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Livin’ With Livin’ With Steve – Part 2 – Bakin’ With Steve

I wrote a lot about Episode #1 of Livin’ With Steve a few weeks ago, now onward to the second instalment of this smash hit Livin’ With Steve franchise. This week I’ll be talking about the second episode Bakin’ With Steve. This is actually one of my favourite episodes, I like the simple story and visually I think it is one of the more appealing episodes. It’s not without it’s problems though, which I will go into soon. First I’ll talk about where the idea came from.

When we finished making the Livin’ With Steve pilot episode, we put together a 13 episode series bible in a very short amount of time. I wont go into the specifics for why this happened, but the series bible took all night to put together and we had to pitch as many ideas for episodes as we possibly could in a short amount of time. The conversations would literally go like this.

JONNY: “Ummm, what if Nate gets a pet flamingo.”

LEVI: “Nah.”

JONNY: “What if Nate throws a bake sale?”

LEVI: “BRILLIANT!”

That is how the premise of this episode came into being. It wasn’t until I saw Sweeny Todd when the idea for this episode was really developed properly.

The Plot

I thought Nate unwittingly grinding people up and serving them as pies was a funny idea. I still do. Here is where I think we went wrong with the episode, and in some ways with many elements of the series. At its core Livin’ With Steve is a very dark idea. The whole point of the show is that it starts off light hearted and fun and then, as each episode progresses, we reveal Nate obliviousness is a scary fabrication he has invented to cope with his depressing reality. We show that there is a screw loose in Nate and we slowly uncover the depths of his insanity. In my opinion, Livin’ With Steve never really pulled off the darkness it was supposed to. What really would have made this episode is more disgusting shots of Nate cutting people up and making them into pies, pushing corpses through a meat grinder, stirring a big disgusting pot of human remains (this one sort of made it in). All while thinking (impossibly) that he is having a lovely bake sale with his best bud. Each episode should have had that childlike innocence mixed with a horrible darkness beneath it.

The idea that the pies were infected was another idea I thought of. This was more of an idea to forward the plot of the episode and the whole series. The story of season #1 was always meant to have the zombie virus spreading through town. I wanted it to be Nate’s fault that it happened though. His obliviousness completely destroys the life of those around him and has almost no consequences to his own life. This episode very nearly achieved this. This is another episode where I underestimated how confusing the plot idea is. Often when we were writing episodes I insisted that each plot had to have something slight askew about it. It’s not a tired old plot device (like a bake sale). It has a twist on it. Almost like it is making fun of those contrived sitcom type stories. However, to make that apparent in this episode you have to establish several premises.

1. Nate has a bake sale.

2. Steve kills someone,

3. Nate makes that person into pie meat,

4. Nate feeds the infected pies to customers,

5. The customers become zombies,

6. The zombie customers crave human flesh,

7. Nate is making pies that are made from human flesh.

8. Nate has to find more human flesh to feed the zombies so they don’t eat him (and Steve).

THAT is what this episode should have been. It has to take a series of steps to go from the boring premise of ‘Bake Sale’ to the dark premise of ‘Nate finding human flesh to feed to a horde of zombies.’ The problem is there are too many steps between these two premises to cover in our run time of 2 minutes (I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t blame the run time). Instead, the episode is like this

1. Nate has a bake sale.

2. Steve kills someone,

3. Nate makes that person into pie meat,

4. Nate feeds the infected pies to customers,

5. The customers become zombies,

6. The zombie customers crave human flesh,

7. Nate runs out of meat.

It never reaches that level of darkness that we should have pushed for. In retrospect the episode should have gone like this:

1. Nate has a bake sale.

2. Steve somehow infects the pie batch.

3. Nate feeds the infected pies to customers,

4. The customers become zombies,

5. The Zombie customers starting maiming and killing people in front of Nate.

6. Nate is makes pies that are made from human flesh to keeps the zombies happy.

7. Nate has to find more human flesh, doesn’t bother with pies anymore, to feed the zombies so they don’t eat him (and Steve).

Ta-da! We have a transformed the premise completely. Actually, I’m still not convinced the run time of each episode allows us to establish bait and switches of each episodes premise. We tried to cover as much of the plot as we could in the pie making montage, which was sort of effective. We would still have to have a resolution to the premise. This episode would have been great with a 5 minute run time.

Now what was I talking about before this complicated tangent? Oh yes where the episode idea came from. The whole episode plot was formed so I could include one joke that eventually got cut. It went something like this;

NATE: “Wow Steve! We’re selling pies with a mysterious meat in order to pay our rent; this is just like that popular musical!”

