boringoldraphael:

None of the characters are directly based on people I know, but Todd has gradually turned into a much stupider version of my good friend Kevin, who is always getting into ridiculous adventures and always has a good attitude no matter what. Kevin used to live in Pasadena in this gigantic mansion that was owned by a woman who I’m not even sure how he met. Anyway, one day the woman asked Kevin if he would drive her daughter to school, and he said sure because he figured since he was living there for free it was the least he could do. It turned out “school” was college on the east coast and Kevin had to drive her daughter across the country.

Diane is named after a girl I went to high school with. The last time I saw her was this big party the school threw our class after graduation. There was a table set up at the party with little cards and a pen. The idea was you could write a note to yourself as a high school graduate and then all the notes would be put in a box and redistributed at our ten-year reunion. (I don’t know if this actually happened or not, because I did not go to my high school’s ten-year reunion.) For some reason, Diane and I agreed to write notes to each other. I don’t remember what I wrote on her note — I’m sure it was something stupid (“What’s the future like? Are there flying cars?”) — but I remember her entire note to me. It said: “ARE YOU HAPPY?”

I remember being terrified to get that note in ten years, probably because I thought I already knew the answer, but I was also struck by how simple and straightforward the question was, while also being about so much. The moment really stuck with me, and I thought about it a lot while working on this show, so I named a character after her. The Diane of BoJack Horseman isn’t really based on the Diane I went to high school with in any real way, but it’s possible she might be based on that note.

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT BOJACK HORSEMAN.

boringoldraphael:

Hello! I am going to answer your question, and then I am going to talk a little bit about GENDER IN COMEDY, because this is my tumblr and I can talk about whatever I want!

The vast vast vast majority of the animal jokes on BoJack Horseman (specifically the visual gags) come from our brilliant supervising director Mike Hollingsworth (stufffedanimals on tumblr) and his team. Occasionally, we’ll write a joke like that into the script but I can promise you that your top ten favorite animal gags of the season came from the art and animation side of the show, not the writers room. Usually it happens more the second way you described— to take a couple examples from season 2, “Okay, we need to fill this hospital waiting room, what kind of animals would be in here?” or “Okay, we need some extras for this studio backlot, what would they be wearing?”

I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that the croc wearing crocs came from our head designer lisahanawalt. Lisa is in charge of all the character designs, so most of the clothing you see on the show comes straight from her brain. (One of the many things I love about working with Lisa is that T-Shirts With Dumb Things Written On Them sits squarely in the center of our Venn diagram of interests.)

NOW, it struck me that you referred to the craft services crocodile as a “he” in your question. The character, voiced by kulap Vilaysack, is a woman.

It’s possible that that was just a typo on your part, but I’m going to assume that it wasn’t because it helps me pivot into something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year, which is the tendency for comedy writers, and audiences, and writers, and audiences (because it’s a cycle) to view comedy characters as inherently male, unless there is something specifically female about them. (I would guess this is mostly a problem for male comedy writers and audiences, but not exclusively.)

Here’s an example from my own life: In one of the episodes from the first season (I think it’s 109), our storyboard artists drew a gag where a big droopy dog is standing on a street corner next to a businessman and the wind from a passing car blows the dog’s tongue and slobber onto the man’s face. When Lisa designed the characters she made both the dog and the businessperson women.

My first gut reaction to the designs was, “This feels weird.” I said to Lisa, “I feel like these characters should be guys.” She said, “Why?” I thought about it for a little bit, realized I didn’t have a good reason, and went back to her and said, “You’re right, let’s make them ladies.”

I am embarrassed to admit this conversation has happened between Lisa and me multiple times, about multiple characters.

The thinking comes from a place that the cleanest version of a joke has as few pieces as possible. For the dog joke, you have the thing where the tongue slobbers all over the businessperson, but if you also have a thing where both of them ladies, then that’s an additional thing and it muddies up the joke. The audience will think, “Why are those characters female? Is that part of the joke?” The underlying assumption there is that the default mode for any character is male, so to make the characters female is an additional detail on top of that. In case I’m not being a hundred percent clear, this thinking is stupid and wrong and self-perpetuating unless you actively work against it, and I’m proud to say I mostly don’t think this way anymore. Sometimes I still do, because this kind of stuff is baked into us by years of consuming media, but usually I’m able (with some help) to take a step back and not think this way, and one of the things I love about working with Lisa is she challenges these instincts in me.

