If listening to a man talk about anthropomorphic blue jays, racoons, and gumball machines in a beautiful cathedral setting sounds a little strange to you, then you don’t know the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF).
OIAF, now in its 37th incarnation, offered a brief reprieve Sept. 21 from its stream of screenings to host a talk at Saint Brigid’s Centre for the Arts that featured J.G. Quintel, creator of the Cartoon Network series Regular Show, along with moderator Conrad Montgomery.
Entitled ‘OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! Regular Show is coming to OIAF!,’ the event began with a series of clips from the show and a brief presentation from Quintel on behind-the-scenes snippets before he handed the reins off to the floor for questions. This led to humourous anecdotes about the creative process and how his personal life manifested in Regular Show.
The series follows the exploits of Mordecai and Rigby, two slackers who work as groundkeepers for a local park. Quintel said many of the characters are based off people he knows, as well as himself.
“Mordecai is pretty much me in college,” Quintel explained, before revealing that Mordecai’s love interest, Margaret, wore a jacket in one episode that his real-life wife owns.
The show’s intense production schedule was also a recurring topic—every season is nearly 40 episodes.
“It’s really important to sleep,” Quintel told the crowd, which primarily consisted of animators from across the continent. “If you stay up, you just work slower and slower. Just go to sleep,” he said.
The show’s creative process is a long and arduous one. As a way of building inspiration, the writers would play games, such as pulling words from a hat and then writing a plot in two minutes that was inspired by the word, said Quintel.
“A lot of the time they’re bad, but five per cent of the time they make people laugh,” Quintel said. “Even with the process for [outlining episodes], it still takes our writers a day or two to actually write them.”
The writing team’s work ethic was also praised by Montgomery, who serves as Cartoon Network’s creative executive.
“I don’t know how you guys do what you do,” Montgomery, who has been working for the network since 2010, said. “You must be exhausted all the time.”
After outlining the episodes, the show goes through the standard process of outlines, storyboards, and recording sessions before finally being sent to Korea to be animated. It takes approximately five weeks to make a single 11-minute episode, according to Quintel, which makes the fact that the team rarely misses deadlines all the more impressive.
Quintel said there is no end in sight for the show, but he revealed that he has considered working in feature films. Still, he said he would rather get to work on his next television series as soon as possible once Regular Show concludes.
“I’d like to take what I learned from Regular Show and put it to use on something new,” Quintel said. Whether or not that includes anthropomorphic animals remains to be seen.
