Story of David

Adaptation of the story of King David.

My Role:

• Recruited team

• Directed first piece & advised on subsequent three

The large challenge on this project was timeline, as the writing stage stretched out nearly five months longer than I’d allocated for. Writing didn’t finish until December, and with our company closing in March, there was a very real deadline to finish all sixteen minutes in three months, from initial storyboards to final polish.

I came into this project after the writing stage. I was handed a “final” script, but it needed significant rewrites.

Here’s an example of the evolution of the script before and after revisions.

I spent a day reworking it, and then brought on Lexi Diamond, an old comedian friend with incredible writing chops, to punch it up and make sense of many of the places that just weren’t working for me.

We spent about a week going back and forth, and came out with something that felt tighter all around. Time was of the essence.

For the storyboards, with such a tight timeline, it was a bit risky working with new people, and yet due to availability, all of the key illustrators were new.

I got referred to two great storyboard artists, Katherine Nguyen and Sherwinmay Bustos.

A studio, Double Dare, had emailed me a couple years back for another job and I had them in my database as a place I’d love to work with.

I had an open call, with various artists doing test illustrations of David to see who to hire. Here are some of my favorite submissions of potential character illustrators, all of whom I would have loved to have worked with.

The character illustrator, Rafa Gallardo, was a total professional and his illustrations jumped out as my favorite. He had a body of proven work, and presented a style where I could easily see him turning out dozens of characters relatively quickly, in a format that would work well for this animation.

For animators and music, I was able to stick with the people I’d worked with on Shaboom!

To pull this off in time, I had to ultimately split directing responsibilities with Sarah Lefton, my boss. I directed the first one and she directed the final three, due to the three other projects I was juggling.

For the previous six years at BimBam, I’d always been the one to direct these sorts of productions, so it was a lot to put on her, as she was juggling a lot already, and this was the first time she’d done this.

It was a race to the finish, trying to complete the episodes before the company closed, and not at all guaranteed to happen.  

One of the most fulfilling things for me to hear after it ended, was that she enjoyed the process so much, she would have loved to have split labor in this way for other projects too. The company is now closed, so it’s moot, but having the process continue to evolve and grow right up to the end meant a lot.