I feel like I can confidently say that this isn’t just a me problem though— this kind of thing is everywhere. The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male.

You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster.

I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT BOJACK HORSEMAN.

boringoldraphael:

Nope!

I definitely watched a lot of “Full House” and TGIF growing up, and I’m sure you can see the influence on “Horsin’ Around” but BoJack himself is not based on any actual celebrity. The idea for BoJack came from two places for me:

1) I’ve been friends with Lisa for a long time and I wanted to work on a project with her. She’d been posting these animal people drawings on Tumblr, so I started brainstorming ideas for shows about animal people. I just looked up the old email thread where I first started talking to Lisa about the idea. Here is another animal people show I came up with, when Lisa told me she was concerned my depressed talking horse show idea was “too sad”:

Spruce Moose in the Juice Caboose

Spruce Moose is a dapper fellow with his finger on the pulse (and he’s also a moose). He works as a bartender in the bar car of a swingin’ locomotive (The Juice Caboose) where he meets all sorts of people and solves their problems. Dig that crazy rhythm, baby, juice, baby, POW.

It’s Cheers! On a train! With a moose!

I feel like that idea mostly came from “What rhymes with moose?” but still I think there’s something there. I remember the idea was that the train was the Slumberland Express where kids go when they’re half asleep but not quite at Dreamville. It’s a calm place with milk and cookies and things, but then in the back there’s this raucous Juice Caboose with this Willy-Wonka-Beetlejuice type Spruce Moose always trying to get kids in trouble. Lisa had the idea that he would have these two sidekick cocktail waitresses called the Spicy Mice. Again, most of this idea was built around rhyming. Anyway, if anyone ever asks me to write a kid’s movie, that’s the first thing I’m pitching.

2) Anyway, the second thing is that I moved out to LA from New York, and I was staying with a friend of a friend of a friend in this tiny closet of a room in this gigantic fancy house in the Hollywood Hills. The people in the house claimed that A) it was the second-highest elevated house in all of Los Angeles, and B) Johnny Depp had once lived there, but I can’t back either of those claims up. (Johnny Depp would be a great Spruce Moose by the way. Could we get him?) I had very few friends at that time and I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be doing, and I started thinking about how living in this beautiful house, basically on top of the world, I had never felt more lonely and isolated. I wanted to write a show about a character that has gotten everything he’s wanted and still can’t find a way to be happy.

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT BOJACK HORSEMAN.

boringoldraphael:

Okay, hello, here we go, how does an episode of BoJack Horseman get written. I’m going to try to be thorough (read: LONG. VERY LONG.) with this answer, because I think some people are going to be interested in the whole process, so sorry if it gets a little boring to people who are not that interested in the whole process. I guess you can always just stop reading at any time. As if you needed my permission.

ANYWAY, let’s take episode 9 from the first season, because I feel like that’s a pretty typical episode in some ways, but also kind of interesting and specific in other ways. By this point in the season we had kind of figured out a process for how an episode gets written. This process was not a given— every show kind of does things their own way, and it took a little trial and error to figure out the correct order of things on BoJack Horseman.

So, backtracking a little: When I pitched the show to Netflix, I pitched the whole season, one through twelve, one episode at a time, and we had that document in the writer’s room, so every episode had a place to start from. Some of those episodes are very close to the original pitch (103 and 105 for example), while some are entirely different (106 was pretty much entirely put together in the room with nothing from the original pitch in the final episode).

For 109, all I had was the Princess Carolyn story. I knew Princess Carolyn, fed up with being at BoJack’s beck and call all the time was going to start dating this guy that was very obviously (to BoJack and nobody else) three kids stacked on top of each other under a trench coat. Everyone would accuse BoJack of being jealous and we’d kind of play with that idea that when your ex starts dating someone new, you don’t get to point out his flaws even if they’re really obvious, because everyone else will assume you’re just still hung up on your ex. The episode would end with BoJack and Vincent finally having a conversation and BoJack would spill his guts to him. That was all we had at the start.

