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.

Tags: 2d, Adelaide, Adelaide Zombie Walk, Animation, australia, Behind the Scenes, Blood, cartoon, Comedy, Film, Horror, Horror Movie, Livin' With Steve, Living With Steve, Making of, pilot episode, web series, Zombie