I'm making a movie! Here is the teaser for AJ Goes to the Dog Park.

Sunfly: The Animated Series

Slup?

Last time I posted here, I was in the middle of working on OK KO!. Since then OK KO! ended, and I've spent much of my time working on my CN development project with a team of amazing people. I also helped out on a Netflix development project, and wrote on season 1 of Shape Island for Apple TV+. I'm currently working on season 2 of Jellystone!, which has been delightful.

The other big thing I've been working on is a LIVE ACTION FEATURE FILM! This is an absurd comedy on a microscopic budget, made with a crew of friends and family during visits to my hometown of Fargo, North Dakota. Below are some amazing posters made by @michaelfurler for the first 15 minutes of the film, which we've played at a few film festivals as a short.

What am I up to in 2023? Well, my CN project was recently put on ice and I wrap on Jellystone! soon. I'm going to take a breather and focus on finishing the movie for a bit, and then I'll go out with some TV/movie pitches and start looking around for a new animation gig when I'm ready.

NEW AJ’S INFINITE SUMMER EPISODE! (kinda) A while back, I  recorded some friends doing table read of an unproduced AJ’s Infinite Summer storyboard. As a quarantine project, I made a rough animatic assembled from that recording! Watch it in full here: https://youtu.be/6aT_tcBrOJ8

OK KO! Episodes 17-20

Know Your Mom

It was time for another good Carol episode! This one came together for us very quickly, and ended up being a very simple and sweet story about KO and Carol's relationship. It was originally written with Rad and Enid as KO's sounding boards, but we thought it would be fun to bring in Brandon and A Real Magic Skeleton for a little change of pace. I love the way Ryann and Parker expanded their appearance into a funny running gag that ended up helping to further cement their personalities moving forward. In the outline we handed out, the Kactus Krew were not given a lot of specifics. We had figured they would have an old school mob/organized crime type theme (but cactus). When we saw the first pitch with Succulentus portrayed as a nu-metal character, I was shocked. I remember being literally on the floor laughing,  a visceral physical reaction to how unexpected this take on the episode was. It was another situation where I was so unsure- can we do this? It is too insane? Is it "on-show"? All we knew for sure is that we all laughed, so we decided to go with our gut reaction and support it 100%. Jonathan Davis coming in to do the voice was another amazing development. He was the nicest guy in the world, and such a pleasure to work with! This especially felt great after my parents wouldn't let me see KoRn in concert when I was in 7th grade. Take that, mom and dad! 

We’re Captured

We aren't the first show to do a play on the sitcom "double-booking" trope with a villain, but we knew it would be super funny with our heroes and Lord Boxman. This was an incredibly enjoyable episode to write the story for. I remember hanging out in the writer's room with Ian, Dave and Erin just cracking ourselves up with how silly the episode starts and it just continues to escalate in ridiculousness from there. This was around the time we were first conceiving of TKO, so it was a helpful reminder that the show was in no way backing down from comedy. The concept for this story was shared with the board artists after the premise stage (I think in a big writing meeting, but it could have just been during lunch or something), and Ryann immediately took an interest in Professor Venomous. She then shared with us some early design concepts and ideas for Venomous (and his minion, who we'd later call Fink), and we were able to integrate them into the final outline. As with Know Your Mom, we knew the role Venomous was going to take in this episode and the series as a whole, but he was really given life thanks to the strong and specific POV of the board artists working on the episode. This was also a great early display of Boxman's family dynamic with the robots. Darrell and Shannon weren't even originally in this story, but Ryann and Parker REALLY wanted to include them. Parker pitched us the "daddy? may I wear my costume?" scene, which is something he observed in his real life. We were unsure, but we were willing to give him a chance to sell it in their pitch. I'm definitely glad we did! One final thing to mention about We're Captured is that our heroes lose in this episode. Isn't that fun?  Ryann Shannon on We’re Captured

Face Your Fears

Face Your Fears was conceived as a crucial stepping stone toward several key mid-season episodes, but it actually ended up being produced after TKO because we needed Dave and Haewon to tackle Legends of Mr. Gar first. This was the luxury of knowing that OK KO! would premiere with a month of episodes. We were working so far ahead that we could produce some episodes out of order and then make sure they aired IN order. (More on this in a future post...) Anyway, this episode provides a ton of important character development that ties to our big "mid-season finale" episodes, Plaza Prom and TKO. Gar manages to speak a sentence to Carol, which he repeats in Plaza Prom, and we get another hint of some darkness within KO. Among many other things! The concept of hopping through a bunch of character's linked fears in order of their plug-in connection is pretty complicated, but the board artists did an excellent job making it feel exciting and cool. Dave and Haewon were very excited to tackle something with this level of depth, and it shows in every scene. Figuring out how much to reveal in this episode was a challenge, and I'm very happy with the final result. Special regards to our design team for their work on this episode. All the different fearscapes are so distinct and so gorgeous. I was stunned when I started seeing these designs come in. In my opinion, this was the most impressively designed episode so far! Of course, since this episode they've continued to top themselves many times over. :)  Dave Alegre on Face Your Fears Everybody Likes Rad?

