#I also got to work on a sitcom style comedy show in between camp cretaceous and chaos theory

[neunhofferart]

I was just rewatching camp cretaceous and thinking about the writing and storyboarding process for a show that does silent/physical comedy so well and then I discovered your tumblr! amazing work!

Aw thank you so much!! We were a script driven show so some of it was thanks to our writers coming up with funny material to work with, and then a lot of the physical/visual comedy in Camp Cretaceous and Chaos Theory was thanks to the direction of one of our showrunners, Aaron Hammersley-- he comes from a storyboarding and directing background himself, and he often did passes on the animatics to punch up the acting and comedy even more. I got to work directly with him when I started out as a revisionist on Camp Cretaceous, and I tried to learn from and emulate his comedic sensibilities (in addition to learning from and emulating all my other incredibly talented coworkers haha).

You can particularly tell whenever Aaron touched a scene though-- like, you can almost see his drawings and recognize his timing even when it's translated to 3D. The shot of Ben falling over and screaming for sliiightly too long from the clip that was released today is one of his revisions that wasn't originally scripted, for example. I think probably the BEST example of his is the scene from Camp Cretaceous when Ben is staring at Bumpy and slowly shaking his head with those haunted eyes as she plops down in his sleeping spot-- that was pretty much exactly how Aaron drew it and timed it haha.

A lot of it comes down to thinking about the character's personality and what they'd do, picking strong expressions, limiting the movement of everything around that expression, and being allowed to let the timing breathe. It's really interesting-- a scene from a script can be made into something completely different depending on who's boarding it/who's directing it/how the interpretation of the script is approached.

Even though we were on script driven shows, part of the process of being a storyboard artist was working with our episodic directors to translate the script visually before it was animated, and troubleshooting any problems that arose while visually translating it. If we were able to pitch ideas that supported what was written in the script but took things further/we came up with good solutions to problems that also elevated the storytelling, we were given a lot of support from leadership in return-- particularly on Chaos Theory!