The story behind Our Bewildering Universe
TelltaleGames
Former Telltale Staff
The week before Culture Shock was released, we added the following Flash movie to our site as part of the Interim Theater. Since the game is now out, we've moved it here to the blog in all its glory. You may be wondering just where this odd little Flash movie came from. Wonder no more! Steve Purcell tells all below.
How did you get hooked up with the people at Lightsource Studios?
Lightsource Studios is a commercial art production company south of San Francisco run by two old friends of mine. Gary Winnick hired me at LucasArts when he was the Art Director there many years ago and I've known Frank Cirocco since we were both doing comics. Back in 2001 my older brother Lee who has written many books on various technical subjects, while somehow managing to make complicated content entertaining to read, was working on a book about Flash animation. He asked if I'd be up for doing a piece to include in the book that could be dissected to show the process. I immediately called Lightsource and asked if they would be interested in working on a little short.[readmore]
What was the process for making this? What parts did you work on and what parts did Lightsource do?
I wrote an outline for the short and fully storyboarded it. Then I went in and started drawing the keyframes on paper. I broke the figures into layers that could be vectorized which was all handled by the Lightsource crew. I gave them color guides since I wanted it to look muted like faded 16mm film. As they began to assemble the pieces and start moving them around Gary and Frank were supervising the animation. I was working at ILM at the time but managed to come down to the Lightsource office and offer some additional Direction (The three of us share the Director's credit). It was fun going online with Gary and Frank looking for the sound effects. It was amazing how many various fart sounds we had to sift through to get the right brain-popping effect. There was a whole section listing "human" farts and I had the urge to call up the sound effect company and demand that they guarantee that the farts were indeed human.
How come you never made any more of these?
I'd love to do it but it's actually very time-consuming. Fortunately, Lightsource had a crew that they could devote to this project at the time. I certainly don't know how to do Flash and am not likely to learn soon.
The music in the short is credited to Lee Purcell. Is that your brother?
Yeah, my brother put together the weird minimalist sort of X-files background theme. We would always talk about doing some kind of creative project together. This is as close as we've gotten so far.
He has a hilariously dry sense of humor and has a lot to do with influencing what I think is funny.
Thanks Steve and Lightsource Studios for letting us host this short!
How did you get hooked up with the people at Lightsource Studios?
Lightsource Studios is a commercial art production company south of San Francisco run by two old friends of mine. Gary Winnick hired me at LucasArts when he was the Art Director there many years ago and I've known Frank Cirocco since we were both doing comics. Back in 2001 my older brother Lee who has written many books on various technical subjects, while somehow managing to make complicated content entertaining to read, was working on a book about Flash animation. He asked if I'd be up for doing a piece to include in the book that could be dissected to show the process. I immediately called Lightsource and asked if they would be interested in working on a little short.[readmore]
What was the process for making this? What parts did you work on and what parts did Lightsource do?
 Storyboard graphic, from The Age of S&M. |
How come you never made any more of these?
I'd love to do it but it's actually very time-consuming. Fortunately, Lightsource had a crew that they could devote to this project at the time. I certainly don't know how to do Flash and am not likely to learn soon.
The music in the short is credited to Lee Purcell. Is that your brother?
Yeah, my brother put together the weird minimalist sort of X-files background theme. We would always talk about doing some kind of creative project together. This is as close as we've gotten so far.
He has a hilariously dry sense of humor and has a lot to do with influencing what I think is funny.
Thanks Steve and Lightsource Studios for letting us host this short!
This discussion has been closed.