I said, Steve, whatever you want to change, like, we don't want to mess with SpongeBob too much, Like I want to make sure it all still fits in the world that you created. And he said, I've done everything I want to do with SpongeBob. I want you guys to do what you do with SpongeBob. What a great guy, SEUs. Welcome to SpongeBob binge Pants, Nickelodeon's official podcast about all things SpongeBob. I'm Hector Navarro and I'm Frankie Grandang. We have an incredibly special episode for you today that requires a little bit of historical context since SpongeBob square Pants started all the way to today, SpongeBob, along with the Patrick Star Show are still animated on pencil and paper and then they're scanned to be colored digitally. They're animated at rough Draft Korea, though technically only season one of SpongeBob was sell animated and painted. This process, combined with hand painted backgrounds and using X sheets for timing direction, is increasingly increasingly rare in the animation world, and it's part of the reason why SpongeBob and The Patrick Star Show have such beautiful cartoon looks to them. Yes. So stop motion animation feels kind of like the spiritual sibling to SpongeBob's traditional animation style in that it's another very labor intensive process where extreme artistry and detail is put into every single frame. So using stop motion animation for specific SpongeBob gags, holiday specialist moments in the movies, and various shorts on the Patrick Star Show seems like a total no brainer. You're right, Frankie, and it's a no brainer, And so is the no brainer of us talking to some of the creative genius is behind the stop motion animation of the SpongeBob universe from screen novelties. We're talking to Shamus Walsh and Mark gabbaetto. Let's do it here we go. I'd love to start by understanding what type of person does it take to be able to be that patient to make stop motion animation? This is marked. I think a lot of stop motion animators start off by being highly influenced by something that they saw as a kid, either at being Rudolf Rends Reindeer or King Kong, or like the old Harry House in movies, like you know that this weird figure exists, that you can go and grab it and you want it, you want to play with that, and the way it has its own personality and it's and it's life. It's fascinating. Even when you watch stop motion today, there's something weird about it because even though you can make life out of drawings or rigged characters on a screen, there's something I've knowing that that actual figure exists that is very attractive. His jolly little eyes on me. It take me me, I like buying use like a christ mystery and what about you, Shamus. You know, it's a whole process and and we enjoy the process. And that's the funny thing about getting involved with stop motion animation. It's one of those things that you're kind of just really drawn to do, I think from the time you're a kid. So yeah, it does take this certain level of patients. But at the same time, when I'm animating, I don't feel like it's this tedious process. On each of our stages, we only shoot about five or six seconds a day, But when when when you're doing that process, though, I'm just kind of like zenning out and I really enjoy the process of it, So I don't feel like it's this tedious thing frame by frame, because I'm always just thinking about the overall acting of the shot, because when you're animating, you're you're kind of sharing that performance with the voice actor, so you're kind of like playing off what they're accenting. And obviously all the voice actors on the show are so great and give you so much to work with. No hold your holly. We're singing the best Christmas song ever, and that's silver Bells, raw Fells Putty. Hey, I want to sing Randolf the Red Nose Seahorse, people fell cash and not about the holidays. Jamis you brought up that it's not tedious to you guys, And I feel like whenever somebody like sixty Minutes or you know, NBC Nightly News or whatever, comes over to your studio and does those little interviews with you guys, the reporters always like so stunned that it's not it's not tedious. First of all, they're stunned by the process and to hear that it takes a whole day to make five seconds. I think that most normal people go, well, why are you doing this job? I would quit, like like they just can't understand it. Even that we do this this archaic form of animation. Uh, we aren't really opposed to technology. You know, you're always trying to find a tool that helps you create the performance or tell the story that you want. Um. So we do use a lot of computers to both like model things and also to give us video reference as we're shooting. Because when you look at two D animators, you know how they what they call flip and rolling the drawings. When you see them flipping and rolling, you could never do that with stop motion in the olden days. But then as soon as video taps and things like that started coming out, then you could kind of start flipping and rolling your single frames, which was a real game changer for stop motion. So yeah, like around the you know, late nineties is when that all started being available. And one of the cool things though, that because we were able to jump into the digital age with capturing everything digitally and stuff, we are still able to implement our our desire of one to shoot everything in front of camera as opposed to creating it later on in after effects or whatever. You know. We always still try to go for