The confounding thing about seeing your friends become successful is that while you’re obviously happy for the good things that come their way, a tinge of jealousy and envy is not unusual, and that certainly captures my feelings about today’s guest.
Most of you won’t know this man by name, but when you hear his credits, I think you’ll agree with me that he’s accomplished an awful lot, and you will probably understand why I greet him with a touch of envy, at the very least.
Kit Boss was a gangly young kid when I met him more than twenty years ago in the Clearwater Bureau of the St. Petersburg Times. He arrived as this year’s intern, joining the staff for a time in search of real-life newspaper experience. Kit was an instant hit with the staff, funny, self-effacing, and extremely talented at capturing life’s special moments in a way that the best journalists do.
When he later joined the Seattle Times as a TV beat writer, Kit participated in a few critics’ press tours in Los Angeles. He met several men and women who wrote for TV and started thinking, “Hey, maybe I could do that.” And eventually, he did.
So where, you’re wondering, have you seen Kit’s work? Well, his first job was writing a season for “Bill Nye, the Science Guy,” and he won a couple of Emmys for it. His next noteworthy gig was a big one, getting a story credit on the final season of “Seinfeld.” That led to a staff writing job on “King of the Hill,” which was then in its third season. Over the next seven years, he rose to executive producer on that show.
When “King” was briefly cancelled, Kit moved on, eventually landing a job on HBO’s sitcom “Lucky Louie,” starring comedian Louis C. K. When it ended after just after one season, he was asked to adapt the British series, “Creature Comforts,” for CBS. And “Creature Comforts” begins a limited run on CBS on Monday, June 4th, at 8:00 PM, which is why Kit – the show’s executive producer – is here today.DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN HERE.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES. BOB ANDELMAN: Kit, welcome to Mr. Media.
KIT BOSS: Thank you, Bob. Thank you. Your voice is just dripping with jealousy. It’s such a pleasure.
ANDELMAN: Well, and unfortunately, Kit, that introduction was so long, we’re out of time.
BOSS: Oh. You failed to mention my hot wife, Bob.
ANDELMAN: Well, you’ll send me a picture, and we’ll post it and share with everyone.
BOSS: It’s really good to be here.
ANDELMAN: Well, that’s great. I’ve been doing Mr. Media now for a couple of months, and no one has ever mentioned a hot wife before, so I’m going to be completely distracted for the rest of the interview.
BOSS: They’ve got them. I’ve Googled those guys, and they’ve all got hot wives.
ANDELMAN: Well, Kit, tell everybody about “Creature Comforts” and explain, if you would, why our mutual friends, Tim and Bridget, are really squeamish about its debut.
BOSS: Oh, gosh. Well, it’s such a cool idea, and I can say that because it wasn’t mine. It’s easy for me to say that. It’s sort of a hybrid between animation and a reality TV show but more like an old style documentary kind of show where we start with documentary audio that we gather from interviews conducted with just ordinary Americans all around the country, and then we take the audio, and we animate it coming out of the mouths of plastocene animals that are done in stop-motion animation, like “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” or “Gumby” or more germane to this discussion,
Wallace & Gromit. The same studio that does the
Wallace & Gromit movies is the studio behind this show. They’re the ones who first did it, Nick Park, the guy who’s won a few Oscars. He was the one who came up with the idea and did the Academy Award-winning short in I believe it was, God, no, I’m blanking, I think it was in the late 1990s that he won an Oscar for that, and that led to a British series of the same name, “Creature Comforts,” and now it’s crossing the pond, and we’re trying to do our version of it for CBS.
ANDELMAN: I need to point out in the interest of total disclosure that if it wasn’t for “Creature Comforts,” there probably wouldn’t be a Mr. Media today, because Kit actually hired me as a field interviewer for the show more than a year ago, and
that forced me to invest in a digital audio recorder, and when that assignment ended, I started thinking of other uses for it, which led to this interview series.
BOSS: Wow, I had no idea.
ANDELMAN: Yeah, so it all comes back to you, Kit. Everything comes back to you.
