In one of
Hollywood’s many industrial back streets sits a nondescript building. Inside
that building is ShadowMachine Films, the home base of Adult Swim’s comedy
mega-hit Robot Chicken.
Robot Chicken is the brainchild of actor/producer/
director Seth Green and producer and editor Matthew Senreich. Both are long
time toy and action figure collectors.
For years Senreich was editor of the popular magazine Toy Faire, which utilized action figures
to create comedy sketches fumetti-style. Green, being a huge fan of the
magazine, saw its potential for an animation off-shoot and contacted Senreich
about expanding the strip into a television show. Legend has it that the name
for the show was inspired by a dish on the menu at a West
Hollywood Chinese
restaurant where Green and
Senreich had dined several times.
The show itself
diverges from the common format of most comedy shows. It has an uninterrupted
15-minute running time and the sequences are not usually linked together by any
typical narrative device. Explains head writer Tom Root, “Our show set out from
the start with a different format where it’s like channels being flipped on a
television set. From the start we knew it was going to be short-form and that
no joke was ever going to over-stay its welcome, and we knew that there were
going to be many, many short little bits. Almost immediately we realized that
it was maybe the hardest thing we could ask our set builders and puppet
builders to do, because even though our show is a quarter-hour we are cramming
it with 20 or 25 different set pieces.”
Robot Chicken’s
non-stop content presents challenges for the writers and artists alike and both
groups are required to make concessions to time and budget. Comments Root, “We
make compromises in the script phase when we can, but mostly we just sort of
write the scripts that we all think up and we don’t worry about how feasible it
is until farther on down the road. That’s when we have to get into compromises
and so forth.”
The
show fixed its sights on spoofing anything embedded in pop culture, fusing
cultural reference comedy with religious and social satire. Root explains the
references are so diverse that not every reference made on the show will be understood
by everyone, including himself. “The writers are all aged between late 20s and
late 30s, and a lot of what we make fun of is just kind of what occurs to us
from our backgrounds as being stuff that’s right to make fun of. A lot of
it comes from the late 1970’s through the 80’s and 90’s and because we are in
our 30s, I find that we are kind of aware of things, the culture being the way
it is in this country you can be well aware of what’s popular without actually
having to watch it or be a fan of it. So even though I am completely out
of the target age, I know that Hannah
Montana is huge, for instance. So last season I wrote a Hannah Montana sketch and I just went to
Wikipedia and tried to figure out what the show is about. The gist of it
was a girl in a blond wig who pretends to be a singer and by day she’s a
brunette who’s in high school. That was really all it took for me to come
up with a story about it, because we were never going to get deep into those
characters in the first place, we just wanted to violently kill the star and
then watch the other characters run around and try to deal with it. It turned into sort of a Weekend at Bernie’s sketch, where they were chopping up the Hannah
Montana corpse trying to get her through a day so she could pass some sort of
test in school, and the corpse ends up waterskiing.”
Walking through
the corridors of ShadowMachine, one can’t help but think of the days before
digital technology, when effects facilities were teaming with sculptors and the
walls were lined with off-the-shelf model kits and bits of lumber and plastic.
The company feels like a memorial to the effects houses of the past such as
Boss Film Studios and Boston’s famed Olive Jar Animation Studios. The interior
of the shop includes many cubicles where individual sets are positioned for
photography and where the animators work their magic. In an adjunct building is
the fabrication shop where molds and sets are constructed as well as the puppet
fabrication area. The walls are adorned with sets from past shows and various
stop motion puppets or action figures harvested for their vital parts.
Stop motion
methodology seems like a natural for a comedy show utilizing modified toys and
action figures. Production designer Ross Schuman came to the show with
considerable experience in stop motion. “I got a call from the producers out in
San Francisco. I had done a project for
the Klokeys, who did Gumby, and they
had just done a re-emergence of the Davey
and Goliath Christmas special. I’d
just come off that and I got a call randomly from the producer, and some of the
key people involved. Basically less than nine of us had done an hour of
stop-motion in a year and I was the only set guy. So that work was really some high-end stuff,
if you work for Art Klokey you’d want to bring you’re A-game, so I really
worked hard on that. And then from there
I got the call and they showed me a clip.”
It was at this
time that Schulman was introduced to Green’s early prototype of the show “It
was called Sweet Jay initially,
recalls Schulman. “I think Fox owned it
for the web and it never really made its way, and then all of a sudden the
producers got it on Adult Swim and it became an untitled Seth Green project at
that point. What I saw from Sweet Jay was a whole lot of very crude
puppets and crude sets, and I thought we could do that. But when I got down
here and talked to Seth, they were limited by what they had in terms of the
budget at their disposal. But he wasn’t
interested in making a really crude show.
They were interested in making a sketch comedy show that was funny.”