I've alluded to this before, but we took extra care to make sure that all the episodes  leading up to TKO were very balanced in terms of subject matter. We mapped out the whole half-season in advance, with many episodes simply listed as "ENID 1",  "CAROL 2" or "PLAZA EVENT" before we knew exactly what the stories were. We knew that Enid and Rad would have an equal number of episodes, and Everybody Likes Rad is "Rad 3". Much like "Enid 3" (You Have to Care), this is one of the first times we allowed an episode to spend some real time without KO as a main focus. This episode is a combination of two ideas. The first half comes from a pitch by Erin, and the second half derives from a concept Ian and I were sitting on from the previous summer. Neither "Rad's Viral Video" nor "Rad Goes Hollywood" felt like they could sustain a whole episode, but we realized there was a story to be told about how one could lead to the other. It worked! We ended up with something I'm really proud of. Geneva and Mira did a fantastic job making a hilarious episode that deals with sophisticated themes in a nuanced way. At every stage I was impressed at how far we were able to push this episode into unexpected tonal territory while still being 100% "the show". I especially love the melancholy-but-warm final scenes, which have caused "volcanoing" to be a term I commonly use in conversation. Geneva Hodgson on Everybody Likes Rad?

OK KO! Episodes 13-16

Just Be A Pebble

This was the FIRST EPISODE we produced! As I've stated before, we started with a few simpler stories before making the "first" episodes and this one is indeed very simple. We wrote it to be a linear, self-contained opportunity for the characters to act the way they are supposed to act and the world to be the way it's supposed to be. It mostly takes place in the plaza, giving our designers an opportunity to build up a cache of experience and artwork leading up to everything's true first reveal in "Let's Be Heroes". Because this was the first episode, there are some things going on visually that chose to not carry over into future episodes but are fun to see here. It's like our "Doug Can't Dance"! Or our "Tommy's First Birthday"! Yeah, you get it. After making the pilot and all those shorts, we weren't really sure what an 11-minute episode might actually look and feel like. Ian and I boarded two unproduced episodes between the pilot and the series, but a lot had changed since then.  After seeing Mira and Geneva's first pitch, we were completely energized. It's a real show! It works! They were the first to set the tone for the comedy, action, and especially the characters.  Presenting Joe Cuppa

Believe it or not, this is a very personal episode for me. During our summer 2015 development time, Ian and I spent a number of days building out the world by creating dozens of characters and their backstories. A lot of them came from the crowd shot in the original pilot. Here is proto-Cuppa (and Crinkly Wrinkly, and Dogmun!)

I suggested giving him a Rodney Dangerfield-esque lounge lizard persona, something I find inherently funny. In 2010 I had co-written a feature length screenplay about a character like this trying to live a normal life while being physically unable to speak in anything but Dangerfeldian quips and one-liners. Nobody wanted to fund that movie for SOME REASON, but I was able to infuse some of its spirit into this story. It was Dave Tennant who decided Joe Cuppa should specifically speak in coffee puns, and Erin Shade who conceived the hilarious extended slapstick sequence at the end. This episode has a clear example of why it's so fun working on a board driven show. I had written this bit in the original premise, which I thought was SO FUNNY-

Then at Stevie and Danny's board pitch, I was blown away by how far the concept got pushed. My line worked fine as a dialogue joke, but it became something much more imaginative and visual. If you’ve seen the episode, you know what I’m talking about! We've Got Pests

Pests is a super old idea! Ian and I first started meeting to talk about Lakewood Plaza Turbo in 2013, and one of the story pitches I had was that the Plaza gets infested by tiny 90s platformer mascots. In 2015 we wrote our first outline, which was completely different. It was still an Enid story, but it was all about her trying to be a cool employee and not care when things went wrong at the plaza. We felt pretty good about it and moved on. When time came to hand the episode out to board, I realized we had taken a lot of these themes and tackled them with more depth in "You Have to Care", which we had just finished outlining. So with just a few days to go before handout, we re-broke the entire story to cover different thematic territory. The main thing that held between all versions is the ending where we see the pests grow and change over many years thanks to Enid's words. It's one of my favorite ideas we've ever put into the show, and Danny did an amazing job making this a standout sequence in the series. Fun fact: another secret internal document we use is called "Illegal Words". It's a list of words, phrases and terms we have required ourselves to avoid. Items on the list vary from cliches, soon-to-be-dated slang, pet peeves, overused jokes, etc.  For this episode we decided to open pandora's box and allow the pests to say some of these illegal words. Whether this was good satire or a grievous error is up to the viewer. It was an experiment we will likely never try again! Legends of Mr. Gar

As we started figuring out where we were going with the season, having outlined episodes like "Face Your Fears" and "Plaza Prom", we realized we were spending a lot of our Gar time on his nervousness around Carol and were missing a big showcase of his amazing hero power. Because we were working pretty far ahead, we were able to very quickly write up this story and hand it out ahead of those other episodes to keep Gar in balance. Ian came up with the initial concept and we had a lot of fun dipping into the backstories of the characters. The opening scene is actually heavily cannibalized from one of our 2014 unproduced development boards, and Skateboard Nerd's explosive final fate is based on a cut scene from one of Ian's Secret Mountain Fort Awesome episodes! This episode has more hilarious wand weird moments than I can count. I love that we were able to do such a fun digression with an unconventional structure this early in the series. Dave's visual gag of Gar walking out from behind a shelf that looks like his body... legendary. Haewon's sequences of young Rad.. incredible. Crinkly Wrinkly's tall tale... fact or fiction?! ALSO Jake and Mint Potion did incredible work on this episode. They completely blow us away every week, but I especially loved their variations on Rad and Enid's character themes here.