like, well, here's this ghost, are we going to just create it in a in a program or are we going to just build it and shoot it in front of the camera, in front of everything else. And so that that ended up making things a lot easier for us because you saw instant feedback. So now it allows us to make even more things to put in front of camera and shoot it all at the same time, as opposed to shooting in different layers. Us to following night and everyone is getting their bloomers there off that holiday is no word wait a monen of you. That kid isn't screaming with bear. You guys have a very lovely of relationship with SpongeBob from the Goofy Goober Rock sequence, the snowmallisk, the entire episode. It's a SpongeBob Christmas. You guys did the ten near anniversary recreation of the opening sequence. You did Legends of Bukini Bottom, the Halloween special that we all love so much. So how did this relationship with SpongeBob start? I know, I was trying to remember how that all played out, because I feel like it's been you know, man, over ten twelve, you know it's been it's been close to twenty years. Shay, Yeah, Yeah. Mark Osborne, who had directed Kung Fu Panda. He was working on the feature shooting the live action stuff, right, didn't Mark shoot the palm tree and the water and stuff for the first for the opening? Yeah, for the opening? Yeah, that classic little live action bit of the island and then we go underwater. Yeah yeah, yeah, they shot that in Steve spool really yeah, because he and Steve were old friends. I can't hear you who does? Yeah, Marc was telling a sad story and it's funny. Even even the guy that built the island, his name is Joe Schmidt. He's a he's a dear friend of ours and he still works on the SpongeBob stuff with us. We have this, you know, small group of talented people would really like to work with, but it's this very close knit small group. They've pretty much been with us through all of this stuff. The core group is really only about ten to twelve people who specialize in either fabricating the puppets or lighting the miniature sets, or building the miniature sets or animating. Is it a family affair? Like do you find that you find a lot of people that are like, yeah, my dad, my grandfa No I wish, I wish, but no, no, not real because usually probably if someone if your grandpa was a stop motion animator or whatever, they probably the kids probably see how crazy it is of a way to try to live. I think I'll become an accountant and have a stable job. So so you guys were describing like Mark Osborne is working on the first SpongeBob movie, and that's where and is shooting the live action elements that the various like David Hastle hop stuff, all that weird fun stuff and that first SpongeBob movie. And that's where screen Novelties comes in. With the Goofy Goober animation segment. We built the Clay Goofy Gooper SpongeBob and the thing got direction from Mark and Steve and we had this crutty little like just one room shooting in space where we're renting up by the Empire Center in Burbank. And when we were ready to shoot next to the train tracks, which is great when you're trying to shoot stop motion and the whole places rattling. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. But then you know we're ready to shoot and stuff, and and Mark's like, hey, we're gonna come over and check it out. And we're like oh cool, And we thought it was just gonna be a Mark and Steve. It was like the entire crew. Everybody showed up. Everyone just showed up and we're like, oh my gosh, you know, and they're all kind of looking at this clay globe. That's all it really was. And we had like a little replacement mouths and stuff like that. You know that we were able to star background sculpt in there and everything and and a star back backdrop. Yeah. Like that just shows you how passionate the SpongeBob crew is, because that's what I remember is when they came over, they were just so nice and I felt like we immediately clicked with them. And after they left, I was like, these are the nicest people. Yeah, And I mean I think that that shows in the show, you know. I mean that's why the show is so great, is that all these really passionate, dedicated people love making this thing. Wow, polite of me, I forgot to introduce you to my that's the most realistic, fake moster I ever saw. Who are you calling? Fank with us with stop motion? But this is what we love to do, So we put a you know, love in every frame. So we appreciate it because sometimes you work with people or clients or whatever and they just want it done. I just remember Steve really being fascinated and asking questions about the process and stuff, and it was just so nice to have them be that interested in what you were doing for this little tiny section of the movie. I think even Tom Kenney showed up. Wow, that doesn't surprise me. Tom is also just such an enthusiast of animation in general, and it's so cool that you guys are describing how the whole crew showed up. Do they also have a sort of passion for stop motion animation because it seems like they've used you guys as much as they possibly could throughout the years. That's what initially got me drawn to the show is that it wasn't just a standard cartoon. From having the opening shot be that pool with a little miniature tree, like if, the whole show felt very multi media from the beginning, you know, and it felt like they were trying to fit in as many like weird cutout animation type shots, like almost like a Terry Gilliam esque kind of thing being and