Santa: “What would you like for Christmas?” Girl: “My own credit card.” - Brazil

I used to be annoyed by my lack of moon based, colonial living options, but then I learned that being a lunar colonist would be a lot like camping.  I hate camping. Even shopping at Eddie Bauer is too close to camping for me - I clearly have no future on the moon.  Cassandra Quinn, however, is far better equipped to handle lunar life.  Quinn is the star and heroine of Moon Town, an upcoming sci-fi animated series from Steve Ogden. Here, Ogden talks about operating his animation industry website, AnimWatch, creating Moon Town, and developing Cassandra Quinn.

Pink Raygun: Tell me about AnimWatch.

Steve Ogden: I ran AnimWatch for five years and got a load of what I call the “I Gotta To Do Thats”.  That’s when you’re just talking to people who are doing stuff and after a while I started thinking, “I could do that.” I was trained as an animator a million years ago and worked as a cel animator for a while, did some commercials and stuff for things you never would have heard of.  But, I never really did anything more than that with my animation and started working in games (I’m with Firaxis now and before that I was with Cyan – the guys who made Riven and Myst).  

With AnimWatch, I was interviewing people who were making films; most of them were making films out of their bedrooms, their garage, or their basements.  But also, among those single person productions, I had things like Madagascar and Robots and even The Triplets of Belleville.  So, AnimWatch became this really interesting site (the shell of it is still there if you’re interested to see it) where you have single person productions profiled alongside Hollywood blockbusters.  I took them all equally seriously and asked the same questions of the guys who worked on Robots that I did of the guys who were working on their show reel to get hired or someone who was doing something for a college project. The one thing they had in common was that they were excellent in some way. They were visually excellent or they had great stories or they had great sound or were unusual or broke some mold.  I got to the point where talking about what other people were doing was not as interesting or as exciting as doing my own thing. 

Unfortunately, I never really got the audience that I expected. When I started, everyone I talked to was shocked that it hadn’t already been done.  By the time it was done, I’d have a contest and ten people would enter or maybe only five. My podcasts got quite a bit of listens, but that was still in the low thousands. The audience just never materialized for AnimWatch. 

PRG: Were you running AnimWatch by yourself?

SO: Yeah.  I was doing it all: interviewing people, writing the interviews, programming the website. I did have some friends that would pop in from time to time, like Peter Hargreaves who was absolutely indispensable. He helped me build the backbone of the site, programmed my searchable film list and that kind of stuff. Then Jason Lysinger has worked with me quite a bit over the years and helped me set up the forum. It’s good to have help, but I could have used more help. It got to the point where it was eating all my time. During the five years I was working on AnimWatch, I managed to make one film called Flakes, which was about a minute long.  It’s cool, it won an award, and everyone I know liked it. But, I wanted to do something meatier and I didn’t think there was enough time in a day to do AnimWatch and my own films. 

PRG: Reading about Flakes, it sounds like you intended it to be like an interactive web comic, or an animated web comic. 

SO: I still have this crazy idea and I think it’s a good idea. Once you get your four characters built and your basic ten sets built, that you would just do an animated, four panel strip.  But, I can’t bring myself to do it. You sit down with something like that and it seems so easy, then you get about a week into it and realize that first, it’s more complicated than you thought it was going to be and second, the finished product is going to be too simple to be rewarding. A four panel comic strip, like a typical newspaper comic strip might take you an evening to do.  But, something like Flakes took a couple months of hard work from me and the people who were helping me to get that done. It just seems like if you work that hard you should have something more than a cute snowman that will get more of a reaction than just “Oh, that’s cute” and never gets watched again. 

With something like Moon Town, you might watch it and feel like you have to watch it again to catch something completely different. That might be more interesting than a little animated newspaper comic. That said, I’m so schizophrenic on this because every few months think it would be a great project and want to start again. I have a couple others like that. I have one about some pigs who work for a meat packing factory.  They work in these cubicles that look like pig pens and they’re basically filling orders to have each other slaughtered in the basement. That’s about what the modern business model is right now, like when you’re getting laid off and think that the evil company is out to get you. Well, the evil company is you. It’s everyone who works for the company.  They’re all humans exactly like you are. The guy that fills the order to get rid of your job has a job. Sometimes he’s the last one to be let go, then his job goes and it’s just the weirdest thing.  That project is called Cubicle Pigs. 

PRG: Tell me about the genesis of Moon Town.

