My Interviews

Even though there are Creature Comforts interviewers throughout the country who are doing a great job and are constantly sending us minidiscs, I have gone out and done a few on my own. Even though it's generally more productive to interview people that you don't know, I have interviewed a friend of the family and my young cousin. I also did an interview at the San Diego Zoo a few months ago where I approached people at random and asked if they would be willing to be interviewed for an animated TV series. One woman who I met was a supervisor in the sanitation department and had a lot of great zoo stories to share. You can look for her as a meerkat in our "Zoo" episode. Since my first zoo trip was productive, I decided to take my cousin Maya to the LA Zoo a couple weeks ago which was lots of fun. She's a real animal lover so she had a lot of opinions on all of the animals there. My first attempt wasn't very successful:

But after that, I found a more responsive subject:

The interview process for the show is really challenging since the material that we're looking for is very specific. But it's very exciting to see something start out as an audio snippet from a documentary interview and make it all the way to the stage of being animated. I haven't done nearly as many interviews as our story editors have and I think you definitely get better with practice. But as in all documentaries, ultimately, the final piece is only as good as your characters.