then from stop motion or just a little model miniature shot obviously the two ds the core feel of the show, but they always knew to just throw in a few little cool things like that to to work on your imagination in the background there, and that's what drew us to the show right away. Others are talking never rent erupt, don't put people down or leave the toilet seat up. It's the time for family and Holly and Turkey. Business season, Jupy Jerky Gallant Santa brought nearly every gift on your list wide wine about the one Eddie miss don't be It's Christmas, Christmas, It's Christmas. Out of all of the SpongeBob stuff that you've worked on, do you guys have any favorite moments, anything that you're particularly proud of. The SpongeBob Halloween that we did, that's my favorite too. The scare song was so much fun. It was a blast. It was the last project we had worked on with Steve. You know, he personally oversaw everything, and Mark and Vince are the showrunners on it and stuff, and they're just like, do whatever you want, you know, and they just like I remember sitting in the antimatic edit with with Mark and Vince and Steve and we're just like is it COVID do this, or like, yeah, is it Covie do this? Yeah, it's a cool with do this. You know when they say how nice they are, they really are. I mean it's it's amazing. And what Steve had told me once, you know, I said, Steve, whatever you want to change, like, we don't want to mess with SpongeBob too much, Like I want to make sure it all still fits in the world that you created. And he said, I've done everything I want to do with SpongeBob. I want you guys to do what you do with SpongeBob. What a great guy, this guy, you know, Steve Hillenberg, the nicest guy in the world. He was just so gracious and giving with letting everybody else be creative as well. Yeah, just open to you know, everything, saw us to feel true to the SpongeBob world. But within that he did give you a lot of leeway. But the funny thing is it's almost too long of a leash to give you because what we found right away was that stop motions. Already this new interpretation SpongeBob himself of the character, you don't want to do anything that betrays how everybody already feels about how he is, how what what he would do in certain situations, and it's and it was kind of intimidating to be kind of like scooted out into the bikini bottom world. It was exhilarating and I like sort of scary and feeling like a big responsibility at the same time, because they're these beloved characters and we love them and you know, when you're reinterpreting them in this new way. As much as the show already has this um mixed media vibe to it, we were really worried that people would be like, well, this isn't the SpongeBob. We know, you know, he's weird, but the thing is the show is weird, so uh, you know. We had a really good time, and it was also really hard to just interpret this adorable two D character into a dimensional model that doesn't feel like weird and gross. He had to exude the SpongeBob energy and that was a huge challenge. The first couple of times we were going through trying to interpret the character, we realized how much we had to push and pull things and how every aspect of the fabrication plays into it, from finding the exact right foam that when you light, it kind of has this happy glow to it. You'll actually see an evolution of our design of SpongeBob through over the years because the opening title, you know that SpongeBob has a lot more like he's really dense looking. And then we switched over to a couch phone. The open cell qualities of it are able to catch light and so that gives out a little bit of a luminous and quality. But then we went from there, we refined it further into the Halloween one, and then we devolved for Patrick Starr. Yes, yes, it's the whole version of it. It's like, you know, the black and white. It's so cool. Yeah, why I do laughing? Uh? Hatrick? What's wrong with you? Spongebobryses? Patrick? Is this really happening? And this isn't funny? Was wrong? SpongeBob? Sometimes skirryqual scary? Which character was do you think the most difficult to pin and nail down? Was it SpongeBob himself or was was there anybody else was giving you some difficulty? Well, they each have their challenges, you know, squid Word having all of his thin little legs and stuff, and Mr Crabs being this giant monolithic shape, you know. Um, yeah, he was hard and so was Patrick because in the cartoon, Patrick's mouth goes right into his body. You know, the physical limitations of trying to build that and animate it. We're there, and so we kind of just took advantage of our limitations and kind of like for the Christmas one, we decided to, you know, give him a little scarf that you know, it was believable that his mouth would stay in the head area. What's that? It's a trap, a trap for Senda dated with Christmas treats. Will trap Santal in my box blocked up like fort knocks and make himself the clocks well Christmas, Oh he cookie. I think it was plankton, Oh wow, because so many different scales and close up plankton, miniature scale plankton. He was a little bit harder because as he was so tiny, you know, in the first few that because we're literally going like little bean size puppets, and that was kind of like excruciating. We had we called it the jelly bean plankton because he was about the size of a jelly bean. But then when he was close up, we had a larger one. Guys, what's so funny is that Frankie and I just spent the last few weeks talking to some