tiernan420 asked: How many drafts of each episode do you and Matt make before coming up with the final outline?

We go through at least two drafts of the outline. Matt and I each write half and then combine our parts and make some edits. Then Rebecca and our supervising directors, Joe Johnston and Kat Morris (and previously Ian Jones-Quartey), take a look and give notes. We’ll do a rewrite together and then send it to the network execs overseeing the show for approval. If the network has minor notes we’ll address them as we hand out the outline to the storyboard artists, but if they have substantial problems we might have to do a rewrite.

But before we even get to writing the 2-3 page outline, we write a “premise.” This is a single page summary of the episode that goes through the entire process explained above. So in a way that’s a whole other draft.

Now some outlines have had major major rewrites. Sometimes we’ll talk out a story and feel like we’ve got a solid skeleton and when we write the premise or first outline it just doesn’t feel right. Maybe not enough happens, maybe the story feels “muddy” or has too many elements competing for attention. Or it’s decided we should just approach it from a different angle.

The story that had the most drafts I can think of was probably “Marble Madness” which was originally called “Gem Droid”.

That thing went through drastic changes. We always knew the episode would introduce a secret part of the Kindergarten to the Gems, but originally it was a story about Steven falling down a hole in the Kindergarten and getting trapped with a robonoid by himself. Steven at first disliked the robot but by the end he couldn’t help but empathize with it. But I think one of the problems might have been that it felt too much like a pet episode- and we had already covered that vibe with Lion and Centipeetle.

Then it became a story about a robonoid crashing to earth and breaking. The Gems are baffled as to why Peridot would send a droid to Earth so Steven convinces the Gems to fix it to see what it was up to. The robonoid starts walking and the Gems begin to follow it but they tell Steven to stay behind for safety. Steven doesn’t want to be left out of things, so secretly he follows them on Lion. For various reasons this felt structurally uneven and tonally it seems strange to have the Gems keep Steven out of a mission like this.

That evolved into the final version. Instead one robot we had multiple robonoids continually crashing down to earth. The Gems keep defeating them but they realize that this rain of robots is just not going to stop and they don’t know what to do. Steven, who is used to not knowing stuff, encourages them to take a chance and follow the robot to see if they can learn what it’s up to. They follow it all the way to an underground chamber in the Kindergarten, where Steven takes his “just ask” philosophy a little too far.

Joe Johnston and Jeff Liu turned it into a fantastic board and made all the work feel worth it, but phew - it took a bit.

6:34 pm • 14 January 2016 • 3,620 notes