Did you know that Bart Simpson’s friend Milhouse was originally written for a Butterfinger commercial, not for an episode, and he was worked in later? Did you know that the songs on the show are performed by a 38-piece orchestra? Did you know that you can make a tuba spray fire using a tank of propane and some simple tubing around the bell? You could have learned all these things and more if you had attended last Thursday’s Union Speakers Forum event featuring “The Simpsons” Supervising Director David Silverman.
Silverman has been working on “The Simpsons” since it began on March 24, 1987. At that time, it was only a short on the “Tracy Ullman Show,” one of the first programs on the fledgling Fox network. Within two years, it was spun off into its own production, and is now one of the longest-running shows in television history, enjoying wide critical acclaim such as being named Time magazine’s TV Show of the Millennium in 1999.
“I originally thought that it would last at least two years,” Silverman said, explaining what he had thought of the show’s prospects when he signed onto the project. “I thought, ‘Well, whoever liked ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle’ will like this, so at least there’s that.’”
The event focused mostly on the technical aspects of producing an episode of “The Simpsons.” As supervising director, Silverman oversees animation on the episodes, and offered insight into the aspects of the show that make it different from other productions. One of the interesting points he made was that “The Simpsons” somewhat revolutionized modern animation by employing many animators in the US, rather than merely doing the writing and storyboarding—putting together simple mockups of the scenes in an episode—then sending the information to animators in Asia, as had been regular practice since the 1960s.
He described that while the show did employ many animators in South Korea, the process involves many animators in the US that produce work farther along in the development cycle than most other cartoons did when “The Simpsons” began production.
An average episode of “The Simpsons,” Silverman said, takes seven teams of animators approximately nine months from start to finish. The process begins with writing the script, which alone takes about six weeks. Once the original draft of a script is written, it goes through the “table read” gauntlet, where other writers offer feedback on the script and jokes are either added or removed. The script is revised, then the process is repeated with the voice actors reading the parts, so that the staff can get an idea of what the final product will sound like, as well as giving an opportunity to the actors to ad lib their own jokes that will be inserted into the script. It is revised again, then storyboarded and simple pencil animations are made.
After this, the simple animations are compared to the script, and revisions might be added again as more jokes can be made involving the visuals of the scene. This process can take up to 12 weeks to complete. After the “final” version of the script is produced, the real animation is done, and the “final product” is subjected to a mass viewing, where on average about two minutes are deleted for just not being as funny as it was thought it would be.
Silverman said that while some other media may be switching to purely computer-based development, “The Simpsons” is still mostly developed by hand with pencil. Each frame is sketched out by hand, then scanned into the computer and colored, and the animation done using the computer because of various technical limitations on frame depth. The primary development type, however, is still pencil.
All throughout the talk, Silverman showed various samples of what he was discussing, such as a simple pencil animation of Mr. Burn’s song “See my Vest,” as well as various scenes that were taken out for being too violent or “naughty.” One of his favorite outtakes was one that showed Itchy and Scratchy animators blowing up a cat with dynamite to study the funniest ways to kill a cat. The censors, he said, made them remove it because it was far too violent. When he pointed out that they do it in every episode in Itchy and Scratchy cartoons the kids watch on TV, the explanation was “But that’s in a cartoon!”
Much of the event was used for question and answer time from the audience. Questions covered a vast range of topics, from the upcoming Simpsons movie to how the songs are written to “Why are they yellow?” Silverman said the decision was made to make them yellow because it would have been harder to draw Bart and Lisa with hairlines; most of the “weird and quirky” things about the show, he explained, were done purely because it was easier and they were lazy.