of the actors who portrayed these characters on the Broadway Show, and and we were asking them similar questions and they also, I think Frankie correct me if I'm wrong, kind of saying, like, the most difficult one to conceptualize was Plankton because of the size differentia, which is so so funny that both you guys and the Broadway Show are having to solve similar problems in different ways, which is so great. No doting stuff right up, Mr Crabs and it's fang of Johnny, mindless fools, stopped bikini bottom mine I punish just victims and then drag down the lifeless bodies to the kitchen. You have fun. It's funny because when we were starting out doing stop motion, we remember a specifically saying the thing you don't see a lot of in stop motion is this cartoony two D sensibility to the timing because stop motion is so technical and how you have to tie characters down and all that stuff. We're like that, maybe that's what we want to explore, is doing this cartoonish stuff because a lot of our animation heroes are to come from the two D world, and it was just really nice to meet the sponge about guys because it's like the most classic cartoonish show because it still has all these squashy, stretchy and and and having characters transform and do strange things like SpongeBob can do all these crazy things. So it was great to say, like, wow, let's put all this to the test and see how cartoony we can go. And the funny thing is you're still working with a TV schedule, TV budget. You know, it's like you've got time to do something, but you don't really have that much time or money to do much. It's just the nature of it. It took us five months to shoot the Christmas special, and I think another five months to shoot the Halloween special. There's a couple of months of fabrication before that. Like the whole process usually takes about ten nine or ten months from first thinking to post. They they really inspire you, and so you want to do a good job for them. They're trusting you, so you don't want to let them down. So we put every weel everything we can. Plus we're excited to try a bunch of stuff every time. We always give ourselves some new thing we want to try. Even when we were doing the Goofy Goober Globe, Steve at that time even mentioned he's like, someday we're going to do it. The whole Christmas special. Yeah, it was, wasn't it? What like it was years until that happened. It was, Yeah, we shot Coffee Guber's two thousand three four and then we got the special, so so he was thinking about it even then. And then after we finished the Christmas Special, I think I remember he and Vincent sank after this, we're gonna do a Halloween thing and then you know, it's like five years, but they eventually pulled it off. Wow, you hear that some of giants that Briou spirit singing. There's just one thing to say. You have worked on so many cool different projects. You've done stuff for cup Head Captain, Underpant's Adventure time. McDonald's is a client, So you've done all this amazing work in your minds? Why is SpongeBob special? What does it mean to screen novelties to have worked on SpongeBob stuff? For me, whenever I think about SpongeBob, I just think about the crew that we work with, and I do love watching the shows, even though I don't watch them that much after we make them, because it's kind of weird. We've gotten so much work from them and we appreciate every single frame we do for them because we know that they do it because they have faith in what we do. They trust us to come up with something new, and we do it because I mean a lot of other people might say like, oh, what you know, you there's too much, Like I want to move on to somebody else, Like we enthusiastically do any SpongeBob project that they offer our way because, um, we know how cool they are, how creative they are. The characters allow you to be uninhibited with your arrange, emotion and the way you want to animate them. Also, just like how you know, Steve trusted us in the beginning and we didn't have a lot of experience and that really goes as far. Yeah, just every collaboration that we have with the whole SpongeBob troop just feels like this natural fit. You know, Um, we're all coming from the same planet humor wise and design wise, and we're not there day to day as part of the crew, so we feel kind of like we're this sort of little honorary members off to the side that we get to sometimes come in and play with everybody where the we're cousins that show up every once in a while. Every time we get to do that, it's just such a blast. That was such a fantastic interview with those two unbelievably talented human beings. I mean, we're learning so many cool, fun facts that have never been discovered before on this podcast. I love that once again we're learning that Stephen Hillenberg is just the nicest guy in the world and for him, for him to have created it would ended up being the most successful cartoon show of all time. It just makes me very happy, and I love the creative energy behind everything that Screen Novelties is doing huge. Thanks again to Shamus Walsh and Mark Cabaetto for spending some time with us, sharing their stories and just like getting me even more excited about stop motion animation, which is so so cool. So thanks again, guys, and don't forget to listen in every Thursday for new episodes of SpongeBob binge Pants wherever you get your podcast and if you like where we're up to over here, spread the word, write a review, and keep watching cartoons. Thanks, and we'll see you next week.

