♪ The Simpsons ♪
(jaunty instrumental music)
- My name's David Silverman and believe it or not,
I've been here since the very beginning.
I'm what they call consigliere.
So, I give my advice, pointers,
and generally get in the way.
Oh no!
Not a camera crew.
Today, I'm here on behalf of The Hollywood Reporter
to show you something about the process
of how we put an episode together.
Let's watch, shall we?
This is going to be good, it's going to be good.
- All right.
- [Shanti Marlar] At 2:30 today
I'm going to have a phone call with Julius
and we're going to brainstorm about
the cover and see where we're at.
(phone ringing)
- [Shanti] Hi. Shanti Marlar at the Hollywood Reporter
- [Voice Mail] When you have finished
(beep)
- Shanti this is an emergency. It's Julius.
Check your email.
Urgent.
- Okay.
We are shipping this cover on Monday.
It is currently Thursday
and we're just now discussing possibly a new cover approach
and it's getting a little stressful but we're used to it.
We'll be fine.
(jaunty music)
- This is going to be good. This is going to be good.
- Homer's pulling in the Drive-Through
- But we can't say what it is.
Oh wait.
This interview's over.
(beep)
So what you see here, these are all drawings
from the Tracey Ullman days.
The Simpsons have certainly changed
as they developed in the series.
But Grandpa's largely the same.
Once we get the script, we start working on the storyboard.
Which have all the key acting moments, all the compositions,
all the camera moves and so forth.
And that's where we start.
Hey.
- Hey
- This is Mike Anderson.
- Dave Silverman.
- Current Supervising director.
- Yes
- Old supervising director.
At the next step, the design department gets started.
We have designs first with guest characters,
guest voices and so on. Costume changes.
Along with character design, there's also prop designs.
New inventions or new props.
So that's all part of the process.
And there's a great deal of work that goes into it.
After the storyboard is approved, we get the notes.
The director starts building what we call the story reel.
And we present that to the writers and producers,
and we all get together
and there's another rewrite after that.
Here's an example of what the animatic looks like.
Come on in, folks.
- [Marge] Kids, fan out around the museum
and find your dad some new pants. Puff-N-stuff or fat.
(laughing)
- [David] So after the animatic we start doing what we call
the final layout drawings. And here what we do is
all the key acting poses and also the finished backgrounds.
Some of this is now becoming a bit antique
because we do it on Wacom Cintiq tablets
rather than doing it on paper.
We're much more environmentally conscious
than your average show, you know.
(jaunty music)
- We are just experimenting right now with
the Simpson artist.
And also our opening spread
is going to incorporate the characters.
So we'll have maybe Homer is sitting here,
maybe Maggie is crawling underneath the chair.
Maybe we can reduce it and get a call on the text.
- [Julius] This is the initial shot we took for the spread.
What I do from here is create a sheen over it
so that I can start to see the characters.
This is my first pass.
So I went through and we did a rough pass of color.
And this is also what I send to the guys
to get a sign-off in the magazine.
Once they kind of give that the green light,
then the next step is I'm going to really go through
and I'm going to start really tightening up these drawings.
Basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this
and then just start to methodically
work all the way down the character. Then I'll take those,
place them in there, do a final color, and we will be done.
(Simpsons theme song)
- Alright, let's annoy some directors, shall we?
I would lower one of the arms down a little bit.
Nothing serious.
Amazing.
These computers.
I'm going to get me a computer.
One more step, which is a really crucial step,
the color department does.
And they add a great deal of life and dimension
to the characters and particularly of the backgrounds.
We got some color.
Fantastic.
Beautiful.
One thing a director ends up assembling is all the drawings
and all the backgrounds and our studios in Korea,
they take this whole packet of material and they do
all the between drawings, and they dialogue mouths
and so forth. It's about a six month process from
the start of the storyboards to
getting back the first color.
And then there's of course the music
that Alf Clausen does with the 38 piece orchestra.
- Hi Jenny.
- [Jenny] Hi there.
- Hi. I'm wondering what time Janice can come down
to do cover lines.
- [Jenny] Maybe 30 minutes?
- Awesome. Okay cool. Thank you.
- So just deciding between our two covers we've got.
Our sketch, which would've been an all illustrated cover,
but now we've definitely decided to go with the photo.
- If you'll excuse me, you know,
I've kind of have to push you out now
because I have work to do.
You know, cause 500 episodes
and we've got another 500 to do to make it 1,000.
But thanks.