Luis' Illustrated Blog

THE SIMPSONS NEWS - How a Simpsons episode is made Part 1.

Simpsons Quote:

“When will I learn? The answers to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a bottle, they’re on TV!”– Homer

Ever wonder what goes into making a show like The Simpsons?  You’re not the only one. I asked the Twitter-verse if there was anything they wanted to know about the production of the Simpsons (within reason. Not gonna tell you anything that will cause me to lose my job). Turns out, there were quite a few questions about the process.

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I thought that I’d make a small series explaining how we make an episode.  Now, granted, you’ll get the process from MY vantage point and I won’t share anything that will get me in trouble or that I know nothing about.

I don’t know ANYTHING about what happens in the recording sessions, for example so…that part will be sorta skipped over and be a little bit vaguer.

Okay then, here we go…

A script falls from the sky…okay…maybe not, but from my end, it does feel that way. A writer writes a script after a long process that’s a bit secret. In Hollywood, it’s not good etiquette to talk about the writer’s room. Well…at least not on the show your currently working on.  I don’t know what happens there and if I did I wouldn’t be able to tell you anyway, but according to Michael Price (writer of episode 500 and @mikepriceinla on twitter),

“The process of pitching, writing, rewriting & polishing a script before the table read is usually about 2 months.”

Then, of course, a there’s a table read of the episode.

I haven’t ever gone to a table read myself, but a board artist, colleague of mine asked to go to the table read of the show he was working on, and he did. He had a lot of fun, but never did it again because he just never had the time to do it again.

At some point after that, the final version of the voice track is recorded (this I know nothing about). By final voice track I mean, up to this point. There might be re-records later.

The writers and actor are actually located in a different place than the animators.  The writers and actors are at the Fox lot located in L.A.. Meanwhile the animation studio I work at, is located in a regular looking building in Burbank.

Yes, it can sometimes be difficult working this way because we don’t have the writers around to ask when we have questions. but that gets solved with these handy little devices we have at the studio called “telephones”.

In any case, once the script is written and the audio is recorded, the script is slightly adjusted and it’s sent to us, at the animation studio.

…AND you may read more in Part 2.

Any questions about the process so far? Feel free to ask in the comments below.

COMIC BOOKS – Deep Comix

I thought this is a new and interesting way to read comics:

ART – Storyboarding my personal project

The work continues on the rough, first pass of storyboards.  Little by little I’m making my way to the first of the fight scenes.  I’m very happy with the progress I’m making.

This is what I did this week:

For more comics and stories written by me: COMICS AND STORIES

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