I said, Steve, whatever you want to change, like, we don't want to mess with SpongeBob too much, Like I want to make sure it all still fits in the world that you created. And he said, I've done everything I want to do with SpongeBob. I want you guys to do what you do with SpongeBob. What a great guy, SEUs. Welcome to SpongeBob binge Pants, Nickelodeon's official podcast about all things SpongeBob. I'm Hector Navarro and I'm Frankie Grandang. We have an incredibly special episode for you today that requires a little bit of historical context since SpongeBob square Pants started all the way to today, SpongeBob, along with the Patrick Star Show are still animated on pencil and paper and then they're scanned to be colored digitally. They're animated at rough Draft Korea, though technically only season one of SpongeBob was sell animated and painted. This process, combined with hand painted backgrounds and using X sheets for timing direction, is increasingly increasingly rare in the animation world, and it's part of the reason why SpongeBob and The Patrick Star Show have such beautiful cartoon looks to them. Yes. So stop motion animation feels kind of like the spiritual sibling to SpongeBob's traditional animation style in that it's another very labor intensive process where extreme artistry and detail is put into every single frame. So using stop motion animation for specific SpongeBob gags, holiday specialist moments in the movies, and various shorts on the Patrick Star Show seems like a total no brainer. You're right, Frankie, and it's a no brainer, And so is the no brainer of us talking to some of the creative genius is behind the stop motion animation of the SpongeBob universe from screen novelties. We're talking to Shamus Walsh and Mark gabbaetto. Let's do it here we go. I'd love to start by understanding what type of person does it take to be able to be that patient to make stop motion animation? This is marked. I think a lot of stop motion animators start off by being highly influenced by something that they saw as a kid, either at being Rudolf Rends Reindeer or King Kong, or like the old Harry House in movies, like you know that this weird figure exists, that you can go and grab it and you want it, you want to play with that, and the way it has its own personality and it's and it's life. It's fascinating. Even when you watch stop motion today, there's something weird about it because even though you can make life out of drawings or rigged characters on a screen, there's something I've knowing that that actual figure exists that is very attractive. His jolly little eyes on me. It take me me, I like buying use like a christ mystery and what about you, Shamus. You know, it's a whole process and and we enjoy the process. And that's the funny thing about getting involved with stop motion animation. It's one of those things that you're kind of just really drawn to do, I think from the time you're a kid. So yeah, it does take this certain level of patients. But at the same time, when I'm animating, I don't feel like it's this tedious process. On each of our stages, we only shoot about five or six seconds a day, But when when when you're doing that process, though, I'm just kind of like zenning out and I really enjoy the process of it, So I don't feel like it's this tedious thing frame by frame, because I'm always just thinking about the overall acting of the shot, because when you're animating, you're you're kind of sharing that performance with the voice actor, so you're kind of like playing off what they're accenting. And obviously all the voice actors on the show are so great and give you so much to work with. No hold your holly. We're singing the best Christmas song ever, and that's silver Bells, raw Fells Putty. Hey, I want to sing Randolf the Red Nose Seahorse, people fell cash and not about the holidays. Jamis you brought up that it's not tedious to you guys, And I feel like whenever somebody like sixty Minutes or you know, NBC Nightly News or whatever, comes over to your studio and does those little interviews with you guys, the reporters always like so stunned that it's not it's not tedious. First of all, they're stunned by the process and to hear that it takes a whole day to make five seconds. I think that most normal people go, well, why are you doing this job? I would quit, like like they just can't understand it. Even that we do this this archaic form of animation. Uh, we aren't really opposed to technology. You know, you're always trying to find a tool that helps you create the performance or tell the story that you want. Um. So we do use a lot of computers to both like model things and also to give us video reference as we're shooting. Because when you look at two D animators, you know how they what they call flip and rolling the drawings. When you see them flipping and rolling, you could never do that with stop motion in the olden days. But then as soon as video taps and things like that started coming out, then you could kind of start flipping and rolling your single frames, which was a real game changer for stop motion. So yeah, like around the you know, late nineties is when that all started being available. And one of the cool things though, that because we were able to jump into the digital age with capturing everything digitally and stuff, we are still able to implement our our desire of one to shoot everything in front of camera as opposed to creating it later on in after effects or whatever. You know. We always still try to go for