Producer's Commentary: Dicks Season 7
I'm not quite sure how to summarize this season... Drama meets action-adventure-comedy? I don't know, but I felt a need to table the heavy dramatic stuff for a while and just go for the gusto. I have wanted to go down this road for a while, and after a destructive tornado, I figured it would be a good time to let space aliens take the reins for a bit. What was interesting to me was to see just how long the gag would run. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had most of the season consumed by alien police pursuing the "outlaw" Glerp, and multiple alien races in shooting competitions.
As an additional benefit, it's inspired me to go down similar roads, that is, radical departures from the humdrum daily lives of a retirement community. This season also finds us outside of the park for the first time. Indeed, way, waaay outside the park. So, who knows where the next excursion will lead us?
Perhaps not surprisingly, this little adventure provided me with by far the biggest technical challenges ever, with one particular episode ("The Harder They Vaporize") taking over a week to produce and pushing my software beyond its limits. It was a blast!
For the technically curious, I use an old version Sony Movie Studio. I've not upgraded because the new owners of the application have ruined the user interface. Movie Studio has a limit of 30 each video and audio tracks. However, as I've learned the hard way, using more than a dozen or so of video and audio tracks simultaneously will cause rendering crashes. The solution has been to mix down all of the audio into a single track before rendering. Mixing down the video results in the loss of image resolution, so I only do that when absolutely necessary. "The Harder They Vaporize" was a killer, requiring roughly 40 video and 50 audio tracks! I loved it.
"Dad?" was the second episode of the season I produced. There's a little bit of me in this one:
when I was young, I met an elderly man I soon came to love so much that I adopted him as the grandfather
I never had. I just took the same concept and placed it in the context of Dicks. During the writing,
I allowed myself to let Paul deliver a string of zingers.
Technically this one was a no-brainer, except that rendering time was ridiculous: over 20 minutes to render one minute of video. The problem was the steam rising out of the hot tub: it's animated to gently waft upward, and that effect sucked up an enormous amount of computational time. Consequently I kept my post-production revisions to an absolute minimum.
The astute viewer will see that I changed the end credits. I've always been annoyed at the now-standard practice of running the end credits past at lightning speed, so I decided to take a shot at it by fabricating no less than 28 pages of bogus credits. If you step through them one at a time, you'll (hopefully) be amused by the nonsense I included. I also changed the end music: I'd grown tired of the original rather harsh bit I'd created, and instead used a clip of the opening theme, which came about when I began creating the outtakes.
After getting rid of Glerp in "Voyager 2," I almost
immediately regretted it, so ever since then I've been plotting a means to bring him back. I thought
making him a wanted alien would make for an interesting twist, with his "crime" being his
involvement with Rita. It then simply became a matter of when and how.
Paul's griping about Sam trying to adopt him as the father he never had seemed like the perfect opportunity, because when I conceived the gripe session, I had no punchline or exit strategy. The ah-hah moment came when I wrote his line about hitching a ride with Glerp to put distance between himself and other people.
There were no technical surprises here; I just needed to resurrect Glerp's ship, and then create the two patrol creatures, which were clones of Glerp with menacing looks and mirrored aviator sunglasses. The only change to the ship was the addition of the patrol's insignia, which is a stupid cartoon rendering of "pi r squared," the formula to compute the area of a circle. I don't know why I chose that, but there we are.
Incidentally, I missed a little visual joke by not including the dreaded display "notch," over which Apple and their fanatical followers have been grousing for years, on the patrol alien's cell phone. I only thought of it after I'd wrapped production, and I didn't think it was worth all of the work required to add it. Oh well, I'm sure another opportunity will present itself someday.
Here we have a string of little moments that naturally followed one another. As I got into writing
this one, I did not have a complete picture of the chain of events in my mind; they emerged as I hit
each beat. I'd originally wanted them to demand to see Rita, and then be led to her grave. Thinking
the gravestone was actually Rita, they'd blast it and then leave, mission accomplished. But when I
arrived at that point in the dialog, I found it was too awkward to steer it toward that
probably-not-so-funny moment when they destroy the gravestone. Instead, Dot telling them that Rita was
dead opened a door: it led to them instantly assume Glerp had killed her, adding another crime for
Glerp. That it all fit neatly into my 47 seconds of episode time convinced me it was the right thing
to do.
Carl's bit of bravery at the opening was a last-minute addition that seemed to provide the perfect opening shot. Ever since "There's No Place Like Home," I really wanted him to be brave; in this case he had to be harmlessly disarmed to avoid any real conflict, but in a way that his bravery would still not be questioned.
By the way, for the first and likely last time, I allowed myself to include a tiny hint of politics in an episode by tossing in some of my political caricatures when the patrol alien mentions an "inferior species." Probably lost on most people, and who cares? It's still a perfect example of an Easter egg.
The title "Misjudged" has a dual meaning: obviously Glerp has been misjudged by the patrol.
But the patrol has also misjudged our residents' ability to deal with them. I'd written enough dialog
for four more episodes, but concluded it was best to apply the KISS principle, and pared it down to
only those moments that actually moved the story forward. For example, Paul and Sam had a pretty
involved discussion about what was going on. I quickly realized that none of it mattered; all I
needed to do was get Paul to Sam's place.
Writing Lady Val's diatribe was an absolute joy. It flowed from my keyboard like fluid prose. When I got to the part about having them stuffed with pimentos, I felt as if I'd completed a masterwork of insults. I love how Voicemaker's Jenny pronounced "salad topping."
Oh, and that little poop gag was a last-minute addition. I was kind of surprised I hadn't thought of it from the beginning.