BOSS: Well, that’s a weight off my shoulders. I hope your listeners or listener, whatever the case may be, appreciate that.
ANDELMAN: I hope so. Well, you know, journalism, you gotta disclose everything these days.
BOSS: What was that experience like for you doing those interviews?
ANDELMAN: It was hysterical. This is a little inside, but I wound up interviewing friends of ours from the newspaper business, Tim and Bridget, and they were perfect for it. Of course, now you are interviewing me.
BOSS: That’s true. It’s the old newspaper reporter in me. I just don’t like answering questions. I’d much rather be the one asking them.
ANDELMAN: Well, it was great, because I know that there was a whole platoon of interviewers….
BOSS: More than 40 across the country.
ANDELMAN: Was it that many?
BOSS: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: You guys were great in that you gave us a Web site to look at or some discs to get familiar with the style and the way to do it, and I knew having watched that when I sat down with Tim and Bridget, for example, that they were going to be gold, because they have interesting voices, and they interact with each other, and I would be interviewing them, and I could be picturing in my mind that these two could be animals. In a nice way. We love them, but….
BOSS: Well, it was a really interesting, kind of slippery process, because they have great voices, and that’s kind of where it starts.
We want voices that are filled with the kind of character that an animator can listen to them and just kind of imagine what a creature might be doing, because we never see, none of us ever sees the people doing the interview. Everything that comes after that is sort of invented. We invent what animal they are, we invent the situation that they are in, we invent their body language.
And if you start with a great voice that has a lot of character, and I can quite honestly say, it’s pretty rare, it’s a hard thing to find someone who has a voice like that. I certainly don’t have it. Most announcers, most journalists don’t have it, because they’re trained to kind of take the edges off, but Tim has this great, kind of southern Indiana drawl and a ton of attitude. You know, he had opinions about things, and Bridget, too, and despite that, the really interesting thing is, we only used one clip of their voices in the entire series. That’s how much good stuff we had to choose from.
ANDELMAN: Oh, that’s great. That’ll put them at ease, too.
BOSS: Yeah. They’ll only have to worry about that one. That one’s really, really embarrassing. Fifteen seconds.
ANDELMAN: Well, it was a great concept. My daughter, who is now ten, would have been nine, I guess, at the time, watched over my shoulder as I was watching sort of the training videos for how to do it and the kind of thing we were looking at, and she and my wife just thought it looked like it would be hysterical.
BOSS: The original show, the series, not just the Oscar-winning short, which was ’89 was actually when Nick Park did that. That’s when he won the Oscar for the short film, the series was just hilarious. One of the biggest challenges for the British show was getting across the idea to the viewers that these are real people. They are not scripted responses. They are not actors in a sound booth somewhere recording lines like every other animated show. It’s just people who are spontaneously answering questions, and it’s hard when you see the show to imagine that none of this stuff was invented. It was just people kind of speaking from the heart.
ANDELMAN: And God bless each and every one of them. It’s funny.
BOSS: It makes me feel kind of sappy when I see the show and start to feel like, this is a great country, that there are all these people with these really funny points of view and these great regional accents, so many of which you just don’t hear on TV because when actors do regional accents, they have about four or five that they choose from. Here, you hear the difference between someone who’s from Mississippi and someone who’s from Alabama or someone who’s from northern Florida and southern Florida. I found that pretty fascinating, myself.
ANDELMAN: Now when we spoke a year ago and this was gearing up, full of enthusiasm, it’s very exciting, but of course -- and you’ve worked on animated programs before -- the process is a long one, and in this case, unfortunately, several things happened in the last twelve months that made this perhaps not as happy an ending getting to air as it might have been.
BOSS: Well, I wouldn’t say it was unhappy, it was a rocky road. It wasn’t a smooth process. We had envisioned… I mean, my hope was that the show would be a mid-season replacement for CBS and air in January or February, and we geared our production schedule to that and were ready to deliver the show so that it could air in January or February. Then a show called “Rules of Engagement” came along and was successful. I think it surprised a lot of people in how well it did, that show with David Spade and Patrick Warburton.
