Opening Night with a Great Interview

Simpsons News — Posted 04 Nov, 2002 by MrBurns

So it was opening night with the Treehouse of Horror 13 this Sunday and it was great to see some new Simpson material out. But what keeps the show so fresh and why do we still love to watch the show? A recent article in the Citizen-Times goes over the why we still love and watch the show. Is it an addiction due the fact of watching since young ages? Is it the fact that the characters don't change, unlike shows where kids grow-up and characters mature? Or is the writing just that damn good? The article goes over these and has an interview with Brian Kelley who is a a staff writer and supervising producer for the show. He goes over the normal day of a writer for the show, the process of making a show as well as many interesting facts. Read this interview and the article by Clicking Here.

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Q: Can you briefly trace the life of an episode?

B-K: It's a long process. You can roughly divide it into thirds: writing, recording and animating. The writing usually takes a couple months. Although the first draft of a story is produced by a single writer (who gets a "written by" credit for that episode), the draft is rewritten several times by the staff as a whole. It's a humbling process in which virtually every word you've written is thrown out and replaced with something funnier you wish you'd thought of. Next, the amazingly good cast (which provide the characters' voices) performs the script, and we make further revisions before they go into the studio to record. The edited tape serves as a template for the animation artists, who produce storyboards and a rough pencil version of the entire show, called an "animatic," before beginning the final, color version that you see on the air. Throughout the animation process, we keep rewriting to improve the script. Needless to say, the final episode may bear little resemblance to the first draft of a year before.
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