Hey guys! I got a review with a question about my writing process that I thought I'd post on here in case anyone was curious. If you're not, sorry for wasting your eyeball fluid :) If you are, enjoy!
Willanatior:
What's your writing process? Do you write down something that happened, then sit down and write a script, then record these down? I'd like to know. Keep it up! Glad to see you're keeping it weekly.
Logo responds:
Thanks for the question, man. I don't often get reviews with questions in them.
Sometimes it can be something that happens, but that's actually pretty rare.
More often than not it's just something that pops into my head for no reason at all. For instance, for Family Reunion, I was lying in bed trying to forget about TooF after spending so much time on Snipe and the idea of a shitty family reunion popped into my head. A couple supporting ideas for it followed (How I hate it when old people talk all slow and about stuff no one cares about, as well as how you usually have someone at the family reunion who hates it as much as you do) so I got out my phone and jotted them down. I haven't been to a family reunion in a long, long time so it wasn't from any direct experience.
So then I'll take those couple of ideas I had and run with them. Try to work script ideas around them. Fit them together somehow. Sometimes what you come up with doesn't work as well with everything else. I wanted to have a couple of uncles at the reunion who were all snobby but it just didn't end up fitting in with time and I couldn't come up with something for them to say that I thought was all that funny. I made the mistake of not excluding the grandpas or at least changing their lines to something more entertaining. I thought it was kinda funny at first but after reading it a few times I should have changed it. I was kinda running short on time though, which should never be an excuse.
The script is the most important part of what I do and I'm going to spend more time polishing it in the future episodes. When I did the original TooF episodes, pretty much everything that came to mind I put down. I would jot it down in like 10 minutes and not polish it at all but people liked it so I found no need to change. I didn't like the scripts in the originals though. They didn't have a lot of substance. Just quick humor. So I traded in my fart jokes for yo-mamma jokes :)
I'll usually sit on a script for a day or so before recording it. I HATE re-recording so I try to include any ideas or changes and be as happy as I can be with it before sitting down to record.
Chopping up the audio is one of the more annoying processes. I don't record everything in sequence. I'll record each character I do separately with multiple takes of each line to pick from. Staying in character allows you to not only have voice consistency but also helps them sound more differentiated. Then I have to pick the best take of each line and put it in sequence with the script, with the right pacing (pauses between lines not too long or short). Then I adjust the audio level so some voices aren't too quiet.
Sometimes after I record or after I start animating I'll come up with a line I wish I would have done. If it's really good, I might go back. But more often than not I just convince myself that it wasn't too funny :P Going back and doing a re-recording for just one line sucks because no matter how hard you try, it usually sounds different than the first time you recorded it. Sometimes you can hear things that were re-recorded if I sound slightly different during a line in the animation.
Anywho, I hope that was the answer you were looking for :D Thanks for asking!