Soon Schulman
would be joined by other talented artists who emerged not only from Los
Angeles’ burgeoning effects scene but craftsmen, sculptors and photographers
from around the world. One of the artists was set designer Scott Schneider, a
veteran of dozens of visual effects projects, feature films and commercials
including the Batman features, Down Periscope and The Shining. “First we get either the script or an anima tic that’s
already been generated, basically just storyboards cut to the soundtrack, to
the dialogue,” relates Schneider. “Ross
will actually start breaking it down as to what he wants to see and what he
wants to build. Then we’ll pull together
a bunch of reference and go over what specifically we want to see. And then from that point I take that
information and start generating 3D models of the set at the scale that we’re
going to build it at. And we’ll put a
couple of lenses on it in the computer and make sure that we’re covered for
what we want to get in the shot. From
that point, I can take that 3D model and generate 2D construction drawings and
put dimensions on everything, and then get that printed out for the guys in the
shop to start building. “
To the untrained
eye it may appear that the animators are manipulating off-the-shelf action
figures, but there is a lot of modification and mechanical work done to create
the puppets used on the show. Explains Schuman, “It’s articulation. That’s the
key to making it work. That’s what we talk about in stop motion — how
articulated can this puppet be? And
basically the process in the first season was taking action figures and
modifying them. But then Rob Browning,
who’s a legend in puppet making, came into the company at a time when we had a
crew chief who was leaving. Rob brought an understanding of puppet making that
we could apply to this kind of; I like to call it slash-and-burn stop motion.”
Sometimes the overwhelming quantity of puppets
needed for any given show can be a daunting task in and of itself. Explains
Schuman, “The amount of puppets sometimes is 100 puppets per episode. We’ve had as many as 70 sets for an episode.
So it’s the quick thinking. Rob Browning
brought in the technique of molding the action figures and then doing a foam
injection with an armature —
armature wire and propoxy and creating these very simple
armatures that are really effective. And
over the years, we’ve moved into silicone.
So they’re no longer toys any more; they look like toys. But this is knowledge; it’s not anything that
people can’t do.
“In the past
traditional stop motion artists and photographers would use film cameras with
stepper motors so the movement of the puppets could be photographed a frame at
a time. Digital technology has now entered as a viable solution to the shooting
component of the production. We started with digital cameras from the
beginning,” states Schulman. “Typically
back in the day, it was a Mitchell/Fries [camera] that had to have perfect
frame accuracy. And now everyone uses the digital camera for many reasons. You
can buy the camera at relatively low cost and there’s very little expense
involved except the upkeep. A big bonus
is you can then transfer this information directly to the editing system and
see your shot immediately. You can cut
in the work and you can do rough comps on the set. What’s better than taking all these different
plates that you’ve shot, putting the puppet in there and looking at the
relationship of the set and the perspective? So doing the rough comps enables
you to really waste no time as to if this is going to work or not, or maybe we
have to think about something differently. We line right up to that frame and
then we’ll bring in trees, etc. So what we see is what we get the shot, the
aperture, everything is right there in front of you.”
The pop culture
mainstay of the show’s target audience are the Star Wars films, which have proven to be fertile comedy ground for
the writers and artists at ShadowMachine.
Robot Chicken’s two Star Wars specials have been amongst
their highest-rated shows and the crew members of Robot Chicken are big fans of George Lucas’ double trilogy. “The
coolest part about our new Star War special is that there were over 40 original
sets that I designed, which weren’t in the Star
Wars legacy,” recalls Schuman with much pride. “So I did a lot of
recreations, but the ones like the storm trooper apartment, which was so much
fun because you get to take all these elements of the original films and expand
on them. We had Jon Berg (stop motion animator of Empire Strikes Back) here as guest animator for the Star Wars II project, because I had met
him at one of the celebration events and these guys created such a great
universe to live in. So creating the
Sarlacc pit, making it animate-able and breathable, that’s a really cool
challenge. The barber shop sketch in the
second special, where the emperor gets his hair cut, was a lot of fun.”
Was there a
concern about upsetting the Lucas film empire? Schuman is quick to dispel any
rumor that there was anything but harmony with Lucasfilm. “The thing about it
is, they know that we are honoring it at this point. When they saw the emperor sketch, they
[Lucasfilm] called Seth and Matt and wanted to talk. They recognized that we honored
them; we didn’t bastardize it. There were some things that he’s fought for,
comedically, that were set up in the movies.
There’s nothing that we’re going to make up that’s some back story about
Anakin and the sunflower sketch where he cuts all the sunflower heads off… that
was in the movie. He came in and all the
little Jedi kids were slaughtered. And
that was something that Seth felt was really bringing humor to that, so it’s
not played any other way than showing it for what it could have been. He created an atrocity, killed all these kids,
so how do you go about it? Maybe he
visualized Naboo and being in love and in the middle of all the sunflowers. But we all have a respect for it, so when it
comes to Star Wars, and we’ve been
invited to the ranch twice and George has been there and has been super
gracious and really cool. And he knows
that at this point we are the fans, so there’s no way we’re going to make these
characters any more or less heroic than they already are.”