The first part of writing a script is the BRAINSTORMING phase, where we all just kind of spitball and talk about whatever and try to figure out what everybody’s doing in this episode. These conversations are usually pretty free-flowing. We sometimes think about where the characters have been and where they need to go. LIKE, FOR EXAMPLE:

Keep reading

This provides an incredible amount of insight into the writing process of one of the most well written shows out there.

sottapop:

Hallo! Sorry it took me so long to reply. I started a draft and then realized it was too much for one post. Then work of course got in the way.

To be honest, my journey isn’t the best example for how to get into the industry. I was lucky enough to have just enough skill to show up on my college storyboard professor’s radar when he happened to need someone for a project. Everyone at LMU (Loyola Marymount) knew that he hired people from his class, I just didn’t expect to be hired while TAKING his class. He had me come in for a week of freelance on an episode of YJ, I didn’t completely suck, and he brought me in when he had a slot available on another project. To be honest, I don’t actually have a portfolio currently because I’ve just been rolled onto new projects at WB this entire time.

Still, don’t let that story discourage you. I know a lot of successful professionals who’ve gotten in through a variety of ways. (All of you guys should chime in btw: meowmixeightysix chrispalmerart chriscopelandart chrissydelk jenbendraws potatofarmgirl jeandrawsstuff e1n kikimanrique, dimisfit, tannertrue, jakecastorena, etc) 

To avoid writing an entire course on how to get into the industry, I’ll try to simplify it to a couple things. Friends and colleagues please feel free to add onto this or correct me.

Have a portfolio(s) ready NOW

Don’t be like me. Start working on putting together samples of boards you feel best show your skills. I’m not sure what year you are currently, but you should have something you feel comfortable posting online/sending to studios by the end of this term. Once you get something together you can always update it with better samples as you complete them. Creating a portfolio website is the easiest way to get your work out there for people to see. I know whenever I recommend someone to a director for a position they like to get a link that they can look at instantly. I like to recommend e1n‘s portfolio site because it’s easy to view and looks snazzy.

For now you should try to include these for your portfolio:

• Resume with current contact info
  
• 2-3 short stories or sequences (include an acting scene, gag scene, and/or action sequence)
  
• Some figure drawing examples

When I say short sequences, I mean keep it to 1-2 minutes AT MOST. If you have an animatic (a quicktime) put together for any of them include them on the portfolio site. Or you can put up PDF/JPEG pages that someone can easily tab through. Some people do it 1 panel per image or 3 panels per page.

Also keep in mind that the portfolio should cater to the type of show you’re applying for. If you’re trying to get onto an action-adventure project, having an action sequence will help. If you’re applying for something like Looney Tunes, having a sequence that shows you know comedy and that you can act helps.

Network

The best way for people to hear about you is to get your name out there. A lot of people I know get into the industry because they know someone at a studio who can get directors/producers to view their portfolios. Posting your stuff online is one way to do this ( meowmixeightysix got hired through deviantART because someone with hiring power was following her) as well as going to networking events like CTN in Burbank, CA. The nice thing about CTN is that it’s less about catering to fans (like SDCC) and more about networking with professionals. They will have lectures on different topics, portfolio reviews, and more. Getting professionals to review your portfolio will really help you find areas to improve on.

You can also network by taking classes outside of your college. If you’re in the LA area, Concept Design Academy is worth looking into. A lot of currently-working professionals teach the classes that both amateurs and professionals take. It’s a great way to meet people who are already working and to learn from them. The guy who hired me used to teach there as well. They’re actually about to open their fall enrollment so if you’re able to, you should jump on it. They have weekend classes. You can also take classes at the Animation Guild.

As for how to get your portfolio to studios outside of your network, I’m actually the worst person to ask. Again, I was brought in without a portfolio because of my professor who became my director. I suggest maybe start by looking up studios near you and keeping an eye out for job openings. For someone new to the industry, you can apply to storyboard positions or storyboard revisionist/clean-up artist positions. When I was brought in, I started as a revisionist then was bumped up to boards when they thought I was ready. Starting out revising is a great way to learn different styles of story-telling and draftsmanship. You’ll pick up different tricks just by being exposed to different board artists’ work.

I hope this helps for now. Keep asking other professionals for tips! There’s not just ONE way to get into the industry.

And good luck!