like, well, here's this ghost, are we going to just create it in a in a program or are we going to just build it and shoot it in front of the camera, in front of everything else. And so that that ended up making things a lot easier for us because you saw instant feedback. So now it allows us to make even more things to put in front of camera and shoot it all at the same time, as opposed to shooting in different layers. Us to following night and everyone is getting their bloomers there off that holiday is no word wait a monen of you. That kid isn't screaming with bear. You guys have a very lovely of relationship with SpongeBob from the Goofy Goober Rock sequence, the snowmallisk, the entire episode. It's a SpongeBob Christmas. You guys did the ten near anniversary recreation of the opening sequence. You did Legends of Bukini Bottom, the Halloween special that we all love so much. So how did this relationship with SpongeBob start? I know, I was trying to remember how that all played out, because I feel like it's been you know, man, over ten twelve, you know it's been it's been close to twenty years. Shay, Yeah, Yeah. Mark Osborne, who had directed Kung Fu Panda. He was working on the feature shooting the live action stuff, right, didn't Mark shoot the palm tree and the water and stuff for the first for the opening? Yeah, for the opening? Yeah, that classic little live action bit of the island and then we go underwater. Yeah yeah, yeah, they shot that in Steve spool really yeah, because he and Steve were old friends. I can't hear you who does? Yeah, Marc was telling a sad story and it's funny. Even even the guy that built the island, his name is Joe Schmidt. He's a he's a dear friend of ours and he still works on the SpongeBob stuff with us. We have this, you know, small group of talented people would really like to work with, but it's this very close knit small group. They've pretty much been with us through all of this stuff. The core group is really only about ten to twelve people who specialize in either fabricating the puppets or lighting the miniature sets, or building the miniature sets or animating. Is it a family affair? Like do you find that you find a lot of people that are like, yeah, my dad, my grandfa No I wish, I wish, but no, no, not real because usually probably if someone if your grandpa was a stop motion animator or whatever, they probably the kids probably see how crazy it is of a way to try to live. I think I'll become an accountant and have a stable job. So so you guys were describing like Mark Osborne is working on the first SpongeBob movie, and that's where and is shooting the live action elements that the various like David Hastle hop stuff, all that weird fun stuff and that first SpongeBob movie. And that's where screen Novelties comes in. With the Goofy Goober animation segment. We built the Clay Goofy Gooper SpongeBob and the thing got direction from Mark and Steve and we had this crutty little like just one room shooting in space where we're renting up by the Empire Center in Burbank. And when we were ready to shoot next to the train tracks, which is great when you're trying to shoot stop motion and the whole places rattling. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. But then you know we're ready to shoot and stuff, and and Mark's like, hey, we're gonna come over and check it out. And we're like oh cool, And we thought it was just gonna be a Mark and Steve. It was like the entire crew. Everybody showed up. Everyone just showed up and we're like, oh my gosh, you know, and they're all kind of looking at this clay globe. That's all it really was. And we had like a little replacement mouths and stuff like that. You know that we were able to star background sculpt in there and everything and and a star back backdrop. Yeah. Like that just shows you how passionate the SpongeBob crew is, because that's what I remember is when they came over, they were just so nice and I felt like we immediately clicked with them. And after they left, I was like, these are the nicest people. Yeah, And I mean I think that that shows in the show, you know. I mean that's why the show is so great, is that all these really passionate, dedicated people love making this thing. Wow, polite of me, I forgot to introduce you to my that's the most realistic, fake moster I ever saw. Who are you calling? Fank with us with stop motion? But this is what we love to do, So we put a you know, love in every frame. So we appreciate it because sometimes you work with people or clients or whatever and they just want it done. I just remember Steve really being fascinated and asking questions about the process and stuff, and it was just so nice to have them be that interested in what you were doing for this little tiny section of the movie. I think even Tom Kenney showed up. Wow, that doesn't surprise me. Tom is also just such an enthusiast of animation in general, and it's so cool that you guys are describing how the whole crew showed up. Do they also have a sort of passion for stop motion animation because it seems like they've used you guys as much as they possibly could throughout the years. That's what initially got me drawn to the show is that it wasn't just a standard cartoon. From having the opening shot be that pool with a little miniature tree, like if, the whole show felt very multi media from the beginning, you know, and it felt like they were trying to fit in as many like weird cutout animation type shots, like almost like a Terry Gilliam esque kind of thing being and