Lisa Hanawalt | Designing Worlds and Characters

In Episode 11 of All Lit Up! we were joined by Lisa Hanawalt whose designs for Bojack Horseman are instantly recognisable! We chatted all things Bojack, Tuca & Bertie and her new show, Long Story Short. 

Hosted by Gilly Fogg.

Listen to Episode 11 now, or read the interview below!

 

Gilly: Lisa Hanawalt, it is so lovely to have you sitting right across from me in person. Thank you for coming all the way to Kilkenny, Ireland.

Lisa: Thanks for having me.

Gilly: Your first time in Ireland?

Lisa: Yes. It's very charming!

Gilly: Here we are in the Lighthouse Studios Library, which is a real treat. You are accomplished, multi-talented, and I think listeners to this podcast might be really interested to hear about when people like you---accomplished and skilled---get a little bit out of your comfort zone. Are you willing to go there?

Lisa: Yeah, of course. I'm rarely in my comfort zone. Just kidding.

Bojack Horseman

Gilly: I noticed that when you were working on BoJack, which went for six series, you worked on all six series. At the beginning, it was your first job on a big animation show, right?

Lisa: Oh yeah. Up until then, I'd never worked on a big collaborative project at that scale at all.

Gilly: And by the end, you were probably leading a team of... how many people?

Lisa: I mean, there were character designers, prop designers, background designers. It was a huge team. I was art directing as well, so very hands-on. Reading scripts, going to table reads, and breaking down the character designs.

Gilly: So what stage in BoJack did you get into the story and the scripts?

Lisa: Right from the beginning. I worked on the original pilot for the first episode. We did a 10-minute presentation episode to sell the show to Netflix. I was on board from the very beginning.

Gilly: You weren't creating the script for BoJack?

Lisa: No, I wasn't commenting on the writing either. It was more about seeing the breakdown of characters and talking to Raphael about them.I mean, occasionally Raphael [Raphael Bob-Waksberg] would be like,

"What do you think is better---Quentin Tarantuna or Quentin Tarantulino?" and I'd say, "Let's go with Tarantulino. I haven't drawn a spider yet."

 

Tuca and Bertie

Gilly: But then you get to Tuca and Bertie, which is your sole creation, your own characters---and suddenly you're being asked - and expected - to lead the writing room.

Lisa: Yeah, which was really scary. I didn't feel prepared or like I knew how to do it. But I developed the show very slowly over a few years with Raphael. In the first few weeks of the writer's room, Raphael was there, and I had experienced writers who knew the ropes.

It wasn't as difficult as I feared. I was anxious at first, but then I realised---I know all the answers! I know the story I want to tell. I know the characters front and back. If I don't know the answers, at least I know how to figure it out. Now I have this room full of people to help me flesh out the story I want to tell.

Learning How to Write Scripts

Gilly: Was it a big journey from that springboard to the final script?

Lisa: Yeah, because I'd never written a script before!

I had to learn that you don't just start "writing a script". You start with weird little scraps of notes scribbled down---sometimes on napkins, sometimes in a notebook or on the computer.

I look through my sketchbook and start putting things together into piles. Okay, this belongs with this. This idea goes with that. These two things pair together. Then I dream of a third idea that makes it really work. It's such a messy process.

Slowly from there, you build into the characters and the stories and the arcs and things you really want to tell. Then you structure that into a season and break it down into episodes. It all just takes such a long time. It's like making the clay before you sculpt the sculpture.

Story Rules and When to Break Them

Gilly: You're a Californian through and through. You studied at UCLA?

Lisa: Yeah, I studied studio art.

Gilly: There is a really set way to do these things in LA---you've got the hero's journey, Dan Harmon's famous story circle. As a designer coming to a writer's room for the first time, were you quickly looking up a hero's journey, or were you just listening?

Lisa: Actually, I was kind of obstinate about it at first. I was like, "I don't need a three-act story structure. I don't need an A plot and a B plot. That's so boring. I'm not going to do that!"... But I discovered along the way that it's actually really helpful to have this framework. Without it, the story falls apart or it's not satisfying to follow.

There are different variations---not everything has to be the hero's journey or the circle or whatever---but there's a reason why it's done that way.

Gilly: I think a lot of people do that. You know, you hear about the three-act structure, and you go, "I'm going to break it. Mine's going to be different." But Picasso was an incredible figurative painter before he went abstract.

Lisa: Exactly. There needs to be an underlying grounding structure. Humans communicate a certain way, and there's a certain structure that triggers the story in people's brains so they know they can follow it. The shorter the thing is, the less you have to follow a structure.