SO: I was in a meeting one day and was bored to death. For whatever reason, I drew this little alien with three antennae and a goofy look on his face, and he was saying, “Help! I’m trapped in Og’s head!”  I don’t know why I drew it.  It was one of those agendaless meetings that you wind up in and instead of paying attention to whatever was being discussed, I doodled that alien. Then little rocket ships and little spacemen kept coming out of me for seven or eight years.  I saw that, when I was doing other things, the same themes kept coming out of my head. Little spacemen, little spaceships, little aliens, little moon craters.  So finally, at the end of last year, I started playing around with some sketches to figure out what was in my head. All these sketches came tumbling out  that were all basically Moon Town. I realized then that I had something I needed to make. 

I started naming the characters trying to figure out who they are and what they do.  It was in that process that Cassandra Quinn came out.  Most of the time when I work on science fiction or superhero stories, it’s very male and if a woman is there, there’s not much for her to do except be ogled or whatever she’s there for. This time I had a male character and halfway through writing, I figured out that the character was actually a woman. I never gave it a second thought. Cassandra Quinn is now this woman who is a security guard in this man’s world and she holds her own. 

It was interesting to me that she split off from this other character. Originally, I was writing this male character who was like a super hero super pilot.  That was what Moon Town was going to be about: sort of this elite flying force, these guys flying rockets and saving the moon. It sounds so corny to think about it like that now.  Halfway through I decided that it wasn’t really interesting to me and I thought it would be much cooler if I told the story from the point of view of someone who wasn’t one of those pilots. Someone who was maybe on the bottom rung of society, which at this point would be a frontier society of miners living on the moon because we’ve used up everything on Earth. So, I had this guy, this Melvin Tripline character, who’s living his day to day existence when something happens that pulls him out of his boring life and forces him to make some decisions. Halfway through writing this story, I realized that he was still doing these really heroic things and was a great pilot and I realized that there were actually two characters going on there. One was this guy and the other was somebody else. That was when the somebody else became Cassandra Quinn. The name Cassandra is from Greek mythology - she was cursed to know the future and to be unable to change it. That will play into Moon Town quite a bit. 

PRG: What’s the tone you’re going for with Moon Town?

SO: The tone had been very tongue in cheek, kind of winking to audience as if to say, “Hey! Remember Buck Rogers? This is kinda like that.” Now it’s not that. Now it’s a lot more like Battlestar Galactica crossed with Wallace and Grommit. The reason I say that is that I heard Nick Park talking about the music and the feel of Wallace and Grommit. He said that it was important to them to take it seriously, so you have these ridiculous looking plasticine characters doing ridiculous things and getting into stupid situations, but the music and the lighting and the framing and camera staging are all very serious. So, you’re not quite sure how to react to things on screen. That’s kind of the vibe I’m going for with Moon Town. Not necessarily humorous, but not as dark as BSG, especially this current season. It’s so dark that it’s not as fun for me to watch. I’m not going to go that dark, but I do have a bit of Terry Gilliam in me.  I love dark humor, but it still has to be humor.  

PRG: How are you planning to distribute Moon Town?

SO: The plan is to have it ready by the end of June. The first episode will be about two and half minutes long and I’ll release that online at the Luna website. That’s to try to get some buzz going and maybe get some bigger fish interested in it.  I’d really like to do at least a half an hour or an hour show on DVD. If I could wave a magic wand, that’s what I’d do with Moon Town.  The thing I’m doing differently with Moon Town is actively seeking to build buzz with people that I think would like it.  Based on your site, I think Pink Raygun readers would like it.  I had done a podcast on women in science fiction and how they kind of get short shrift.  That’s changing now, like on BSG, a lot of the great roles went to women. But, for so many years it just wasn’t that way.  Anyway, when I went to your site that day, the comic on the front page was talking about that exact thing.

PRG: The one with the female uniforms. That’s been bothering me since I was a teenager. 

SO: I always crack up at things like Red Sonja.  She’s just in a bikini and she’s fighting people.  With swords!  You’d think she’d have some armor, but no. I guess her secret weapon is to show off her goodies, like “I dazzled them with my massive breasts!” Who knows? It could work.  

PRG: I think it could. Like if you’re fighting the talkbackers at Ain’t It Cool News, that would totally work. 

SO: I have heard that it’s official in something like World of Warcraft to have your avatar be the hottest woman you could possibly make because a lot of times guys won’t fight you. It’s like, “Maybe there’s a chance. . . that might not be a dude on the other end!”