STEVE: [GROANS]

NATE: “Yeah, it’s exactly like R.E.N.T”

Not the best joke. It got cut for a good reason.

Let’s talk about this episodes place in the arc of Livin’ With Steve. Last time I talked about the arc of the series and how the threat was that Nate and Steve would be evicted from their home. This is the episode that really sets that up as a possibility, when we introduce their angry landlord Mr Rhodes. Mr Rhodes was originally a once of character written for the episode that became Kitten Sittin’ With Steve (which I will cover in 2 weeks). On top of having a stand alone plot to the episode, this episode introduced the idea that Nate and Steve can’t afford to pay their rent and their landlord would be only too happy to evict them. This was supposed to be a running problem in the series. The reason Nate and Steve take jobs Acting, Cat Sitting, Burger Making is to pay their rent, but I don’t think this is very obvious. I heard and interview with Tim Hideker and Eric Wareheim (who would go on to make Tim and Eric: Awesome Show, Great Job! and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie) and Bob Odenkirk (of Mr. Show) on the A Special Thing Podcast where they all spoke about the production of a show called Tom Goes to the Mayor.

Bob Odenkirk: “When we started this [Tom Goes to the Mayor] I argued with you guys a couple of times about how you kinda have to do the same thing in every episode, because you right away wanted to trash the format. Which is Tom goes to the Mayor and suggests something. But I think in this new season you found an amazing mix of sticking to that format enough that it’s a show, that it has this form. And then these episodes that either start there and veer off, or don’t start there and it doesn’t feel like they overwhelm or that you drop your template for the show.”

Eric Wareheim: “I think we started to embrace the idea of, coming back to that, the simple idea that Tom goes to the Mayor. … We started to really appreciate what that little moment is every single time.”

…

Bob Odenkirk: “David and I, when we started Mr Show, we didn’t come out and say hello, and we didn’t want to do it! Burnie Billstein, my manager, said “You have to do it. You have to do one thing at the top of the show that’s the same.” Python had the It’s Guy. Because otherwise every week it is just Craziness and you don’t know where it starts or ends.”

Excerpt from The ‘AST Radio’ Podcast,
Episode: ‘Bob Odenkirk, Tim and Eric’
Uploaded: Fri, 2 June 2006

If we made all 13 episodes, we had many other plots (We had to cut one where Nate and Steve start a Death Metal Band with Steve as the lead singer) that reinforced the idea that they need money. Because there are only 4 ‘job episodes’ in a 7 episode series, the ‘let’s make money to pay the rent’ premise never seems constant. Really this is one of the biggest problems I have with the narrative of the whole series. It doesn’t feel like there is consistency or a running plot because we tried to do both.

I often wonder if this season would have been better without a running arc, if each episode could just stand on it’s own legs as something people can enjoy. I’m reminded of another series that was made along side ours entitled Mollusks: The Animated Series. It’s a very well written series and what makes it so effective is that there is only one plot. It’s like a short film that happens to be cut into episodes. Shaaark! has a different approach where there is no series arc (except for the love interest introduced in the first episode) but it has the consistent premise established in the introduction “A Shark, named Jacques, pronounced Shar, determined to inspire his fellow apex predators, to ride above their instincts and become more than mindless killing machines”. In Livin’ With Steve we tried to do both but the consistency is never established because nearly every episode starts off in a completely new setting.

Trivia and References

Australian viewers may recognise the pie customer’s likeness to Matt Preston, one of the judges from the Australian Master Chef. We actually had the real Matt Preston lined up to voice himself which sadly never came into fruition due to his busy schedule and our tight deadline.

Viewers of Australian Master Chef might notice the quick reference to a famous incident that happened on the television series. I love this moment in television. I could write a whole post about it. I will just say it’s the exact moment that everybody realised the loose definition of ‘Reality’ in Reality TV. It’s hilarious. If Livin’ With Steve is proof of anything it’s that I love corny jokes, and this is the corniest thing that has ever happened.

This episode could really just serve as a big set up to Episode #4. Because Mr. Rhodes is an angry old man sort of character we thought it would be funny if he is desperately attached to his cat. Then we thought it would be even funnier if he collects cat things the way an old lady would. Then we pushed it further and decided that it would be funnier if he was a closeted gay man but it never really comes up in the story. It’s just a little fact about his character which the audience can pick up on or ask questions about. He lives his own bizarre life; the only thing we get ever know about it is what Nate and Steve see. Thinking about it now, I think what I found so appealing about this idea is that it ties into Nate’s obliviousness. His landlord is a bit strange and Nate could probably ask a lot of questions about his lifestyle but he really just doesn’t care. I’ll talk more about Mr. Rhodes in Episode #4. My point is that we crammed as much cat stuff Mr. Rhodes shots as we possibly could.

