When you were creating the storyboards, have you ever consider to change the storyline (but keeping the main theme of the episode)? If you do, how do you deal with it? Asked by Anonymous

This is something that at Pixar would happen all the time (almost to a fault), but in TV it’s a very dangerous endeavor to make big changes to the story during the storyboarding process. There’s not enough time or resources to restart on an episode at a certain point, and usually within 2-3 weeks of boarding, the general direction should be pretty nailed down (Usually a storyboard artist has 5 weeks to work, then moves on to the next episode).

We had two big blowup episodes in the first half of the first season. “BROTHER UP” was the harshest and most painful by far. After fully boarding the episode, the network was not very happy with it. The art department also relayed that the episode was too complicated, and we needed to minimize the amount of locations. In addition, the cut animatic clocked in at over 16 minutes, which were all signs we needed to make some big adjustments. We decided to pull all the story artists off what they were working on, and for 3-4 days, it was all hands on deck. If you look at the credits, you’ll see 7 storyboard artists worked on this episode, so now you know why. I’m losing hair just writing this, remembering how stressful that was. At the end of the day, our talented story artists did amazing, and saved the episode.

The second big blowup was “CUPCAKE JOB”. After 5 weeks of storyboarding, the episode just wasn’t working for me. In hindsight, we probably didn’t spend enough time in the writing phase on this- then in the boarding phase we struggled to execute the story. So we got together with a bunch of the story artists and writers and rewrote act 2 and 3 completely (except for Ice Bear’s storyline in the fountain). We reboarded in about a week with the help of Lauren, and our two revisionists at the time, Louie and Danny (their first time boarding, and they killed it). The rewrite worked way better than before, the network was happy with it, and it was another close call.

Every episode has had its issues, but these two were probably the biggest direction changes. There are other shows that may be able to rework full episodes in a short amount of time, but for how complex our show can get, we can’t do this too often.

- Daniel Chong