PRG: You mentioned BSG and you mentioned Buck Rogers, which perked my ears up because I just bought the whole series on DVD. I couldn’t help it.

SO: Was this the 80s one or the serials?

PRG: The 1980s one with Gil Gerard’s awful hair and Erin Gray’s shiny uniform. So you mentioned those two and also Firefly.  What else has been influential for you.

SO: Blade Runner was a huge influence on me. There was a period of time where my little cute spacemen weren’t little cute spacemen. They were basically little Rick Deckards running around. Then for awhile they were robotic Rick Deckards, which I thought was really perverted, but funny.  

Do you know Pica Towers? That’s something I came across through AnimWatch and I’d urge you and your readers to look it up. This is done by Mark Craste at Studio AKA out of London. These are the coolest little things; there are three black and white shorts online, about a minute or two each. They’re these little TVs and they’re doing the most unspeakable things to each other. It’s really dark, very Terry Gilliam-esque.  After that, Craste did another film, a longer film called JoJo and the Stars and that one won a BAFTA.  That’s a huge influence on me and I think when you see it, you’ll see why. 

There’s something about the vibe of that, odd and dark but really cute.  There’s something about cute things beating the hell out of each other that has an inexplicable charm. 

You know. I have to say it.  Maybe it’s just my age, but I’m a huge Star Wars fan.  I think of them as the first three movies, IV, V, and VI.  I saw the first one when I was a little kid and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I can still remember that initial experience, being in the theater with my popcorn and hearing the music come up and that yellow logo pass into the stars and those ships coming in.  Until I have a scene like that in a movie that I’ve made, I think I’m still going to have that itch. I think that’s a lot of Moon Town comes from that itch.  

Beyond that, there are little things like Starship Troopers, which I love for all the wrong reasons. It just appealed to something weird in me. One of my favorite scenes is when Sergeant Zim stabs a dude in the hand and screams “Medic!” I forgot so much of that film. I saw it once ten years ago and then I saw the DVD for sale at the grocery store for like five dollars.  So I bought it and watched it again and realized I’d forgotten so much of it. Like there’s a big moon station in it and a ring around the moon. A lot of the stuff I had been thinking of for Moon Town was in Starship Troopers, so I’ve changed those things. Fifth Element was an influence too.  I think that gets across the things that excite me. They’re not set in a normal universe. They’re all humorous and have a dark undertone. Except Star Wars, which is pretty optimistic all the way through. 

PRG: Do you have any other plans for your comic strip Croaker’s Gorge?

SO: I’ll tell you the dark secret of Croaker’s Gorge. It was born about 1992. When I was drawing that, I was reading a lot of Calvin and Hobbes and trying to get syndicated.  Croaker’s is the remnant of me trying to become a syndicated cartoonist and failing miserably.  I held on to the strips and last year I pulled them out to scan them and put them online. As I was doing that I saw that the bones of the jokes were OK, but the execution wasn’t so good. I went through and punched them up and now they’re much better than they were. I’m going to give the last ten that same treatment.  The very last one has all three of the main characters banding together to be eco-superheroes and the only mode of transportation they can find is an old junker there in the swamp and they can’t get it to move. They’re just sitting in the swamp throwing off smoke. There’s something so great about them trying to do something good and failing and it’s a good place to end the strip.  I drew that strip 15 or 20 years ago and decided there was nothing more I could say. Maybe when I put it up I’ll think of something else to do with it.  People keep using the phrase “classic” to describe Croaker’s Gorge, which I think is a polite way to say it looks “dated” or “old” or isn’t edgy enough in its art. 

PRG:  I don’t know that “classic” has those negative connotations. 

SO: You may be right. Maybe they don’t mean it that way. I just know that it’s pushing 20 years old and there’s a good reason that it looks old and that’s because it is old. 

PRG: Honestly, your art on Croaker’s Gorge is comparable to a lot of what I see in the comics page in the newspaper. I think anyone could describe any one of those as looking “classic”.  Who knows, “classic” could just mean “hand drawn”. 

SO: It’s a weird thing. In my business [video games], I get these kids coming in every year right out of college and a lot of them don’t know how to draw. They know how to build things in the computer and how to texture things. They know a lot about making so-called art for the computer or for a game. But, they don’t know how to communicate visually in a sketch. That’s very important because it takes so long to build something in the computer that somebody should be able to just spell it out in a sketch in five minutes before they commit a week to doing it in the computer. Some guys can’t do that and it’s really weird to me.  I’ve been noticing this for like ten years. For me, I’d no more want to be an artist who can’t draw than I’d want to be a courtroom lawyer who was afraid to speak in public or a surgeon who’s afraid of the sight of blood. Why would you want to be an artist if you don’t like to draw?  Normally guys who can draw like to draw.  

