How to Animate a Character with No Eyes and Mouth - Among Us Interview with Owen Dennis

Audio transcription

"Hi Owen, good morning, how are you?
Hi, doing good.
Alright, I'll just click straight off. I've seen the show, I enjoyed the show."

"I think you guys have done a great job with it so far.
But it was interesting when I was sort of clicking in for the first time because I thought, well the original game, it has a premise, but I wouldn't necessarily say it has like a natural narrative structure."

"So how do you go about adapting something like that, I guess, and making it work?
So, if you think about it, the game does technically have a structure and a hook.
Kind of.
It's just that like people don't always think of it that way because you're observing the game and it's randomized every time, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah."

"So, but the structure is, or at least the basic conceit is, you're a bunch of people on a spaceship.
One of you is killing people, or maybe there's more of you killing people.
And then everybody has to figure out who it is."

"And so that right there is a basic, a very, very, very basic three-act structure.
Everybody's on a ship.
Inciting incident is somebody dies.
Second act, we have to figure out who that is."

"Third act, we get rid of them, right?
Yeah.
So that's the basics of a story.
So after that, it's sort of like, well, how do we get those elements?
How do we actually do it?
And after that, it's sort of, we have to figure out characters."

"What sort of characters would you end up seeing on a ship like this?
And you took inspiration from, you know, Alien, Star Trek, The Thing, like all those sorts of- The Thing, yeah."

"Yeah, all those sorts of things.
And you take inspiration from those and go like, oh, yeah, often there's like a ship's cook.
Okay."

"There's always a captain.
There's usually a security person.
And so you sort of go through and just figure out, like, what are those general things and what sort of person would take that role?
And like you sort of figure it out as you go."

"And once you have all those characters figured out, well, then it's sort of poking at them until they make a decision that might be bad or good.
And they keep being very character-driven."

"And that's sort of how you go about it, I think.
You talked a bit about the characters there.
I find that the character designs are, like, really simple.
It's basically like a bean with legs, and you guys have added in the hands to be, like, consistent, and a little backpack, and that's about it."

"Is that something that you found, like, on the animation side is really allows you to be a lot more expressive in how they move, say, without-because there's no mouths as well.
Yeah."

"Yeah, it's hard.
Yeah, so when it comes to figuring out how to show expressions in a character that has no eyes and no mouth, for anyone who's watched my previous show, Infinity Train, I had a character called One-One who had two vertical circle eyes and no mouth and nothing else."

"And we still had to get expressions through his face somehow.
And so you'd often do things where you sort of squish the circle eyes and, like, you'd do different things with the eyes to sort of make them show different things."

"And we sort of took that thought and just applied it to these characters instead, instead of having two circle eyes, it's just one giant circle thing.
And you sort of bend it and shape it and have it do what you need to."

"And sometimes it's funny because you'll have, like, if you make a sort of an arch, like a rainbow shape, that can come across as funny.
But also that can come across as pompous or it can come across, it can come across as happy or pompous or it can come, like depending on how you like position the body, it can suddenly make it more, it can change the tone entirely."

"And depending on what the voice actor does as well.
So there's all these things that you just have to keep in mind constantly.
And so I made sure that when we hired all of our board artists and a lot of our artists, we had people who had their own very strong identity and voices."

"And that's why, when you watch the show, I wanted that stuff to shine through.
I want to be like, this artist did this section, this artist did this section."

"And you can tell that like, oh, section was made by a different person than this other section, or this person really want to do this.
Or like, I wanted that handcrafted feel to make it feel like it's as, as much as a perfect conduit between artists to viewer, as we can possibly get."

"So yeah, that's how we did it.
Just a lot of people.
There's a lot of freedom in it as well.
I think something that I was thinking about is that you guys just go completely like, often different directions that I didn't think were possible."

"There's a scene episode five, particularly, I think, where you mesh in all these different styles.
There's, there's little bits of like, I think someone is put in as a real person in a suit and stuff like that."

"So it's just a pretty well, how did you, how free were you allowed to be with sort of, cause this is someone owns the IP. This is out of stuff.
How free were you allowed to get with that?
And were they just sort of like giving you the thumbs up every time?
They let us, they had a few rules that they had and they let us go nuts with it."

"It was, it was, it was pretty free, a lot freer than you'd have on most IPs.
And that's one of the reasons I was okay with, with doing it.
Because, you know, I, I didn't want to, IP can be such a, it can be, it can be good and bad because people know what it is."

"And that's helpful.
It can be bad because people know what it is.
They already have preconceived notions about what it should be.
Luckily, because the game doesn't have any characters and doesn't have an actual like big plotted out story."

"We were given the freedom to sort of tell the story how we wanted to.
And they were like, Innersloth was sort of like, you guys, we make video games, you guys make TV shows."

"We have rules that are sort of like, Hey, you know, you can't, they're super specific rules.
Like the shine on the, on the visor can't be used like an Iris on an eyeball."

"Right.
That's fine.
Yeah.
You have to always be able to see their backpack.
Okay."

"You have to, you can't show them like taking off their backpack.
Like they're just like, it was like something, it was something like that."

"I forget what all the rules were, but they're like very, very specific things.
It's like, well, those are, it's your character."

"You made them up.
Yeah.
But also, you know, Forrest and Marcus and all the people over at Innersloth, they're all artists themselves."

"So trust other artists.
When artists comes to them and says like, Hey, we need to adjust this thing because of this, you know, for example, colors, interior colors in the game."

"If somebody's sliced in half is like a darker version of the color.
Right.
So the teal, that's going to be a dark teal.
But in the show, because we had moments where we're like, well, there has to be blood and someone has to not know who, Whose blood it is."

"Yeah.
Yeah.
That becomes like, well, it needs to be, then it needs to be red."

"And also colors mean different things.
So if I have a liquid and the liquid is yellow, say that's P.
If I have a liquid and it's red, you're going to say it's blood."

"If it's Brown, it's going to be poop.
If it's like, like there's all these things like liquids just mean certain things in animation with different colors."

"And so there's a lot of like, okay, well, we've got to, we have to speak in animation terms now."

"And things like that.
And they're very into us being able to interpret however we needed to.
The voice cast for this thing is absolutely stacked.
This is one of the, it's an incredibly stacked cast."

"Did that affect in any way when you're sort of like storyboarding the decision, or maybe like once you found the voice actor regret in killing certain characters off."

"Cause I don't think it's too heavy of a spoiler to say that people die in the among the show.
I know I'm so, maybe we'll have to cut that, but that's one for the editors, but yeah."

"What was the decision making, I guess on, on that.
We had the voice actors were figured out after we'd already written.
What was happening?
They were, they were being figured out as we were still writing it, but like we, we knew what was going to happen to characters regardless of who was going to be the voice actor."

"But it is, you know, there are times I'm like, ah, like talking with them."

"Oh, well, and that's, you know, that's one of those things."

"I don't know.
Maybe we can get another season sometime.
We can bring them back.
Nice.
I spoke to Elijah and about yesterday and they both said they do it for it."

"And they both said to tell you that when I said I was speaking today.
So, yeah, but apparently you have a plan.
Apparently you have a plan."

"I do.
I do have a plan on how we would go about doing other seasons.
Yeah.
I think I would take inspiration from the way the game functions on its own."

"Yeah.
For every, every time you play the game, it's a little bit different.
I think I would take a, I think we'd try and take inspiration from that."

"Nice.
Nice.
Yeah.
Thank you so much."