then from stop motion or just a little model miniature shot obviously the two ds the core feel of the show, but they always knew to just throw in a few little cool things like that to to work on your imagination in the background there, and that's what drew us to the show right away. Others are talking never rent erupt, don't put people down or leave the toilet seat up. It's the time for family and Holly and Turkey. Business season, Jupy Jerky Gallant Santa brought nearly every gift on your list wide wine about the one Eddie miss don't be It's Christmas, Christmas, It's Christmas. Out of all of the SpongeBob stuff that you've worked on, do you guys have any favorite moments, anything that you're particularly proud of. The SpongeBob Halloween that we did, that's my favorite too. The scare song was so much fun. It was a blast. It was the last project we had worked on with Steve. You know, he personally oversaw everything, and Mark and Vince are the showrunners on it and stuff, and they're just like, do whatever you want, you know, and they just like I remember sitting in the antimatic edit with with Mark and Vince and Steve and we're just like is it COVID do this, or like, yeah, is it Covie do this? Yeah, it's a cool with do this. You know when they say how nice they are, they really are. I mean it's it's amazing. And what Steve had told me once, you know, I said, Steve, whatever you want to change, like, we don't want to mess with SpongeBob too much, Like I want to make sure it all still fits in the world that you created. And he said, I've done everything I want to do with SpongeBob. I want you guys to do what you do with SpongeBob. What a great guy, this guy, you know, Steve Hillenberg, the nicest guy in the world. He was just so gracious and giving with letting everybody else be creative as well. Yeah, just open to you know, everything, saw us to feel true to the SpongeBob world. But within that he did give you a lot of leeway. But the funny thing is it's almost too long of a leash to give you because what we found right away was that stop motions. Already this new interpretation SpongeBob himself of the character, you don't want to do anything that betrays how everybody already feels about how he is, how what what he would do in certain situations, and it's and it was kind of intimidating to be kind of like scooted out into the bikini bottom world. It was exhilarating and I like sort of scary and feeling like a big responsibility at the same time, because they're these beloved characters and we love them and you know, when you're reinterpreting them in this new way. As much as the show already has this um mixed media vibe to it, we were really worried that people would be like, well, this isn't the SpongeBob. We know, you know, he's weird, but the thing is the show is weird, so uh, you know. We had a really good time, and it was also really hard to just interpret this adorable two D character into a dimensional model that doesn't feel like weird and gross. He had to exude the SpongeBob energy and that was a huge challenge. The first couple of times we were going through trying to interpret the character, we realized how much we had to push and pull things and how every aspect of the fabrication plays into it, from finding the exact right foam that when you light, it kind of has this happy glow to it. You'll actually see an evolution of our design of SpongeBob through over the years because the opening title, you know that SpongeBob has a lot more like he's really dense looking. And then we switched over to a couch phone. The open cell qualities of it are able to catch light and so that gives out a little bit of a luminous and quality. But then we went from there, we refined it further into the Halloween one, and then we devolved for Patrick Starr. Yes, yes, it's the whole version of it. It's like, you know, the black and white. It's so cool. Yeah, why I do laughing? Uh? Hatrick? What's wrong with you? Spongebobryses? Patrick? Is this really happening? And this isn't funny? Was wrong? SpongeBob? Sometimes skirryqual scary? Which character was do you think the most difficult to pin and nail down? Was it SpongeBob himself or was was there anybody else was giving you some difficulty? Well, they each have their challenges, you know, squid Word having all of his thin little legs and stuff, and Mr Crabs being this giant monolithic shape, you know. Um, yeah, he was hard and so was Patrick because in the cartoon, Patrick's mouth goes right into his body. You know, the physical limitations of trying to build that and animate it. We're there, and so we kind of just took advantage of our limitations and kind of like for the Christmas one, we decided to, you know, give him a little scarf that you know, it was believable that his mouth would stay in the head area. What's that? It's a trap, a trap for Senda dated with Christmas treats. Will trap Santal in my box blocked up like fort knocks and make himself the clocks well Christmas, Oh he cookie. I think it was plankton, Oh wow, because so many different scales and close up plankton, miniature scale plankton. He was a little bit harder because as he was so tiny, you know, in the first few that because we're literally going like little bean size puppets, and that was kind of like excruciating. We had we called it the jelly bean plankton because he was about the size of a jelly bean. But then when he was close up, we had a larger one. Guys, what's so funny is that Frankie and I just spent the last few weeks talking to some