Channel 101 co-creator Rob Schrab

Final Cut Pro.

Yeah, it’s pretty awesome. It’s a great program and I do everything on it. A lot of people use After Effect but this is just easier for me.

I took a class to learn how to use Final Cut Pro and then just through our little community people said “This is a good way to do lasers with greenscreens.”’ Then it was just experimenting with it.

No we’re completely different separate things. We knew of them and they knew of us. We actually screened a pilot that we produced a couple years ago with them and then we started doing our own thing and then kind of did this cross promotion thing. Which kind of worked, but not so much. We developed it on our own. Even before 101 we would have like these little events. Dan and I are really into making these little DVD movies but we only do them if there’s a deadline because we’re really lazy. So we just say “hey everybody a month from now make the next Batman movie, don’t spend any money and we’ll all watch it or everybody do a kid show and we’ll watch it.” We started doing these themes with the month deadline and people really started getting into it.

Then we started to be a lot pickier about submissions and people were just getting pissed off like, “I worked a whole month on this you fucking asshole!” That was just a drag. So we said, “Hey, instead of us being the bad guys, let’s make the audience the bad guys and let the audience vote for it.” If it sucks, it won’t be just us saying it. That’s pretty much how 101 came about.

I like to layer everything and the more I do it the more I layer stuff. It is pretty addictive to be coming up with the effects and building props and stuff. It’s a real freeing experience because Dan and I were like working in the business for seven years and we only got one thing shot. We were constantly writing scripts and they were constantly being put on shelves collecting dust. We were just getting frustrated because we came out here to be creative, not to fill shelves with paper. We wanted to make stuff. So we started shooting stuff. Then for the last two and a half years we’ve just been shooting stuff, a short a month.

It’s a great discipline and it’s the best school in the world. You get immediate recognition or rejection because you got 300 people watching it and they don’t respond to it. It’s like an open mike for directors. Dan and I are super creative people and you would think Hollywood would be the creative capital of the world but it isn’t. Everywhere you go you’ve got these uncreative people saying “No, that’s not going to work.” While you’re like “No it will work, you‘ve just got to let me do it.”

No not really.

I got some work based off of 101 on Drew Carey’s Greenscreen show. I’m being shopped around finally, as a director by my agency based on my work with 101.

I try to strike a balance because there is a deadline and you don’t want to overextend yourself, because you do have to make a living too. Although there is the danger of just becoming so obsessed with your show that you just let the bills go away, which I have done before. But yeah I got it down that so I can crank those out in a week.

I wanted to do something that wasn’t sci-fi or horror based even though there’s sci-fi and horror in it. But I wanted to do something that had everything like making the special effects and the props but not doing that genre. So I wrote everything around that. I’ve always wanted to do kind of like a live action Calvin and Hobbes, Pee-Wee Herman kind of stuff. The first episode went over really, really huge. The second one was even bigger and then it turned into this epic thing.

Yeah, I’ve been approached with it. Right now I’m in the process of developing a script and it’s just trying to nail down what would be the best way to approach it.

Monster House is a script that Dan and I wrote back in 1998. Several times it was almost made into a film and then recently [Robert] Zemeckis came up with the idea to do it with motion capture like Polar Express. He is like obsessed with this new technology and was just going through all the properties that he liked. Monster House is going to be the second mo-cap animated thing that he’s done and that’s coming out in summer 2006.

Oh yeah.

I don’t. They hired him. The live action is already shot and now they’re going to be like animating for the rest of the year.

Well there was a bunch of them. We wrote one. Then [South Park writer] Pam Brady wrote one and then a couple of other people wrote one. The problem was we wrote the original on spec and Ben flipped over it. He wanted to make it so it was just one of those things that got really big, really fast and then went away because it didn’t get picked up.

I remember saying in a meeting, “If we don’t get picked up, let’s make it into a feature.” Of course we didn’t get picked up and a couple of months later we found out that the rights to Heat Vision and Jack were kind of handed over to one of the Zucker brothers and that we were under contract and they had to use us even though they didn’t want to use us. It got kind of messy. We ended up writing a script for somebody who wasn’t involved with this thing from the beginning like we were. We were executive producers on the show and now we were being told by somebody we didn’t even know what works and what doesn’t. It was really annoying and finally we just had to walk away because they weren’t going to make the movie that it should have been. Just recently, Ben was asked if he would you be interested in directing it and he said “Only if Rob and Dan write it.” Now we’re working on a deal again, so this is like round two with Heat Vision and Jack.

Yeah, exactly. But I’ve got bigger fish to fry so I’m not going to hold my breath.

I would say all of it. It began when we came out here to work on the Scud feature script which was optioned by Oliver Stone for three years. We got a decent chunk of change you know, relatively at the time. We were basically told “No, you’re a comic book writer, you’re not a screenwriter.” So in an effort to prove them wrong we wrote a spec script called Big Ant Movie which was about giant ants taking over Los Angeles. One of the executives at Oliver Stone’s wanted to see it and a good friend of ours gave it to her. She put it in her briefcase and as she was taking meetings all over town and one was with Robert Zemeckis. Robert Zemeckis pretty much said “Do you have any writers that can do anything with big insects.” She goes, “I’ve got a script right here.” She pulled it out, gave it to him and a week later we were meeting with Robert Zemeckis. Shortly after that we got a two picture deal and one of those pictures is Monster House.

It’s really just entertaining yourself. That’s the biggest thing. Our best advice to people is to just make yourself laugh. If you’re writing a comedy script you should be like laughing the entire time. It’s hard but you’ve got to work with your gut and your heart and some people can’t do that.

Yeah I got that from working on Heat Vision. When we were shooting Zoolander I was just kind of hanging out, Ben was like, “Look I’m really far behind. If I give you a crew would you shoot second unit for me?” So I shot second unit like on Zoolander for about a week. I was also picking up shots that Ben didn’t have time to do because it was just such a grueling shoot.

Yeah, it’s a great movie.

Yeah, it’s got animated menus and I have a Ringwald and Molly DVD and a Twigger’s Holiday DVD. Robot Bastard has a ton of extras like behind the scenes, the making of, the making of props and how to do stuff. At one point Robot Bastard was going to be made into like a TV show for MTV. But that of course fell through. So I’m going to do like a radio play for the pilot that I wrote for MTV. So that’s going to be on there.

I’m still shopping around Scud. I was very close to having a series last year. We were casting and everything and of course everything shifted and the new guy didn’t get it. I have like a ton of animation tests and I have got like a script that I’m shopping around. We’re trying to get into Adult Swim as well.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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