Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1313527
WINTER 2020 23 D E PA R T M E N T above: At times, it was difficult to keep track of similarities between sections and they used a board with Post-it notes as a visual guide. "We had an 8- to 10-foot-long physical print of the episode laid out left to right," says Sawyer. writers who worked on the Boss Baby and Carmen Sandiego specials recall endless numbers of Post-it notes on storyboards trying to help the team keep each branch of the tree distinct. "It was quite a web and we were spinning a lot of plates," says Duane Capizzi, co-executive producer of To Steal or not to Steal, "but a key thing honestly was having someone on the team who knew gaming and who had familiarity with how to design games. Producer Sam Nisson was our secret weapon. He was able to chart out the branches in a huge tree-like diagram with all these figurative branches. That was really the key to being able to see how it all played out." "One of the speed bumps I encoun- tered was just how easy it was to lose track of similarities between certain sections," agreed Boss Baby's Forgione. "Because it was nonlinear, there were some cases where some parts would jump further along. It was interesting to see how three different teams could come up with similar stock choices or even just compositions for very similar moments at different points in the story." In many of the recent programs, the decision to build an interactive episode originated with the studio. With more than 10 specials, Netflix has started to make the practice mainstream. For a property like Carmen Sandiego, which originated in gaming, an interactive adventure was a natural choice, accord- ing to Capizzi. But the "make it interactive" directive, while replete with creative challenges, is also a daunting ask when you're attempting it for the first time. Boss Baby writer Brandon Sawyer, recalls being terrified when the idea was broached. The first question to be answered—why? "What's the justification on our show?" Sawyer asks. "Why interactive? How can we use this format in the world of this show we had been making for—at that point—30 episodes? What can we do that requires [a show] to be interactive and not just, 'Here's a typical story we would tell with a couple of token branching choices, but really it amounts to a normal episode?'" Sawyer's first idea for Get That Baby was to have the series' villains return and hatch a plot to kill Boss Baby. While that plot didn't fly, the villain reunion was incorporated and the plot