ANDELMAN: Right. Because the world was ready for another David Spade show, you know that.
BOSS: I am not going to say anything against David Spade. He’s got that “The Showbiz Show.” He does that second banana character really well, and people seem to like it. The show just was a really good fit for the CBS lineup. It made a lot of sense. People who were watching “Two and a Half Men” stuck around and watched “Rules of Engagement,” and the good side of it is, we’re doing a show for CBS, which is the most successful, has the highest rating comedy on TV and is, aside from the “American Idol” effect, I mean, CBS still may win the overall ratings for the year, even with “American Idol” factored into it. So they are the number one or number two TV network, so it’s a great platform to have a new show, and the down side of that is, most of their stuff is working. They don’t have a lot of holes to fill. They weren’t desperate to put on a show, to put our show on, so we kind of went on the shelf for a few months, and now we’re going to air in June, which. I think taking everything into account, I’m perfectly happy with it. It means that we won’t have to get as big numbers as we would have if we were on in February just because fewer people are watching TV in June. But it’s not so late in the summer that everybody has gone off on vacation and forgotten how to watch TV and doesn’t realize that there is actually fresh programming that does come on in the summer.
ANDELMAN: I can see that there are certainly two ways to look at a summer run. One is, you are not competing with a lot of fresh programming. On the other hand, there’s the perception, sometimes, that CBS is just burning off something it’s bought and may not plan to see it again. But you obviously have an upbeat attitude toward it.
BOSS: Yeah, I don’t feel that they’re burning us off. That’s not the attitude. I think the people at CBS loved the original show. They loved the idea. They loved the things that they were seeing, and they’re really happy with the finished product.
There’s a pretty impressive list of shows that debuted in the summer that went on to be really interesting, successful shows, “Seinfeld” being one of them and “Northern Exposure” on the drama side. That was a big success story for CBS.
That was a summer series. My take on it is it’s a great place for programming that’s a little bit out of the box and that’s a little different from everything you’ve seen during the regular season, and I think there are enough viewers out there who are eager, who are hungry for those kinds of shows that if they find us, I think they’ll really enjoy what they see.
ANDELMAN: Was the business side of “Creature Comforts” affected at all by the fire at Aardman and the dissolution of the deal with DreamWorks?
BOSS: Nope. The DreamWorks deal was purely a movie distribution deal, so that didn’t affect any of their TV projects, and the warehouse that burned, I think there weren’t any old “Creature Comforts”-related sets or characters in there, it was mostly a bunch of old movie stuff. And regardless of that, all of the sets, the fire happened before we started production, and everything that we did on the show was from scratch. The characters were all designed from scratch. There were maybe a couple that we used when we were in a pinch from the old series when we just didn’t have enough time to build something new, but for the most part, all of the backdrops, all the scenery, and all of the props, which are all built by hand, all these little tiny scale cars and toasters and everything you see on the screen, shrubbery and I mean, I could go on, wicker furniture that they make out of telephone wire. It’s crazy the stuff that they build there. They do that all from scratch, so that didn’t affect us at all.
ANDELMAN: One of the most interesting things about having made a very small contribution to this was learning about how it’s all done behind the scenes. I kind of wondered, as part of this airing on CBS, if the public would get any kind of behind the scenes peek at how this comes together, because it’s just as fascinating as the show is entertaining.
BOSS: Yeah, we’ve provided CBS with some behind the scenes stuff for electronic press kits or for however they might to choose to promote the show. A lot of that footage, I think, will wind up on the DVD. There’s definitely going to be a DVD release of the show.
ANDELMAN: Oh, good, good.
BOSS: And there’s also, for people who are really into it, the UK version of the show comes with a making of extra on the DVD, so people can check it out there. One of my hopes is that this show is so built for viewing in non-traditional places, places other than TV, whether it’s on the Web or on your cell phone or whatever, that I hope… We’ve tried to stress to CBS that it would be great if they could promote the show across all those different platforms and give people who are really into it a way to go to CBS.com and see a little bit of footage of the making of, see what some of the characters actually look like in real life. People always seem to be really fascinated with that.
