Feb 8, 2023

"My Daddy the Bounty Hunter": Patrick Harpin and Everett Downing share the animatronic that landed the Netflix Commission (exclusive).

Netflix's original animated series My Dad The Bounty Hunter will premiere on platforms around the world tomorrow. Co-creator and Showrunner Everett Downing Jr.And Patrick Harpin sat down at Cartoon Brew ahead of the show's debut, the first animatronic they put together to pitch the series

The show, produced by Netflix and animated by the French costume Dwarf Animation Studio, was a few weeks after Lisa and Sean's brothers packed into their father's latest work trip. It is an action comedy that is always hoping to finally get a quality time with a busy old man. Things are earthly, when the two learn that their dad is actually one of the most prominent bounty hunters in the galaxy, tracking down the bad guys and bringing them to justice

Originally Downing and Harpin threw Netflix in some early screenplays for the show, but they found that my father Bounty Hunter was one of the best in the series. It wasn't until I put together a detailed animatic that I earned a commission for the game. Story artist Gustavo ("Goose") Cosio boarded that animatic as the basis for the 3-minute cold open at the beginning of the first episode of the show, and both the original animatic (rough sound and music) and the final version of the scene are linked below, and they are the basis for the final version of the show. The similarities are striking.

Patrick Harpin: Everett and I teamed up with Gustavo Cosio, a storyboard artist who Everett knew from Maya and 3 others, and we were writing a script for the pilot and we were kind of trying to prove that it works. At the time, we were all developing on our own. We didn't have a crew yet, we didn't even have an editor.

Downing: About two weeks before we started working on this animatic, we had adjusted in the script for the first two episodes. There were a lot of questions about whether the show would work, whether it was too late, or if there were too many family things and not enough action. The show is all about family, right-and we needed a couple of episodes to establish that dynamic. But we wanted to do this cold open to promise that action was coming. We wanted to give this chase first to earn more time to show our characters chilling as a family.

Harpin: In Animatic, we decided not to show that the bounty hunter is a dad. Of course, the show is called my dad Bounty Hunter, but his kids don't know what their dad is doing. Anyway, there's a stigma attached to the title bounty hunter, but we wanted to make the character likeable. So, we're cold-open, making the bad guy like a fun jerk running away at all and telling the audience, "Yeah, ok, I want to see this guy get caught.

Downing: And that animatic is also very close to the last scene. We didn't need to make a lot of changes. I think the executives asked for a cool line of action or something, so we added "You forgot a hint", but that's one to it

Harpin: When people ask for animated advice, I always think you have to be able to put animatics on. We live in a world where you can see movie screenings with a budget of budget80 million dollars and Animatic becomes garbage, and you just wonder, "Where did that money go-" So what we did was we got a better board than either of us. We hired Goose, who is an artist, and we got into some stuff on the show. Board artists are like superstars to me. Everett and I both come from a storyboard background. That's what we've been doing for 10 years or more. So one of the things I believe is that when artists animate their boards, you absolutely use what they do It is also up to us to give them a powerful script and not make too many changes. "I rewrote this scene last night, but it's already animated."That's how you burn people. You're not wasting people's time, so you have to give them something that they know is final.

The descent should be careful, I would like to save a lot of time and energy for our storyboard, and I told them, "Hi, me and I did this job, and I'm getting bigger and bigger." Do not burn yourself to clean your boards and try to make them perfect when you throw them at us."We had a kind of model that had to win the clean-up before we spent time on the clean-up," he said. I think some artists feel like they need to clean up the whole time, doing iterations after iterations and pitching boards that burn people, sometimes just stick figure thumbnails are enough and go clean them if they're approved.

Harpin: We want to be smarter about how we use people's energy. I hate getting bad scripts, it makes me angry. So when I give someone a script, I want to put everything in there and make sure it's packed with characters and stuff I want to ride on myself. You can then let the artist work on the sequence. Goose gets the scene, and all he does is add magic. When the Bounty Hunter's shot has a hole in Blobby's head and it turns into a smile, it's from the goose and helps build the scene.

Downing: I think the beauty of storyboard artists is to bring visual storytelling. Many people want to use them as artists to create images, but that's not the case. These guys need to be part of the creative process. They add so much and create so many happy accidents.