But doing a half-hour---well, technically 23 minutes each---that's long enough that you need an underlying structure or people are going to get really bored and it'll feel like nonsense.

How Many Jokes in a Minute?

Gilly: Your particular genre is adult animated comedy. There are also rules about how often broadcasters want the audience to laugh. How did you get the funny in there?

Lisa: I mean, at first we just did it naturally. Then Netflix asked for more jokes per minute. They kind of panicked about it being funny enough, so we had to go back and cram more things in after it was already animated, which was tricky---especially the first episode. After that, they calmed down.

Gilly: So you've got a finished episode, presumably really pleased with it, sweated blood and tears to get it finished. Then they say, "Can you add more jokes?"

Lisa: I mean, by the time it was finished, I couldn't even see it anymore. We'd overworked the first episode so much. Even today, I can't really watch the first episode comfortably.

The first episode---I was learning how to make a TV show. So, it doesn't find its footing until halfway through the first season.

Gilly: You had fully animated it already?

Lisa: Yeah. And then they say, "Can you add more jokes?"

We had to go back in and quickly reanimate parts of it.

We added things like Speckle tripping and falling and spilling a bunch of stuff---just absurd things that we hoped would result in a hard laugh, which is what they wanted.

Gilly: What is a 'hard laugh'? Did they define that?

Lisa: I don't know. I think hard comedy is like a guy getting hit in the crotch with a football. You know, human humour.

Gilly: Animation is like cake in the oven or setting cement. You had to drill it back open and kind of add stuff in?

Lisa: Yeah, that must have been the very opposite of funny. It didn't feel good. But I mean, we were lucky that we didn't have to reboard very much at all. The show was mostly published as intended.

Gilly: By the way animation series work---while you're getting episode one hopefully finished, episode seven or eight is still in a scripting stage?

Lisa: Yeah, or at least we wrote it pretty quickly. So by the time episode one was finished, episode seven or eight would probably be close to done as well.

Gilly: Did you have to go back and add hard laughs to everything?

Lisa: No, only the first episode. Because of the way their algorithm works, they were worried about people watching the whole way through the first episode.

Gilly: Can you explain that a little more?

Lisa: Well, I don't really understand how their algorithm works, but they said something like, "This many people watched 70% of the first episode and then they turned it off." That's the number they gave us. So they're really concerned about retention through that first episode.

Creating a Show

Gilly: To go back to the whole writing process, you've done how many seasons of Tuca and Bertie?

 

 

Lisa: Three. The first season on Netflix and then the second and third seasons are on HBO Max and Adult Swim and still available to view globally.

Gilly: Having created a show, does it make you feel more confident? And how much of a personal experience do you find it's important to bring to your work?...

Lisa: All of my work is very personal but in an allegorical way. I'm creating characters based on me but also based on other people. There's not a one-to-one like, "This person is me, this person is my boyfriend."

But I'm taking inspiration from everything that's happened to me personally and kind of spewing it back out again.

Animating a Music Video

Gilly: We ask every guest on this podcast to choose a short film, or it could be a game or an app. What have you chosen?

Lisa: The app Instagram. No, I'm kidding. I chose my own video. I hope it's not weird to choose my own music video. I just was thinking about it recently. I rewatched it---the music video I did for Tegan and Sarah called "Hang on to the Night."

They asked me to do this while I was on hiatus from working on BoJack. I feel like it kind of helped me sell my own show because it showed how my work is different from BoJack---it's more surreal. There's plant people, there's boobie imagery. I learned a lot while working on it.

Gilly: It is beautiful. Listeners, please go to the link and watch it because it is pure joy and pure Lisa Hanawalt. The imagery is all over it.

Lisa: Thank you!

Gilly: And I love the story of how it came to be. Who contacted you to do it?

Lisa: Sarah. So Tegan and Sarah followed me on Twitter back when I was on Twitter. They liked my comics. We'd had one of their songs on BoJack, but I hadn't really talked to them.

Then Sarah just DM'd me out of the blue and asked if I would do a video. They were doing videos for every song on this album, and she said, "Here's our budget."

And I just said yes. But I didn't know how to animate. I'm not an animator. I've never studied it. So I just boarded it out in my sketchbook and then learned how to use After Effects. I boarded out a loose animatic in Photoshop just by making a million drawings and piecing them all together in After Effects.

Then I hired animators to help me actually animate it. Nicole Stafford was a main animator on the project. She basically acted as a producer because she organized all the shots in a spreadsheet and figured out what I needed to get done by when.

I realized I need that. I'm not the most organised artist. But yeah, it was a really fun project.

