Transom is proud to welcome the creative team behind our favorite animated series, Creature Comforts. If you haven't seen it, get thee quickly to their Transom pages and catch up. This series comes from Aardman Animation in England (home of Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, etc.), and is inhabited by claymation animals whose identities are derived from audio interviews with real people. There's a kinship between radio and animation, because we all imagine the source of voices we hear, and if our imaginations are free-ranging and whimsical, the voices might look like this.
Kit Boss, Richard "Golly" Goleszowski, and Dan Sinclair talk to Transom's Samantha Broun. The conversation is transcribed, illustrated with audio/video, and is downloadable in MP3. There's also a "Making Of" video, and all sorts of background and technique, including interviewing. And you can ask questions. This is good stuff. You'll like it.
Going back to the notion of sideways thinking for a minute – was this something each of you brought to the job or learned once you were there? I’m also curious how, if at all, the skill of sideways thinking translates to your life and/or jobs post-Creature Comforts? Is it something you continue to use? I can imagine never seeing or hearing the world the same way again.
In regard to people being offended by the creatures they were turned into - I had the good fortune of doing interviews for the series and none of the people I interviewed were bothered by their animals. I do wonder though if the fact that the series was cut short is a reflection of the American public's inability to laugh at itself.
I have so enjoyed watching these videos -- they are rich with real humor and life. I'd love to hear even more about the process of choosing the animals that accompany a particular interview and span of tape.
To respond to Sam's question of Feb. 12, wherein she won't let this notion of sideways thinking die:
In some sense, it seems to me that every creative act involves an exercise in lateral/sideways thinking. I mean, there's the logical part of your brain that's always trying to make sense of the plot, and figure out, well, if this happens then what should happen next? Or trying to structure the syntax of a line so a joke is as funny as possible, just in the way it's expressed, and how the information that's required for the joke to make sense gets doled out. And then there's the part of your brain that's engaged in trying to take something that's familiar and twist it in a new way, so that suddenly it comes alive and carries all sorts of new meanings and associations.
Okay, this all sounds very vague and hi-falutin' so now you probably want an example from the non-Creature Comforts world. Let's see... I think a few TV shows are distinctive because they're full of lateral thinking. "Seinfeld," for instance. Or "The Sarah Silverman Program." Or especially the kind of improv-based comedy being done at the Upright Citizens' Brigade, or by The Kids in the Hall, in their heyday. As Golly has mentioned in the past, Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons were filled with sideways thinking. In a more general sense, I think every comedy worth its salt tries to take topics that are out there in the culture and look at them in a new way. It's something I tried to do when I wrote for "King of the Hill," and every other show I've worked on.
Jeez, it's hard to talk about comedy. Such a fragile creature. And by dissecting it, you almost invariably kill it. What's the famous quote (like most famous quotes, I've seen it attributed to half a dozen different people, but I remember reading it once in an interview with Elvis Costello): "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." The same could be said of what we're engaged in here.
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