Inside SpongeBob SquarePants Animation Studio

Hey everybody. When you think young, hot, sexy Hollywood, two words come to mind. SpongeBob SquarePants.

Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants and this guy. Hi, I'm Chris Finnegan, I'm the producer here at Screen Novelties and we're working on a SpongeBob SquarePants Halloween special all in stop motion animation.

Ooh, stop motion magic. I hear some cool stuff going on back here. Hey, Alfonso. Hi. Might if I invade your workspace?

Sure.

So, Alfonso is working on the Flying Dutchman puppet who turned out awesome. He just looks really cool. Like these figures just have such life. They're just so expressive.

One of our artists is working on replacement mouths for the Flying Dutchman character. So, these allow the animator to make different mouth shapes and simulate talking. When the animator is doing a shot, they switch out all the different mouth shapes to get different sounds and words.

Come on, that's great. What a- what a great way to make a living, man. Let's check out another set.

Great. Justin's one of the animators on this and this is his baileywick. This is his scene.

Are you in charge of this sequence?

Uh, yeah, I guess in a way I am, yeah. It's up to me to walk those two guys, those tricker-treaters up to the door there and get it done, that's right. These two guys.

So, just for any young Hollywooders that might be wondering and about the path to this kind of like fun, artistic, crazy career. How did you wind up doing what you're doing?

Um, I actually had a background in sculpture and then I wanted to bring my sculptures to life, so that naturally led me to stop motion animation where you're bringing the characters, animating a puppet frame by frame and creating animation that way.

It's great. See? Living sculpture. You never know where you're gonna wind up. Yeah. Right? It's like follow your passions, man. I'm telling you.

The idea of this episode is that SpongeBob just doesn't understand spooky and scary and scary is funny. Yeah, this is uh SpongeBob's idea of what Halloween decoration should look like. He's all about butterflies and unicorns. We pride ourselves on our glitter collection here at Screen Novelties. We've used about three tons of glitter. I've inhaled about a ton and a half just since I've been walking around here. Screen Novelties has a very strict no pirates allowed policy. So, if you're a pirate, get out now. Yeah, this is kind of the nerve center for the stop motion special. So, we get the storyboard from Nickelodeon then we cut it up into lots of little panels and then camera here, our animation director, basically goes through and schedules the shots day by day. Some days an animator might only get one shot done that's five or six seconds long. Uh like, look. This is somebody's Thursday. All all that they're getting is these two panels of the storyboard where SpongeBob and Patrick in their Halloween costumes, Sandy's silhouette comes up behind them. Sandy comes up behind them. And then she goes And SpongeBob goes and Patrick goes

Alfonso, you just completed this sequence. Sure, can I bring a gas? Sure, can I bring a gas? Poor Alfonso. That's why uh stop motion animators are uh a little bit crazy. But they're nice. But they're crazy. That represents a lot of labor and a lot of posing those teeny little armatures and just stop motion is not for the faint of heart. It's bits and pieces and you know, you stitch them all together and hopefully you've got an awesome creepy Halloween patchwork stop motion quilt. Now you know the drill. Wow, Chris. Thanks for letting me uh walk around your crazy mad scientist Halloween haunted house laboratory. Uh, I always feel when I come down here like I stepped into an alternate universe, like a portal to to uh another world where everything. I feel kinda stop motion myself right now.

Yeah, well, thanks for coming by. It is kind of a miniature wonderland of sorts. So, I'm glad you could check it out.

Bam! Thanks for checking it out, gang. Yeah, enjoy the Halloween special. You're gonna love it.