Gilly: So it was basically a Lisa Hanawalt Studios production. That must have been an enormous amount of work!

Lisa: Yeah, it was absolutely just three months of nonstop drawing, animating, and learning how to use After Effects. I don't know if I could easily do something like that again, but it was really great to do it.

Gilly: It's unusual, I think, to be a creator and then say, "Oh, I'll try animating."

Lisa: Well, I just thought---I draw and I know how to make things move. I can make GIFs. How hard could it be? And I realized like three minutes of animation is actually a pretty long amount of time if you're doing it by hand.

There are parts of the video where it looks a little rough. Like there's trees tracking over the hill as the horse is walking over the hills, and these trees moving backwards in space. It's really complicated.

I did all of that by hand, just learning how to animate from scratch. So it looks a little chunky and clunky, but that was my first attempt.

Remote Collaboration

Gilly: Even sitting here in Lighthouse Studios---this is a huge building filled with hundreds of people when you're in production, all creating. The atmosphere is wonderful. If you've got something to talk about with an animator, you can walk and see them face to face. But Tuca and Bertie was animated in Korea.

Lisa: Yeah, we did some animation in-house, but the last two seasons I did with Adult Swim were during the pandemic. So I couldn't walk over to anyone and chat face to face. It was really isolated.

Gilly: Do you think you'd lose something then?

Lisa: I think so. I mean, I'm still proud of how those seasons came out, but it was really difficult. We had the writer's room over Zoom and I recorded actors in their closets. It was wild.

Gilly: When you tried to animate the Tegan and Sarah video, you did animate it and you succeeded. Did you get an insight into the level of performance and character that animators bring to your show?

Lisa: I mean, just being an artist, I kind of knew what it would take. But actually I also animated a sequence for Tuca and Bertie.

There's a scene where Tuca and Kara are dancing and then Bertie comes into the dance. It's all done by hand. We were going to farm it out, but then I just kept thinking I should do it myself because I knew exactly how I wanted it to look.

I wanted it to look very hand-drawn. I just thought it would be fun. So yeah, I spent like a month doing that.

Gilly: Your producer cleared your schedule to enable you to do that?

Lisa: I don't know how I did it. I was working on the show at the time. I think I did it like over Christmas break partly. Somehow I had the time. I filmed myself dancing and drew it based on that, drawing as different characters. Yeah, it was really fun. I was proud of that.

Gilly: When a show like Tuca and Bertie goes to Korea and then you get to do parts of it in the studio, does it make you feel like you should do it all in LA? Is that a discussion people have about why we're sending shows away?

Lisa: Yeah, I mean it's a budget thing. It's definitely cheaper to animate in Korea, but then stuff does get lost in translation, literally. It comes back and we have to adjust it the way we want it.

Gilly: Did you go out to visit the studio?

Lisa: No, I never have actually.

Gilly: Did you think about it?

Lisa: I'd like to. It would be fun. It wasn't suggested. I know we had other directors who went and I've met the owners of the studio. They came to the US to visit. But yeah, I don't know. I think it's a budget thing.

Long Story Short

Gilly: And you liked the work that came back and you trusted the process?

Lisa: Yeah, that's just part of it. It's also the manpower needed. There are a lot of animators needed. Especially for Long Story Short, my new show---it's like a pretty big show. There's a lot happening in it. So we need help. We can't fit it all in-house. So that's also being animated by Big Star currently.

Gilly: You're now supervising producer and designer of Long Story Short, and you're on the second season. Congratulations. It's such a gorgeous show spanning many different timelines with the same family. Do you miss not being in the writing room?

Lisa: Sometimes. It's kind of a relief, honestly, to not have to worry about that on this show. I can just clock in and do the art directing alongside Alison Dubois, who's a fabulous art director. She worked on Tuca and Bertie and BoJack as well.

We share an office. It's way less stressful not being showrunner.

Gilly: Maybe you'll go to a different network or platform for your next show?

Lisa: Maybe. Yeah. If it's a quirky idea that's not going to sell in the major markets, then I'll take it somewhere else. If it's not a premium cheeseburger idea.

Gilly: Gourmet cheeseburger?

Lisa: Yeah, that's what they want!

Gilly: Lisa, thank you so much for sharing your time with us at Lighthouse Studios. It's a real pleasure to have met you in person.

Lisa: The pleasure is mine. Thank you for having me.

Gilly: And go watch that Tegan and Sarah video. It is so good. Thank you, listeners, for being here with us as we beam out from Lighthouse Studios. Do come back and join us next time on All Lit Up!