Note Mr. Rhodes cat telephone and the picture on the wall behind him. We has an idea that instead of getting married, Mr. Rhodes consideres himself married to his cat.

Mr. Rhodes has a little Cat Bobble head on the interior of his car.

Finally there is the song ‘Sexy Disco Woman’ composed by Cam Blokland, who did almost all of the music for Livin’ With Steve. I asked him to write the most flamboyant funk/disco song he possibly could. He said he knew what I wanted nearly right away, made this song and I loved it. I want to release the full 2 minute version online one day. I liked it so much I had to put it in the outro credits. Another fun fact about Mr. Rhodes is that he is named after the character of the same name in George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead.

The photo montage was also a reference to the original Dawn of the Dead soundtrack. Romero uses a track entiteld ‘The Gonk’ which we gave to Cam to try and make a sound-a-like for. It’s a very subtle reference that nobody will ever pick up on.

That really all I want to say about this episode. I know it sounds like I’m shitting all over my own work when I look at these. I’m very proud of them and this really is one of my favourites. I feel like the only way to improve is to be as critical as possible of your own work. In the future I am going to try and write one of these BEFORE I write the script.

Anyway. I’ll write up Episode #3 (another favourite of mine) next week.

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Categories 2D/Traditional/Flash, Animation, Film Reviews, Horror, Livin' With Steve, Original Film

Zombie Train – Nitrogods Music Video

19 Mar

While I was working on Livin’ With Steve I was contacted by German metal band The Nitrogods to create a video clip for their new album. They sent me the song ‘Zombie Train’ and I loved it. They only had a small budget and they needed the video clip quite quickly. We took the job because we loved the song, we made it a passion project. This is the first production I have been involved in where I had to plan and produce the final product in a little over a month. My friend Jarrod Prince and I listened to the song a few times and had a big brainstorming session. Eventually this story about an underground train that travels through hell emerged. Sort of like Midnight Meat Train.

I think the real challenge of this production was to get it done on time. I know that sounds really obvious, but everything about the project- the story, the style, the shots- had to be carefully planned to ensue the video could be made in a month. The Nitrogods had an album launch on the 23rd of Feburary so we wanted to have the video clip complete and sent to them before then.

My goal of this video clip was to tell a short story without animating hundreds of shots. The song Zombie Train goes for 4 minutes and we had a crew of 3 (for the majority of the production). We used the music video for Rob Zombies American Witch as a reference. A video clip that, admittedly, is not the best in the world, but it does succeed in telling a story that fits the tone of the song, mostly through stills. We decided for our video clip most of the movement would be completed using After Effects instead of Flash. We hoped that interesting shots and visuals would replace the need for lengthy animated shots and save us time.

Another goal of mine was to use more interesting shots. The majority of Livin’ With Steve used the same flat angles to avoid having to redraw the characters too many times or have too many backgrounds (which you can read about here). Nothing is more boring than an animation with flat uninteresting angles. Animation gives you the freedom to be very creative with camera work and it feels like a missed opportunity not to take advantage of this freedom. To break this habit I tried to set out each shot with a clear foreground and background so it doesn’t feel like it takes place in a flat world. I wanted each shot to feel 3 dimensional, like it had real depth. Really the stand out part of the video is the backgrounds which Jarrod made. They make each shot look great (particularly the final shot) and allowed us to achieve the depth I wanted each shot to have.

Because this video takes place in two worlds (and because of the twist at the end) we wanted the train station world to have a dull blue and grey palette and the Zombie world to be red and black. I should have spent a little more time grading some of the shots properly as some are WAY TOO RED but for the most part I think it worked out. We also made the video grind house projector style to fit the music.

“Using all the modern technology and correcting every little mistake takes away from the edge and roughness that makes Rock´n Roll what it is.”
- From www.Nitrogods.de

To match the Nitrogod’s music, we decided the video clip itself should also be a gritty rough style of film making. The whole thing is designed to look hand shot, an effect we had played with before in Livin’ With Steve. We expanded on it slightly though.

To achieve a more realistic shaky cam look we exported the backgrounds, characters and foreground on different layers, put them onto 3D planes in After Effects and made a 3D Camera with a Wiggler on it. This made the camera move as if it was being held by a hand and allowed us to achieve a realistic hierarchy with our shots.

