation, which is more detailed, like the in-between movements the drawings needed between the main drawings made at Film Roman to complete the movements and the painting.
This is all supervised by the directors and animation directors. Since season 1 to season 14 , episodes used traditional cel animation, which was made by drawing the characters in the cel papers and painting them manually.
However, since season 14 , the show uses digital ink-and-paint, which is done by digitalizing the cel papers and coloring them digitally. Sometimes, when faster animation fits better such as planes, flying or rolling elements , 3D animation is used. Since season 20 , the show is broadcast in high-definition, which allows for better detailed images. Talk Contributions Create account Log in. Essential pages. Page Discussion Edit this page History.
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