ANDELMAN: Oh, definitely.
BOSS: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: That was definitely part of it, whereas, you know, to see “King of the Hill” behind the scenes, well, it’s a bunch of people standing at microphones, not the same. I think one of the examples from the British show that we saw was the interviewer interviewing somebody while he’s wrestling. That was just great, you know, and the sounds.
BOSS: We interviewed some people ice skating, who were doing figure skating. We interviewed, I don’t want to give away the joke, but there is a really, what I think is a really good gag involving a couple of guys in Beverly Hills who are wine oenophiles, I guess you call them oenophiles, is that a wine aficionado?
ANDELMAN: I believe that is it.
BOSS: And they are doing wine tasting, and we took that and twisted it in a way that we hope makes it really funny when they become animals. So yeah, when you can get those sounds of real life being lived, that gives the animators one more thing to animate to, and that gives you some great possibilities for acting. The other thing that we do that I always found interesting about the process is we get all these interviews, we choose the audio that we think is funniest, and then before we send it over to the UK, we do what’s called live action videos. Did you see that at all on the stuff that you saw?
ANDELMAN: No. No, I didn’t.
BOSS: It’s a big part of the process at Aardman. We actually act out the parts, we act out the scene. For example, if Tim and Bridget are sitting there talking about art or they are talking about what attracted them to each other, two of us from our staff, in front of a video camera would sit there or stand there and kind of mouth the parts, but more importantly, act out with our body language and our attitudes and our looks. We send those live action videos to the UK as a guide, and then the animators, whichever the animator was who was directing that shot, would also act out the parts for themselves as a way to kind of understand, to sort of embody the character, kind of feel what the attitudes were and understand the action better. That’s why, when you watch Aardman stuff, it’s so incredibly life-like and so full of character, the eye movements and the little head tilts, just the little subtleties that are hard to get even if you are a human actor, and then to translate into these tiny plasticine characters, that’s to me one of the secrets of why the show turns out so funny.
ANDELMAN: Okay, you’ve got this experience of this many years on “King of the Hill” and now “Creature Comforts.” “King of the Hill” and “The Simpsons,” I believe the animation gets sent like over to Korea or somewhere to be done?
BOSS: They do what they call the key poses, they do in the U.S., and then they send it over to Korea to do all of the in-between frames and a lot of the drudgery, but yes, the bulk of the animation on a show like that is done overseas.
ANDELMAN: And both shows, obviously. The process with Aardman, how different is it than the process with “King of the Hill”? Is one any faster than the other?
BOSS: They both take about the same amount of time. I mean, you figure from the time you have a finished audio track, it takes about seven or eight months until you have the completely finished animation. The processes are different, and I won’t bore you with the specifics, but the number that kind of sticks in my head that’s pretty amazing for “Creature Comforts” is that a single animator working on a set who is animating a scene between one or two characters typically can shoot about three and a half seconds of animation a day. That’s not much animation. Imagine if you are an actor, imagine you are doing a movie, and the director realizes, well, gees, I can only do four seconds today, it’s a really laborious process. The big difference I think at Aardman is that they do it, they don’t farm anything out. They do it all themselves, and you really get the feeling that they’re these incredibly obsessed craftsmen, artists who just love animation and who pour their hearts into it and just a level of care and love and creativity that they put into stuff. Their standards are so high. That’s, I think, why their stuff turns out so well.
Click Here to Keep Reading!© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
"Creature Comforts" art and video © Aardman Studios.
Labels: Creature Comforts, King of the Hill, Kit Boss, Louis CK, Lucky Louie, Seattle Times, Seinfeld, St. Petersburg Times, The Simpsons
Of the nine books I’ve written, it just occurred to me that the first and last have Pulitzer Prize connections—not for my work, unfortunately, but still…![[Get Copyright Permissions]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.gif){kind=small}
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