PRG: I think with the younger kids - I have several kids in one of my classes who all want to design video games and none of them can draw. They’re not even planning to take an art class. But, they love video games. 

SO: When people in the community meet me, they say one of two things.  “Oh, you’re that guy who’s creating this nonsense that’s ruining the world.” The other reaction I get is, “My kid wants to do that when he grows up.” I don’t get much middle of the road.  People usually have some reaction when you tell them you make video games for a living. I used to get the first reaction a lot more than I do now. I think a lot of them want to do it because they confuse playing video games with making video games. They’re not the same thing. There are guys who get paid to play for a living and those are the testers. They’ll be the first to say that it’s not a good gig because they play the same level over and over and over again just looking for errors. They’re not playing for enjoyment. 

PRG: How did you get into the game industry?

SO: By the skin of my teeth. I was moving down that unemployable road trying to get syndicated.  I was starting to get worried because I was working for a t-shirt company and it was an absolute sweatshop, a horrible situation. Some weeks they couldn’t pay their bills and they would ask me to work for free so they could get the money to pay the bills so they could pay me next time.  I began actively looking for other work and found that unless I knew the computer - that’s what they said back then, “Do you know computer?”  And I didn’t know computer.  I was in the first generation where it wasn’t just the computer science guy studying computers. If you were in the art track, you could get a little computer time. The layout guys all had Macs with Page Maker. That was like a million years ago, before Illustrator.  We had the Apple 2E, which was really weak. We would program graphic by programming in BASIC to get these blocks of color on the screen. You’d find the pixel location and the color you wanted and program it in BASIC for this rudimentary drawing on the screen. I was tutoring people in that so I knew I had the technical aptitude, but by the time I was looking for a job I didn’t have any Photo Shop or Page Maker skills.

I picked up some computer stuff here and there, and then when I had the chance to get in at this multimedia company I basically lied and said I knew Photo Shop. They hired me based on my traditional skills and since I could draw, they figured I knew Photo Shop. I thought I’d just read the manual on the job and learn. But, there was no manual.  I would print out the help files and read them in the bathroom, then when my boss came by my desk I’d try one of the tricks I’d learned from the help files so he’d see that I knew how to use the program. Around 1994 that boss came to me with a disk in his hand and said “You should do this.” That was Myst, which I’d never heard of. 

I took it home and played it until 3AM and felt like I’d had this experience like I’d been somewhere. I started writing to the people at Cyan and sending them my portfolio. After two years of that they hired me.  By that time I did know 3D software and Photo Shop and most of the stuff I still use today. 

PRG: What does your job entail?

SO: I’m a lead artist at Firaxis. That’s part managerial, keeping track of the project, making sure that people are assigned to tasks as necessary and making sure that when the assets are completed they fall within technical and visual guidelines. The other part is to set the look and feel of a given game. 

PRG: What’s been your favorite game to work on?

SO: I have two.  My very favorite game was Real Myst. By the time I’d gotten to Cyan, they’d stopped making pre-rendered games. That was where you’d render the scene and people could click on these still images and manipulate things. We went to real time, which is more like what you see now in video games.  I didn’t want to make those real time games, I wanted to do still images like Myst and Riven. It’s a lot harder to make a real time 3D game. After a couple months of working on the game that became Uru, a couple of us were pulled off to make the real time version of Myst. That was my favorite because I loved Myst and loved working on those assets. It was this sweet reward to get to work on something I loved so much. 

My second favorite was the DS version of Civilization Revolutions.  The DS has this tiny little memory footprint, so we were taking this humongous game and crunching it down to this tiny little living space.  Everyday we’d start off saying “we can’t do this” or “we’ll have to leave this part of the game out” and by the end of the day we’d have found a way to get it in.  It felt like we were doing the impossible everyday, but that’s what I loved about it. That’s kind of a geeky answer. 

PRG: You’re in the right place! We love all kinds of geeks at Pink Raygun.  

Steve Ogden’s Moon Town is expected to be completed this summer.  For more on Moon Town and Ogden’s other projects, please visit Luna Entertainment. 

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