While the Dicks are busily patting one another on their backs for a job well done, sinister forces
are at work. It is all, of course, a setup for much bigger things to come, hence the title,
"The Bigger They Come." In retrospect, however, I feel as though that title was in fact
a bit too much of a giveaway, since it hints things won't stop here, but are instead just getting
started. Whatever.
The (presumably) big, nasty patrol ship, shown here, is simply Glerp's little one- or two-seater stacked with extra decks and bristling with big blasters, which were recycled from the patrol alien's hand weapon.
Here it is, folks, the arms race we all knew was coming, which consumed over a week of 16- to 18-hour days spent
toiling tirelessly on the old pee see. I was literally pushing the software beyond its limits: I kept
running out of room, and had to mix things down in stages, ultimately using around 40 video and 50 audio tracks,
when the software is limited to 30 each. I also did almost everything twice, as my first pass just didn't have
the visual punch I was after. I'd started by doubling the size of each ship; I then tripled them, which necessitated
creating ever-longer strings of trailers (there are 48 of them in the final shot).
It was all a setup for the closing remark by the three-headed alien: "Would love to stay and chat, but we've got a thing." Those dudes, by the way, were made from Sam's head, squashed and tripled, and also voiced by Voicemaker's Jony (Sam's voice talent), as were all of the aliens, including Glerp! Oh, and you did see Carl pee his pants, right?
Most of the aliens have names. I never did give Glerp's race a name, but they were derided as "little green snots" by the Frog Freakers, who were in turn called out by the Wombat Whackers as having "shit blasters." Then came the Borg-inspired Cubistats, who were going to vaporize the lot of them "just for being so annoying." Finally came the Clobbernauts, who would "show [them] how it's done."
Yes, it all makes for quite a shift from the drama of the previous season, but this was a path I'd wanted to pursue for some time, and decided we could all use a break from the heartache of prior events. It's also inspired me to pursue similar tangents in seasons to come.
I'll freely admit this episode was nothing but a setup for Carl's closing remark about the Jerry
Springer Show. Don't bother sending me any hate mail, because I hate it too. But it also still makes
me laugh. Originally "Where Do We Go From Here" was meant to be a pivot back
to more serious stuff, but the punchline popped into my head along the way, and I thought, I
simply have to do this.
I recently re-watched a few of the earliest episodes, and realized just how far I'd come with the series, in particular with respect to the animation. I now go to great pains with lip syncing, having created quite a lot of new art so their mouths would articulate better. Plus I had to invent my own methods of streamlining the process, because it is quite labor-intensive: I don't use any special software to do the work; it's all done by hand.
The first episode that doesn't take place in the trailer park is set on an alien planet, where
Glerp is stranded on a desert island. That's not how it was intended, though: it was originally
an alien landscape with mountains and rivers, a lot of small alien creatures eating one another,
and even the outskirts of an alien city. But while I was rendering a purple flowing river, it
occurred to me that it looked more like an ocean, and hence we arrive where we are today.
The story morphed along the way, too. At the outset, Glerp was to have landed safely. Then I was going to have him crash-land. Finally I settled on a breakdown. As I worked on the dialog between Glerp and Rita, the "hitchhiker" joke emerged, and (like the Jerry Springer gag) I realized I just had to do it. The police pursuit of a Frog Freaker ship near the beginning was a last-minute little Easter egg. I love the little "whoop whoop" of the police cruiser.
Technically I knew in advance this one would be quite a lot of work, and that was fine by me; I looked forward to creating the alien landscape. In earlier renderings it was much more complex and detailed, but I soon realized it would overwhelm the viewer. So I pared it back to "alienized" icons that said "desert island" as quickly and efficiently as possible: a sandy beach, a few alien palm trees, and Glerp's color-changing beach umbrella.
Fun fact: this marks the first time I've added a shadow cast by a character. Glerp looked as though he was floating in space, so I "grounded" him with a shadow. I may do this more in the future, although it is a minor technical PITA.
Oh, and the title? Remember Gilligan's Island? Yes, I know, you'd rather not. But if you don't know what I'm talking about, the title is meaningless. Too bad.
"Sons and Fathers" was meant to be a shift back toward a bit more seriousness, but gently,
having a little gag at the end to keep it light. Still, Sam's soliloquy has a fair bit of me in it: although
my folks never separated, they did discuss the possibility with me, because for as long as I could
remember, they just fought like cats and dogs. And my mother was just like Sam's: a real drama
queen who would regularly raise the roof. So Sam speaks on my behalf to all of those viewers who may
have shared similar situations.
This was the third episode I produced for this season, and it kind of floated around waiting for the rest of the episodes to be finished until it could find a home.
As often happens, the first episode I produce for a season winds up in the final spot. I've intended
to follow the relationship between Dot and Ping very slowly, as I've felt that devoting more than a few episodes
in a single season might be too "soapy." That said, I've already plotted its course well in
advance, so we're still in the early days of this story arc. And yes, Glen does eventually get into the mix.
One potentially confusing point in the story is Ping' reference to Sam's help "while [she] was away." I wanted to keep her out of the whole alien invasion bit, so she was supposedly on vacation (actually she was in rehab for alcoholism, but only Dot knew about this). So I'd intended to have a character make reference to that somewhere along the way, but the episodes were so compact that I could not find the time for the comment. So I may try to explain it all in a future episode... not that it matters much; I doubt I'll receive any "fan mail" asking about it. Indeed, I don't expect to ever receive any "fan mail" at all.
As a title, "Unspoken" may be a bit too obvious, but then again, so what? It perfectly summarizes the episode in a single word, and it's not like there's some shocking twist at the end. I quite enjoy taking my time looking at little slices of life in a realistic way and at a measured pace. And once again I was amazed at the performances I could get from a free online voice synthesis tool.