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Immediately following the Oscar-winning success of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Portland animation studio ShadowMachine took little time to celebrate its success before diving into its latest project: In the Know, a savage satire of National Public Radio.
The stop-motion adult animated series, now streaming on Peacock, follows Lauren Caspian (Zach Woods), host of public radio’s “third-most-popular interview show,” his real-life celebrity interviewees (Kaia Gerber, Mike Tyson and Jonathan van Ness), and the group of ragtag eccentrics he works alongside.
The series is the brainchild of veteran comics and showrunners Brandon Gardner (CollegeHumor Originals), Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-Head), and Woods (Silicon Valley). The co-creators have a long history of collaboration, and their shared sense of deadpan humor makes for hilarious one-liners like “The way this country treats the neurosensitive makes me want to firebomb a Bath & Body Works.”
WW sat down with the ShadowMachine animators, producers and crew of In the Know for a behind-the-scenes look at the production of the show, starting with production designer Rob DeSue.
“The first thing we saw were written pages, and they were laugh-out-loud funny before you even saw the characters or environment or the performance,” DeSue recalls.
“From the moment I read the script and the description of each character, I remember I was on a plane and people were like, what is going on?” director of photography Michel Amado adds. “I fell in love with the project.”
In any type of film or television project, it takes a village to pull off the monumental feat of moving from pre-production to production to post—and even more so when each character is created not only through a voice actor’s performance, but also through every animator’s efforts to physically bring those characters to life.
“We had 20 animators, and every single one of them played Lauren and all of the different characters,” producer Melanie Coombs explains. “So the performance is defined by the voice actor and each and every one of those animators.”
The mechanics beneath each puppet also allowed the animators to literally bring expression to each performance. “Lauren had face replacements,” animator Savannah Steiner says. “But for the rest of the characters, it was face mechanics, which are these little paddles that are in the mouth. I’m not sure many TV shows have done that before, but it helped make those performances what they were. It was so fun because it let us express more than if it was just a premade mouth.”
Although the technology allowed for more creative input from animators, it’s nothing new, according to In the Know’s lead stop-motion animator, Malcolm Lamont.
“That mechanical stuff we’ve been doing since the first film I worked on, which was Corpse Bride [released in 2005],” Lamont says. “And then everything moved away from that because they’re seen as slightly less expressive. So I had fallen out of love with the mechanical faces, but with In the Know, I really got back into it and enjoyed the subtlety you can get out of the tiniest little lip movement or motion.”
While some showrunners might veer away from open-ended collaboration out of fear it might stray from their vision, co-creators Gardner, Judge and Woods instead leaned in to feedback and suggestions for character performance.
“I would film myself acting out my shots before I animated them, and I’d show them to Zach and Brandon, which is so weird when you do Lauren because you’re lip syncing to Zach’s voice and showing Zach your performance,” Lamont laughs. “I’d be cringing because I’m showing this to a guy who gets paid to do this, but he was always so supportive and appreciated it.”
The success of In the Know comes at a sobering time for ShadowMachine, which is currently mourning the death of Pinocchio co-director Mark Gustafson, who died of a heart attack earlier this month. Still, there’s solace to be found in the show’s intersection of passion, collaboration and trust.
“The way that they [Gardner and Woods] directed us and talked about it when they first came into the studio, they looked like little kids in a candy shop,” Steiner says. “And that energy just transcended throughout the entire project.”
SEE IT: In the Know streams on Peacock.