One of the creators of Deep Fried, Live! starring Tako the Octopus, quite possibly the most popular animated show on the Internet, Rob DeBorde has played roles in every aspect of producing the hit - a feat never even considered before the days of the Internet. Still striving to see his creation take the next step towards television stardom, he strongly believes that simplicity continues to be the key to success in this business, as proven time and time again by the original greats which continue to live on in our hearts...and through syndication!

Just Laugh's Managing Editor, Matthew Gatesy, recently took a little time to talk with Rob about the production of Tako's show and his take on the future of animation on the 'net. Here's what went down...
 

First of all, where did the concept for Deep Fried, Live! come from?

Let’s see... Originally it started with the character – Tako. I had created Tako probably three years ago as part of a comic strip that had a whole bunch of oddball characters. Tako was this octopus that lived in a bucket and he was at kind of a pet store full of weird characters, and he was the best thing about the strip. My partner, Dave O’Neal, really liked the character and when he quit working at Electronic Arts, he said, "Well, we should do something together with that octopus character of yours." I said alright – let’s do an animated show, and he at the time had gotten really into cooking, as I was – he was a little bit ahead of me – and he said, "...with all this cooking stuff, let’s make a cooking show and have him being the main character." And so Deep Fried, Live! was born out of the concept of putting an octopus in a kitchen. It made a lot of sense, obviously having a guy with a lot of arms to not only do the work, but also to get a few of them cut off once in a while!

So I just took it from there, watching Emeril day and night to see all the things we could make fun of, and that’s where Deep Fried, Live! basically came from. The show itself, in terms of the content, after we got more serious about the cooking, is a lot more like Good Eats – it’s a show on the Food Network geared more towards teaching you how to cook or teaching you the elements of food science, that kind of stuff, and so in terms of the show, we patterned it more after that. Of course, there’s not an octopus hosting that show, so it’s a little different...

The recipes are a combination of Dave O’Neal and I, and it’s mostly then experimentation. A lot of recipe writing is taking what somebody else has done and changing a few things about it to make it your own. There aren’t really any hard and fast rules about borrowing because everybody does it, but after we really got into it more, most of it really just comes out of the kitchen. Dave and I both have different styles of cooking – he’s a lot more into the slow cooking, spend lots of time experimenting and tweaking, while I want it done fast, and as raw as possible and as clean as possible. So I tend to grill a lot more and do more fast searing and cook more fish and meat, and Dave does a lot more soups and stews and things that take some more time.

Yeah, everything that’s in the shows, in terms of both the recipes and content – the music, the animation, all of that. To be honest, playing in the kitchen is the most fun of all of it because it’s like, Let’s see what the best way to cook a piece of Ahi is, and then we get ten pieces of fish, cut them into little bites and try cooking them in different ways.

Quite a bit! It starts with the script – I have a show bible that has as many ideas that I have come up with, and I think there’s probably about three dozen or so. We draw from those – I write the first pass at the script and then it gets kicked around between Dave and I, and we usually get some other people together to work on it. Once we finalize the script, it gets recorded – the dialog gets recorded. We have now two setups – I have an audio setup in my office so that I can record stuff and the main studio is Dave’s. He comes from an audio background, so he’s got quite a nice setup. We’ll record all of the dialog, and while that’s going on, I’ll be doing character design and creating any new sets that have to be done. At this point, we’ve got a lot of stuff already done, so it’s mostly just integrating the characters. I do all of that work starting in a notebook, just sketching pictures of the characters, and then creating them online in Illustrator and then bringing them into Flash. I usually end up doing storyboards for, if not the whole episode, the main parts that aren’t as obvious. At this point, we’ve got kind of a short-hand with the animation – whoever’s doing it, so they know what to expect based on the script.

The animation process is definitely what takes the longest – that’s the part that tends to slow us down the most because it takes a big time commitment. At the level at which we’re doing it – we’re doing it at 18 fps (frames per second) – and we try to do it as high quality as we can, so we’re pretty slow at that end! It’ll be anywhere, for a ten minute episode, six weeks to two months of just straight animation. If we get some more people in the office, that time will cut down, but once we’ve got the show flowing, usually in the past it started with Dave doing most of the animation while I’m cleaning up more storyboards and characters, and then I’ll come onboard towards the end and do more, but lately I’ve been doing more animation.

Once we get close to the end, all the little music and sound effects cues start coming in and we’ll start incorporating all of the food elements – the sidebar stuff, the recipes, the technical things, working on some of the extras that get packed on. Usually by towards the end, we’ll announce that it’s coming out and then when everybody’s expecting it, we’ve given ourselves a deadline and the last week or two is testing and making sure that everything works right…and looking for as many typos as we can find! There’s always a few that slip through – we still get one every once in a while, somebody will find something in the first episode buried in there and love to point it out!

Oh boy... That’s tough because different episodes have taken longer – I think the third episode took the most time overall because that episode had a lot of music and animation. Gee whiz, I’ve never even sat down to think about that because there was probably about a three month process from when we started the script to when we actually published it, and somebody was always working full-time on that episode, I think we had actually four people working on it, production-wise, mostly being myself and Dave and another guy...I really don’t know. I mean, you can figure in that time of three months, for the most part, two guys working full-time or close to it and two more guys working part-time, so whatever that works out to, that’s probably what it is.

[Editor’s Note: nearly fifteen hundred hours, if our calculator works right!]

I do the voice...I do most of the voices on the show. Tako actually gets pitch-shifted up so that his voice sounds a little higher than mine – obviously I don’t sound like Tako when I’m speaking! There’s obviously some acting – of the all of us, I’m the one who has a little bit in the way of acting skills, so I get to do the voices and it’s kinda cool, you know? You do the voice and then you act it out, and then you throw it through the processor and all of a sudden, hey – it’s Tako! It sounds like that stupid octopus...

Yeah, there are two we haven’t done yet that are my favorite, in terms of the scripts and the stories – they’re the funniest. I went back and read them recently and its like, "Wow, those are gonna be great – let’s get ‘em done!" But of the ones that are out there, I probably think that the third one is the best, but the second one maybe has just a better basic story – the king prawn episode. But in terms of what we’re trying to produce, the chocolate chip episode probably has overall the best of everything put together.

Well, what I’m working on right now is a shorter episode that I’m hoping to get done by Halloween, which I think is doable. That’s always been our biggest crutch – just being able to complete these things. We start out with the idea that this one’s going to be shorter and we’ll get it done quicker, but they always end up being ten minutes anyways! The one I’m working on now will hopefully be done by then – it’ll be about a three minute episode, and then we’ve got two more lined up that are in production – they’ve been scripted and are in storyboard stage. One is about salmon, where Tako actually goes to Alaska to spend some time trying to figure out why salmon spawn, how they do it and how they get where they’re going, and during that process, of course, he teaches you how to cook salmon. The other episode is a steak episode, as we’ve had a number of people request that, and in this one Tako gets abducted by aliens and ends up having to show this alien the proper way to cook a cow because they’re having trouble with the calculations...it’s just really funny – I was pleased with the script on that one.

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