Go behind the scenes to see how Rebecca Sugar, Ian Jones-Quartey, Patrick McHale & Pendleton Ward brought Adult Swim’s The Elephant to life.
If you didn’t get a chance to check out the magic that Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), Ian Jones-Quartey (OK K.O.!), Patrick McHale (Over the Garden Wall), Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time), and the rest of the crew behind Adult Swim’s The Elephant created with that animated experiment, stop reading this and watch it (we’ll wait). Amazing, right? We found ourselves yelling “Nooooooo!” at the screen at one point near the end – that’s how much it drew us in. The Elephant featured one creative team being responsible for one of three acts… without any knowledge of what the other creative teams were creating. We have Sugar and Jones-Quartey working as a duo, with McHale and Ward each taking on a chapter. With Titmouse producing, Jack Pendarvis and Kent Osborne served as the “game masters,” with the storytelling experiment culminating in a single, surprise narrative that lived up to the hype and then some.
Here’s a look at the behind-the-scenes documentary “Behind the Elephant,” which offers a rare glimpse into the creative process behind the event, featuring interviews and footage from the production. The documentary highlights the unique challenges and discoveries that made the project a truly original experience — for both the audience and the creators themselves:
Pendleton Ward on Getting Involved with “The Elephant”: “Well, it’s cool to be involved in experimental art. I think it all started the beginning of this past year. It all happened pretty quickly. It wasn’t hard to pull me back in. All they had to do was just ask me if I wanted to collaborate on an Exquisite Corpse project [a collaborative game where players add to a drawing without seeing previous contributions, creating wild and bizarre artworks] with my friends.
My assignment was to do the first part of the three-part project. I got to work, and I burned out and needed some help, so I asked my friends Thomas Herpic and Abby Magno to help me out and do the rest of the boards. After that, I was able to just hand it all off to Beto Irigoyen and Pato Bauza (aka Pato Aqua) — I was a big fan of their collective online, and they wanted to work with Studio Ruda in Argentina, and I wanted to work with them. They all just went to town, and made it beautiful.”
Patrick McHale on What the Best Part of “The Elephant” Was? “The amount of trust given to me by the executives (and the other directors) was really special. It’s a very strange and unnerving experience to be in a position where the executives know more about the story than the director does. It would have been impossible for me to defend my decisions against harsh notes because they actually knew more than me about the full story. But luckily everyone was up for this weird game and very supportive of letting me succeed or fail on my own. It was also just a great opportunity to hire some really fantastic artists — a mix of friends, people I’ve always wanted to work with, and lots of new lovely people I met along the way.”