Although the Robot Chicken crew tries to remain
faithful to the Star Wars universe in
the look and tone of the photography, their resources are not nearly as grand
as their Lucasfilm brethren. “One of the
tricks with Robot Chicken is we have
very little time and usually very little money,” notes Schneider. “You have to be very creative with what you
use and what you get away with. Of
course, a lot of the materials we use are right from the local hardware store,
because we don’t have time to do fancy silicone molds or anything like
that. Some material we have laser cut,
but we don’t have time to do all of that.
On the [Star Wars] blockade-runner, that was one of the exceptions to
the rule. After I designed that, I had
suggested to Ross that we actually have the main sections of walls wire cut out
of bead foam. The reason for that is
because we could get nine feet of wall for $100-200, and it was already the
shape of the wall and then all we’d have to do is add material and styrene to
the surface to smooth it out. And it got
us there fairly quickly. That took care
of the main wall. Model builder Logan
Paine fabricated on wood the individual bulkheads. Those were made out of MDF
and he just made up a template and cut out several of those. We had the actual
doorframe and the door itself and the control boxes that are all mounted along
the wall, those very pronounced kind of tapered boxes that are mounted on the
wall. Those components we had rapid
prototyped.”
According to
Schuman, the creative process emerged organically, often involving the director
and Seth and Matt bouncing ideas off each other. “Our director, Chris Mackay, will have
meetings with Seth and Matt; they’ll chat about certain things that they were
thinking the writers wanted to see happen or Seth thought of something he’s
really psyched about. At one point during the Star Wars project, and even though it was Star Wars, Seth said, ‘This is a studio apartment in Studio City.’
And we would riff about the vertical blinds with the hibachi outside on the
deck, and just start riffing that way.
But often, I will do preliminary sketches where I just riff. You know, mostly for stop motion I have to
make sure that there’s animator access, that you can get the shot that’s needed
and that it’s appropriate to the genre or the parody. For things like Batman, obviously there’s a lot of great stuff out there, so you
can find reference and see every single angle. With Star Wars there’s something like 35,000 books written on the
subject.”
The Robot Chicken crew didn’t limit
themselves to what existed in the known Star
Wars cosmos as seen in the films. Creative and comedic license allowed them
to explore the fringe areas of the galaxy far, far away. Although the Robot Chicken team had the blessing of Lucasfilm with their parodies,
the artist learned to be autonomous in acquiring their own reference material.
“We wouldn’t even ask them,” notes Schulman.
“It’s just the fact that we’re doing the project, so we can find our own
reference. And we’re always going back
to the masters to try to get the truth of it.”
Schuman and his
team take incredible pains to capture the essence of the Star Wars universe and all the other pop culture icons they
parody. “Seth would bring everybody
through the studio and he was excited by the fact that we had just replicated
the blockade runner spot for spot. We had originally talked about making it
shorter and doing all these things, and I said I had some ideas. Scott
[Schneider] and I were working together in the computer and I laid out the blueprint
and it was nine feet long. It was a
dream model, we came in on Saturday and cut all these shapes out and then when
the builders came in that following week and saw what we were doing, everybody
was on board, and we cranked this model out.”
Star Wars was one of Robot Chicken’s most popular pop culture targets, but the creative
minds at ShadowMachine did not limit themselves to childhood fetishes. “You name it, we’ve done it,” says
Schuman. “We’ve done Iron Man, Davey and Goliath and the Brady
Bunch as well as political and religious satire. The greatest thing is you
get people in here…we’ve had Christian Slater do some voices, and John Favreau
as well. When Mark Hamill was here we were in the voice recording studio and it
was a dream come true for me…and he sticks his head in and he goes, ‘Wow! I remember this.’ He had just been looking through it at
head-level, and he was like, ‘That’s the set, man.’ And that was just huge. Our crew worked so hard and we just loved
doing it. That was a seal of approval,
because Mark lived in it.”
It is the
dedication of the artists and the tireless efforts of the writers and creative
minds at ShadowMachine that have made Robot
Chicken Adult Swim’s most highly-rated show. Now entering its forth season,
Robot Chicken continues to be as
popular as ever. In 2008, it was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding
Animation Program. It won Emmys for individual achievements in animation in
2006 and 2007. Thanks to the artists and writers at ShadowMachine, stop motion
animation and miniature creation will still have a venue, making us laugh out
loud along the way!
Special Thanks
to Scott Schneider, Tom Root, Ross Schuman and everyone at ShadowMachine for
their assistance with this article.
This article was originally published in Sci fi Fantasy Modeller
Interview transcribing and additional research by Kathie Louy