I could keep talking about behind the scenes stuff but I’m sure it’s boring. Next time I do a project like this I’m going to make sure we don’t start animation until we have the Animatic 100% locked down. The camera crosses the line a few times. Some shots are different to what I wanted them to look like but I didn’t go back and change them. The look and volumes of characters are not consistent and the lack of animation is painfully obvious in some shots. Most of these things were unavoidable due to the high pressure nature of the production but with a little extra love, this video clip probably would have been far better. The temptation to just keep the ball rolling on projects is really strong, often you can’t give the shots the love they deserve which is a shame. Pre-Production is so important though, and will fix so many issues before they even happen. An Animatic will allow you to see the story of the production much clearer. This is more a message for me than for you.

Lastly here are the original drawings I did of the band.

More stuff coming the the blog soon!

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Categories 2D/Traditional/Flash, Animation, Horror, Original Film

Livin’ With Livin’ With Steve – Part 1 – Scammin’ With Steve

26 Feb

The web series I directed/produced/wrote/animated on Livin’ with Steve has been out for over a month now. It’s been doing modestly well online and I am yet to post any episodes to my blog. I thought it would be a good exercise to post each episode in a separate blog entry and then write about the making of it, any things I would have liked to have done better, point out any references. This is really to help myself improve in direction and writing and not for people to read unless they are REALLY INTERESTED. I got the idea from the Clone High website. I was obsessed with that show and loved reading about all the little secrets and things that got cut etc.

Originally this episode was going to be about Nate and Steve getting their car repaired. Nate accidentally destroys an expensive car and leaves Steve to calm down the angry mechanic. However we had to drop the idea, which I sort of regret because the script was very funny. Jonny and I actually wrote a script for this episode (which we called Fixin’ With Steve) straight after we finished the pilot episode, nearly a year before the series went into production. In the end I decided that Fixin’ With Steve didn’t fit with the arc we wanted for the series (I’ll go into this more in later episodes.) This is the first episode of Livin’ With Steve and I wanted it to establish a few things as quickly as possible;
1. Nate and Steve’s house – We needed to set up this for a few reasons. Several episodes take place in the house and ‘threat’ of the series was supposed to be Nate and Steve being evicted. Truthfully, I feel like that threat got lost in the writing which is unfortunate. Regardless I thought we should establish Nate and Steve’s home quickly.

2. Nate and Steve’s financial situation- Jonny came up with an idea was brilliant for this episode. Nate and Steve have been getting welfare checks under the guise that Steve (who remember; is a zombie) is mentally ill. Nate, who thinks Steve is perfectly normal, believes this to be some kind of scam and encourages Steve to ‘pretend’ to be sick while a series of tests are done on him. The doctor would slowly learn that there is something horribly wrong with Steve and get more and more worried. Nate would see this and become cocky and more convinced that his plan is working. The idea was brilliant but in my opinion we didn’t do it much justice, here is why. This idea requires a LOT of set up. You already need to know that Steve is a zombie and Nate is an idiot for the idea to make any sense. The comedy would come from Nate’s reactions to the doctor which doesn’t really happen. Really this should have been a later episode where the premise of the series has already been firmly established.

3. That Steve is a zombie – Very important plot point. I think we pulled this one off.

So you might be reading this and wondering if I am being to harsh on the episode. I do like this episode a lot. I’m actually proud of all the episodes but I know how I would do it differently next time. I know a bad workman blames his tools and I’m sure a bad film maker blames his budget. But it was the budgets fault. No. The problem is the run time of each episode (which was controlled due to our small budget). Originally each script was three pages and we established far more with. Three pages is 3 minutes of animation though and due to our small budget and crew we had to cut out a page from each script to trim it each episode to 2 minutes. This was a shame because a lot of really funny idea’s were lost. Some episodes actually got better from this. Bakin’ With Steve and Surviving with Steve actually became much better scripts. But the episodes with lots of layers to the twists became too muddied and confusing when they were trimmed down so we had to make them simpler. I think in the future I will try and cut pages out of scenes just to see if they still work. It really helps you realise what is necessary and what isn’t.

Let’s talk about references. One thing I wanted to do very early on was pack Livin’ With Steve with as many references to zombie and horror films as possible. This was a cartoon that was made for the horror community. I always get tremendous pleasure watching a film and picking up on references to other movies and media and I thought other people would to. I think of it as a nerdy version of Eye Spy.

