Click on the image above to read an article written by CCAD about our recent Family Guy talk at school!!! The story can also be found below as well (in case the article/ link ever goes away).
Dominic Bianchi and Mark Hentemann visited CCAD on April 29 and gave
students a rare peek behind the curtain, showing what goes into creating
a weekly, half-hour, prime-time network television program. The fact
that they were hilarious while doing it shouldn’t be a surprise; they
are, respectively, the supervising director and head writer/executive
producer for Family Guy.
Like any good comedic act, the duo knew how to warm up their
audience, opening with a montage of clips from the popular series. They
then went on to detail the creative efforts that go into producing each
episode—a process that takes approximately 13 months, which means that
multiple episodes are in varying stages of development at any given
time.
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| Hentemann shows the writers’ room, photo by Katlin McNally |
It all starts in the writers’ room, where Hentemann and his team
collaborate on a script that must be ready for the first table read at
the end of the week.
“That’s when the first version of the script is finalized and all the
actors come in,” said Hentemann. “We get about 60 people in a room at
the table read, and we hear a script on its feet. (We call it hearing it
on its feet—it’s performed.) We hear how it sounds, get a good sense of
what’s working and what’s not.”
From there the writers will go back and rewrite jokes (aka gags) that
didn’t quite work. Hentemann went on to share a few gags that were
proposed in the writers’ room but didn’t make the final script—they may
not have made it into the show, but they still got laughs from the CCAD
audience.
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| Bianchi talks about the storyboarding process at “Family Guy,” photo by Katlin McNally |
“Family Guy is storyboard-based show,” Bianchi said as
he began to explain the process for dealing with the artwork on the
show, which begins as soon as the audio track of the script is recorded.
“A director and assistant director will have two to three storyboard
artists per episode,” said Bianchi. “They’ll take the audio file and
listen to it, and go over the script and break it down into different
scenes.” The team uses Cintiqs with Toom Boom Storyboard Pro software to
begin creating thumbnails of shots for the show, which are then pitched
to the supervising director, who makes edits. Bianchi and Hentemann
used the episode “Back to the Pilot” (S10, Ep 5) to illustrate this
process.
After more editing and rewriting, the team moves to animatics, which
(at their most basic) are animated drafts that include sound. There are
more rounds of editing and rewrites. At some point color is introduced,
and even after that there are rewrites. During this process they also
have to work with standards and practices, the network entity
responsible for ensuring that a program’s content doesn’t cross legal,
ethical, or moral lines that might result in anything from FCC fines to
lawsuits or lost sponsors.
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| Bianchi shared examples of animatics from “Back to the Pilot” (S10, Ep5), photo by Katlin McNally |
Anyone who has watched Family Guy can imagine the
conversations between the show’a producers and the network. Hentemann
read some particularly funny notes they received from standards,
including one that involved the word “kleeman”—a word the writers made
up to see if the standards office would tag it. They did. However, when
producers noted that the word was not in any dictionary and did not
actually exist, the standards office had to concede. Unfortunately,
after the episode aired “kleeman” became a popular Google search term.
When the writers tried to use it again four months later, they were
denied, because several online dictionaries had come up with a
definition.
The last stage of the production process includes final animation, which is done in Korea and can take as long as four months.
Bianchi and Hentemann ended their presentation with a Q & A that
naturally generated questions about how to get a job in their industry.
Both men noted that everyone has a different story for how they landed
their careers, but Bianchi still offered some advice:
“No matter where you go, what job you are targeting, if you are at a
job that you think will lead to that storyboard job (or whatever it is
that you want), if you are PA [production assistant] somewhere, be the
best PA, have a good attitude, ask questions, be indispensable at that
job.”