of the actors who portrayed these characters on the Broadway Show, and and we were asking them similar questions and they also, I think Frankie correct me if I'm wrong, kind of saying, like, the most difficult one to conceptualize was Plankton because of the size differentia, which is so so funny that both you guys and the Broadway Show are having to solve similar problems in different ways, which is so great. No doting stuff right up, Mr Crabs and it's fang of Johnny, mindless fools, stopped bikini bottom mine I punish just victims and then drag down the lifeless bodies to the kitchen. You have fun. It's funny because when we were starting out doing stop motion, we remember a specifically saying the thing you don't see a lot of in stop motion is this cartoony two D sensibility to the timing because stop motion is so technical and how you have to tie characters down and all that stuff. We're like that, maybe that's what we want to explore, is doing this cartoonish stuff because a lot of our animation heroes are to come from the two D world, and it was just really nice to meet the sponge about guys because it's like the most classic cartoonish show because it still has all these squashy, stretchy and and and having characters transform and do strange things like SpongeBob can do all these crazy things. So it was great to say, like, wow, let's put all this to the test and see how cartoony we can go. And the funny thing is you're still working with a TV schedule, TV budget. You know, it's like you've got time to do something, but you don't really have that much time or money to do much. It's just the nature of it. It took us five months to shoot the Christmas special, and I think another five months to shoot the Halloween special. There's a couple of months of fabrication before that. Like the whole process usually takes about ten nine or ten months from first thinking to post. They they really inspire you, and so you want to do a good job for them. They're trusting you, so you don't want to let them down. So we put every weel everything we can. Plus we're excited to try a bunch of stuff every time. We always give ourselves some new thing we want to try. Even when we were doing the Goofy Goober Globe, Steve at that time even mentioned he's like, someday we're going to do it. The whole Christmas special. Yeah, it was, wasn't it? What like it was years until that happened. It was, Yeah, we shot Coffee Guber's two thousand three four and then we got the special, so so he was thinking about it even then. And then after we finished the Christmas Special, I think I remember he and Vincent sank after this, we're gonna do a Halloween thing and then you know, it's like five years, but they eventually pulled it off. Wow, you hear that some of giants that Briou spirit singing. There's just one thing to say. You have worked on so many cool different projects. You've done stuff for cup Head Captain, Underpant's Adventure time. McDonald's is a client, So you've done all this amazing work in your minds? Why is SpongeBob special? What does it mean to screen novelties to have worked on SpongeBob stuff? For me, whenever I think about SpongeBob, I just think about the crew that we work with, and I do love watching the shows, even though I don't watch them that much after we make them, because it's kind of weird. We've gotten so much work from them and we appreciate every single frame we do for them because we know that they do it because they have faith in what we do. They trust us to come up with something new, and we do it because I mean a lot of other people might say like, oh, what you know, you there's too much, Like I want to move on to somebody else, Like we enthusiastically do any SpongeBob project that they offer our way because, um, we know how cool they are, how creative they are. The characters allow you to be uninhibited with your arrange, emotion and the way you want to animate them. Also, just like how you know, Steve trusted us in the beginning and we didn't have a lot of experience and that really goes as far. Yeah, just every collaboration that we have with the whole SpongeBob troop just feels like this natural fit. You know, Um, we're all coming from the same planet humor wise and design wise, and we're not there day to day as part of the crew, so we feel kind of like we're this sort of little honorary members off to the side that we get to sometimes come in and play with everybody where the we're cousins that show up every once in a while. Every time we get to do that, it's just such a blast. That was such a fantastic interview with those two unbelievably talented human beings. I mean, we're learning so many cool, fun facts that have never been discovered before on this podcast. I love that once again we're learning that Stephen Hillenberg is just the nicest guy in the world and for him, for him to have created it would ended up being the most successful cartoon show of all time. It just makes me very happy, and I love the creative energy behind everything that Screen Novelties is doing huge. Thanks again to Shamus Walsh and Mark Cabaetto for spending some time with us, sharing their stories and just like getting me even more excited about stop motion animation, which is so so cool. So thanks again, guys, and don't forget to listen in every Thursday for new episodes of SpongeBob binge Pants wherever you get your podcast and if you like where we're up to over here, spread the word, write a review, and keep watching cartoons. Thanks, and we'll see you next week.