So right away the second shot is a Ren and Stimpy homage. This shot was originally going to be the shot of Nate and Steve on the couch. Tim had the idea that, because it’s a show about zombies, it should start off a little more interesting than that. He was absolutely right. I wish I didn’t include that establish shot of the house though. The fun of the shot from inside is that you don’t know what you are looking at until the reveal in the next shot. The establishing shot before hand kind of ruins any intrigue it might have had. We should have cut to the exterior later when the doctor screams to establish what the exterior of the house looks like. The shot is kind of a reference to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It used it as a reference to get the shot but it’s not a direct reference. I haven’t actually seen the whole film so I feel weird calling it a reference.

Ren and Stimpy Brain Shot

Livin' With Steve Brain Shot

The next reference is that the doctor is called Doctor West. He is named after Herbert West from the Re-Animator movies and also from that H.P. Lovecraft story if you want to be nerdy about it. There is also some small things on the clipboard which I will explain. Originally we tinkered with the idea of making Dr West a paedophile. I know. Look. Here’s the thing; all the characters Steve kills have to be more evil than Steve. This was a rule we set up. If we wanted Nate and Steve to be likable they had to always be the victims of people around them. I always felt like Dr West was a perfectly upstanding citizen who was only doing his job. He is clearly irritated by Nate but that hardly seems like a reason to be killed. We wondered if we could add some weird subtext to his character where he is a paedophile. We toyed with this idea for two days and dropped it because it didn’t with the tone of the series, plus we had already written the script and shoehorning it in wouldn’t really work. So we had a pretty disgusting logo for Doctor West which we changed. If you look below you can see the new logo is a man holding a baby by the legs and shaking money out of him. I realise in retrospect that Dr West job is really unclear. He is supposed to work for the government to give out disability payments. It’s a bit confusing.

The symptoms are a reference to Return of the Living Dead, where the ambulance driver diagnoses the infected with those exact symptoms.

Hey what’s that on Nate’s wallet at the end? It looks like a face!

It is the Nerconomicon from Evil Dead.

That’s really all I have to say about this episode. I’ll write about Episode #2 Bakin’ With Steve, next week.

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Categories 2D/Traditional/Flash, Animation, Film Reviews, Horror, Livin' With Steve, Original Film

International Women’s Day Poster 2012

3 Feb

I created this poster for this year’s International Women’s Day. The children’s book style was suggested to me by one of my friends. The theme of the year is Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures, so I thought it fit the theme well.

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Categories Design

Ira Glass – Reinventing Radio

15 Jan

Today I spontaneously decided to pay $45.00 that I probably can’t afford to see broadcaster and public speaker Ira Glass do a presentation entitled Re-Inventing Radio. Ira Glass is the host of popular radio show/podcast This American Life, a show I had a brief love affair with last year. The show usually has a theme and features three real stories that coincide to that topic.

Ira’s approach to news stories is very unique. His performance was an explanation on what makes This American Life a different approach to journalism, hence Re-inventing Radio. One example Ira gave was how a normal radio news bulletin might present a story. They might use dramatic music (He compared it to the background music of Battle Star Galactica). They approach a story with the idea that, “What you are about to hear is very important”. It’s gravely serious to the point, as Ira pointed out, it seems like they are afraid they will not be taken seriously.

This American Life treats stories differently. The interviewer is able to respond and talk to the interviewee. They don’t simply respond with follow up questions, they emotionally respond to an interview or situation, where traditionally most broadcasters avoid showing emotion or engaging with a story in a personal way.

What I found most engaging about Ira’s presentation (I’m almost tempted to call it a lecture) was his description of story. Ira has an incredible attention to what makes a story appealing and the importance of story in the world today. He said a few things that I’d like to remember them the next time I am writing.

In a story it should always feel like something is about to happen. It should always feel like it is going somewhere and something is developing. Story isn’t about logic, or reason it’s about motion. Something is happening, which leads to something else happening, which leads to something else etc. You can feel the forward motion. Every story is like a detective story. Questions should constantly be raised along the way. Some are small, some are big. A stories resolution comes from providing answers to these questions.

The fist thing that makes a good story is the action (or the forward motion), the second is know what it is about. What is it in this story we are relating to? Narrative is a back door into the brains of people. Reason and argument doesn’t hold sway. People should be able to connect to it on an emotional level. What is it?

I don’t have much more to say about the show. Ira is a very engaging speaker. He’s also very inspiring. I was talking to the group I went to the show with and we all felt the same urge to go home and write something. It was probably worth that $45.00 bucks, but I guess I’ll know for sure when I try to buy petrol and food this week.

My new year’s resolution is to write more. Something once a week. This doesn’t really mean more blog entries, but it won’t mean any less blog entries.