A lot has happened for you since leaving Walt Disney Feature Animation to go indie. You've had a baby and been nominated for an Emmy! What's life like these days?
Things are awesome. My wife and I have the baby routine down and I’m able to spend the vast part of my week, writing, pitching and going out on various meetings.
What was the first thing you did after being notified of the Emmy nomination for "Baxter & McGuire"?
5 seconds later: Emailed my wife with the news. I’m thrilled.30 seconds later: Google to check that my name is actually officially listed. It is. Yay!
2 minutes later: Call my wife. Ask if she thinks anyone will like my new script. She yells at me and calls me a loser.
Hey, 2 minutes of uninterrupted excitement is pretty good, right?
Are there any further plans for "Baxter & McGuire"?
Comedy Central has an option to pick up more episodes but they haven’t pulled the trigger. To be honest, I don’t know that I would do any more. 8 episodes of one show is a pretty good run. I’m not sure I would grow more as a director doing another season. We are going to enter it into the festival circuit. That’s just getting started. We’ve entered just one festival so far, SIGGRAPH, and got accepted, so I’m pretty psyched. Well, I was for about 30 seconds. ;-)
Your animated short film, "The Zit", is enjoying a remarkable run on the international film festival circuit. What's the latest on that front?
It kind of continues to do its thing. I haven’t entered it into festivals for ages, but festivals will periodically ask to screen it. It continues to tour with Spike & Mike. PBS has rights to air it nationally for another year. And I’ve sold TV rights to a few foreign territories. It’s also been getting a lot of hits at Atom Films—the only place to view it on-line currently. If folks haven’t seen it, they can check it out here:http://www.atomfilms.com/film/the_zit.jsp
And I continue to sell DVDs through direct sales and my various distributors.
What have you learned from the experience of making and distributing "The Zit" that you would pass along to animators just starting their own projects?
Whether folks are working by themselves or with a team, I would pass along the following, hard won advice:
- Come up with a great story and characters. Don’t (that’s right, don’t!) assume either is great until you’ve gotten feedback. Show it to people you trust to give you egoless feedback. Think you’re an auteur? Maybe you are, but you still can’t cordon yourself off. That’s what happened to George Lucas after the first Star Wars trilogy. The auteur then created the dreck prequels.
- Make sure you’ve done step 1 before you start production!
- Figure out how to pitch your project succinctly and with energy. I promise you’ll need to sell someone on your passion project. Maybe it’s other artists you’re soliciting help from or maybe it’s a Post house you need a favor from.
- Be totally committed and if working with others, lead by example. It's a lot easier to ask people to work on spec if they know you are busting your ass to make the best damn movie possible.
- Set goals, follow up, and don't sweat slips. Everyone works better with hard deadlines. Even if they are unrealistic goals, set them anyhow.
- Build momentum. Everyone likes to be associated with a winner. Make sure your production feels like it is always gaining steam. Eventually, you might find that people are running to hop on the train, not off! Same rule holds if it’s just you on the project.
- Don't get discouraged...for long. It was amazingly hard to work on personal projects for what may be be years and not get discouraged sometimes. But attitude is 75% of the battle and if you believe you will get things done, you will. That sounds like a platitude, but it is the truth. Hard work and a little talent pays off!
What, if anything, can you tell us about your animated feature project, "What Lies Below"?
The cheesy Hollywood pitch is "Journey to the Center of The Earth" meets "Star Wars" meets "The Matrix"...with dinosaurs. The longer pitch follows:
What if the monstrous meteor that hit earth 65 million years ago didn’t actually kill off all of the dinosaurs? What if, instead, a group of intrepid survivors took refuge underground -- burrowing and building huge subterranean caverns; developing speech, written language, technology; and evolving into a fearsome cross between dinosaurs and aliens? While these evolved dinosaurs have indeed flourished over the millennia, they have finally outgrown their steamy home five miles beneath ours. There is only one place to go…up…to the surface. And it’s up to a shy waiter to overcome a childhood trauma, unlock his mysterious powers and save the world from what lies below.
I’m doing a polish on the script in preparation to take it out after Labor Day. I’m looking for a vis dev artist to work with me on a handful of concept drawings that I will use to set the project up, so if anyone is interested, please send along your portfolios! I’m looking for artists who have portfolios that lean towards the realistic side of the universe. We need to come up with creatures that look both alien and dinosaur-like at the same time. And we need to be able to sell the scale of the underground civilization that lies 5 miles below us.
While the script consumes most of my time right now, I have a bunch of other projects I am working on. I have two TV projects that we are packaging right now to take out to the studios, and I have 5 internet series I am pitching.
I am also really excited about an animated feature project I am attached to direct. The movie is titled, “Surface Tension,” and is based on a famous sci-fi novella by James Blish. We have a terrific treatment and some fantastic art by this incredible (ex-Disney) visual development artist named Tom Dow. The story is a coming-of-age, action/adventure tale about a race of microscopic aqua-humans living in an alien undersea world who have to solve the mystery of their origins while battling to save their world from voracious 'Eaters.' We are hoping to raise the money overseas and do it as a co-production.
The transition from managing a software department at Disney to flying solo as an independent filmmaker must have been significant. Is there anything that was more challenging than you expected, and what are you enjoying most about it?
Actually, the transition was really easy for me. I think because I had been thinking about it for so long and had been doing the indie thing for so many years while working the day job, it really just felt like I snipped the cord of this huge anchor that had prevented me from pursuing my dreams.
That said, there have been challenges. It took me a while to figure out how to be productive working from the house and not waste time. Since it is so hard to predict what will sell and when, my goal has been to develop and pitch a bunch of treatments and attach myself as a director to as many other projects as possible so that I can maintain a stream of paid work. Working broad and deep is definitely not easy.
Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?
I really want to direct feature films. I hope that I’ll have an opportunity to direct an animated feature in the next year and within 5 have established enough credibility to direct more animated or live action features. I’d also like to live in a house with 2 bathrooms!
Thanks for your time, Mike! We look forward to seeing what comes next. :-)
Thanks, guys! Me too!