{"id":1098,"date":"2008-08-07T06:55:32","date_gmt":"2008-08-07T13:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=1098"},"modified":"2008-08-07T06:55:32","modified_gmt":"2008-08-07T13:55:32","slug":"animating-buffy-words-with-jeph-loeb-circa-2002-part-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=1098","title":{"rendered":"Animating Buffy: Words With Jeph Loeb Circa 2002, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As a follow-up to the Buffy Animated magazine story I posted the other day<\/a>, here’s some interview bits that got hacked out of the story for space considerations. Would that the Official Buffy Magazine had always been 223 pages long…then it would have all fit. I’ve tried to reconstruct the Q&A as best as I recall it.<\/em>
\n
\nHow far into the production process are you at this point?<\/strong>
\nWe have eight scripts out of thirteen. We have all our preliminary designs and are starting to do backgrounds, which means you start building your preliminary sets. We will be recording the first six soon; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more about scheduling than anything else. When you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re dealing with an acting troupe that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s as seasoned and as professional, and knows these characters as well as the people on Buffy, it just becomes a joy. What great words can we give them to play with?<\/p>\n

Pretty much everyone actor-wise has committed. In animation, everything prior to the record is dress rehearsal. Then once you record, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve started the lawnmower; all you do at that point is cut grass. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s different than even film and movie production, because with film production, even though you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re on a schedule, you still have an opportunity to go back and do reshoots, and look at stuff and assemble it. With animation, if you draw it, you use it, and the only reason you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use it is because you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re long.<\/p>\n

What’s behind the idea to do an animated version of this character?<\/strong>
\nI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve said it before–there is no reason that Joss has to do this show. He has an extraordinarily successful franchise in Buffy and in Angel, and in his new show that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s coming. Why do an animated version of Buffy? Well, the reason is twofold. One is love; he loves the character and he wants to see the character explored in a new and exciting way. Two, it very much opens the door, because Buffy Animated very much takes place in what we refer to as Buffy: Year One. These are the stories that happened between the pages of the stories you already know, or between the episodes you already know. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in-continuity stories; they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just not stories that you know. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not gonna be stories where you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll say, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcOh, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how Angel got that apartment.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not something we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re dealing with. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not gonna be that continuity-specific. What we will be doing is telling stories that, if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never seen an episode of Buffy, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be able to say, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWow, this is a cool show.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 And if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen an episode of Buffy, you can sit back and go, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI get the irony of that.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n

We have the ability to be able to know where the characters are going to go. Even though Joss knew in his first year where he wanted to go, those stories hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been told yet. If Buffy says, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m gonna get the greatest car in the world, and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see. People are gonna talk about the way I drive,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll know that people are gonna talk about the way she drives, but not in the way she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s thinking. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the kind of fun we get to do.<\/p>\n

Is it fun to play with the unlimited potential of animation, in terms of what you can depict in each story?<\/strong>
\nOn the one hand, one would think, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcOh, your imagination could go wild,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and your imagination can go wild, so our monsters can be a little more fantastical. But at the end of the day, someone is still going to have to draw that. We can talk about having a barbarian horde coming over the hill, but someone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gonna have to draw it, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gonna be on a television screen, so it ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t gonna look like a horde–it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gonna look like a whole bunch of little things. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re better off coming up with a big barbarian.<\/p>\n

The really, really big difference between the live-action and the animation is scope. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to be able to do something the show\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s never been able to do–we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re gonna be able to go above the town. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to be able to fly, to see things from a perspective that they haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been able to do. We can dissolve down through the earth and go down underneath and into the Hellmouth in a way that allows the Hellmouth to be enormous from a visual point of view. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the nature of animation.<\/p>\n

Will the show’s mythology differ from that of the live-action series?<\/strong>
\nWe work from the same bible. The Watcher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Guide is still the Watcher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Guide, the truths of what a Slayer is, the relationships between those characters–all of those things remain true. The Hellmouth plays a very important part. In talking about using the Master, one of the things Joss pointed out is that the Master didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really get out very much. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to start telling stories where the Master\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s out running around, because that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not true to the continuity. But we have plenty of stories we can tell that invoke the same feeling, but can bring in new characters that we haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seen.<\/p>\n

The joke is that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an absurd concept–it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an absurd title. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s supposed to be. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re supposed to get the joke, and all of the characters within the show get the joke. That is the gift that Joss gave to the audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a follow-up to the Buffy Animated magazine story I posted the other day, here’s some interview bits that got hacked out of the story for space considerations. Would that the Official Buffy Magazine had always been 223 pages long…then it would have all fit. I’ve tried to reconstruct the Q&A as best as I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}