Big Mouth – nate funaro

Big Mouth Season 6

Now that Big Mouth 6 has been out for a few weeks, I wanted to post and send out some thank you’s to the fantastic crew that built yet another amazing season.

This is actually the first Big Mouth season that we made 100% remotely (not in person / in the studio at all). Hard to believe you can make an animated series fully remote with everyone in different places. It’s a weird thing to hire people and work with them for a year and never even meet in person! We started this one back in January 2021, everyone still in their homes…

I remember Big Mouth 6 was a nice “break” for the crew. After us figuring out and producing the Human Resources season 1 episodes (which tended to be all big, filled with lots of new characters and locations) the crew was beatup and tired! Not only was it the work of figuring out a new show but it was also a much more complex series. When they came back to Big Mouth S6 – they already knew all these characters and what to do with them. It was returning to an old friend. No one ever thought Big Mouth was easy but it definitely felt a little easier compared to Human Resources when we got back into it.

Ok on to some appreciation for the many people who make this …

Big Gratitoad to all of the EPs – Mark, Jen, Andrew & Nick, writers team and Titmouse crew who put this together. Thank you Lioi, Rico & Andy, Henri, Bryan, Alex, Ross, Ybarra, Kelly, Pablo, Glenn (and stacks of other people who I won’t drag out a list a names here with). Shout out to our incredible design teams, board teams, dial editing, compositing, animatics, editorial, checking, timing, and production teams. These people make this show look good!

Thank you to all our partners at the studios in Korea, Konrad and the whole sound team at Margarita, our friends at Light Iron, our track team at Syncmagic, and all our record studios.

Appreciation for Chris, Shannon, Antonio and Ben for creating and running one of the best studios in the business where we can make this wild show. Lastly, thank you to all our partners and friends at Netflix – Moon, Porter, and the entire creative team, Mike K, Talar, Amy and the production team, David, Lauren and the post team, localization / globalization, marketing, and the army of everyone else at Netflix who helps put this thing out in the universe!

Thank you, thank you, thank you – everyone who works on this show – you make one of the best shows out there and we appreciate you all and the work you do to bring this thing to the fans year after year.

Big Mouth 7 and Human Resources 2

It’s hard to believe we are already making Big Mouth season 7 – it was not that long ago we were sitting in an office talking about the rules of how the Hormone Monster (he wasn’t called Maury yet) appears into scenes, who can see him, does he have super powers?

Well we figured all that out along with lots of other questions and slowly a big world started to evolve, which is even bigger now with the world of Human Resources. Here we are years later, now starting to work on Big Mouth season 7 and Human Resources season 2 – we are excited for the fans to see what we have been cooking up!

Lots of new characters, new nonsense, and new adventures (that we can’t talk about yet) coming for our favorite friends and monsters in the Big Mouth universe.

Thrilled to be doing many more episodes with such a fantastic crew. Here’s to Big Mouth 7 and HR s2!

Human Resources Season 1 Launch

The wait is finally over – Human Resources season 1, the show we have been working on, produced entirely during the pandemic (remotely), launches today! It’s all about the monsters – we get to see more about their lives, their jobs (and clients), and all their coworkers (and the associated work drama of course).

It’s probably our best looking season yet, and the one we are most proud of. We loved making this series and hope everyone who watches, enjoys it as well.

It is a very tough thing to make a new series, so I want to show some love for everyone who made this show come to life…

Big shout outs and thank you to the Human Resources crew – phenomenal writers and script team, killer dialog editors, the powerful director crew, an amazing storyboard team, the ninja animatics editors, our fleet of expert timers, beastly design teams, our talented comp department, an absolutely badass production team, our eagle eye checkers, the unstoppable accounting crew, and our last line of defense – the incredible post editorial commando group. I could not imagine a better team I would want to have made this series with. You guys made this all happen!

Muchas gracias to all our teams at Margarita Mix making this show sound the best, to our relentless recording engineers, the fantastic crew at Light Iron, and of course our hard working overseas animation crews at Yeson and Yearim making some outstanding animation.

Appreciation to Kevin and his team at Chromosphere for designing / building a stunning main title sequence.

Thank you thank thank you to our incredible partners and execs at Netflix getting us what we need, all the brass at Titmouse who clear the way for us every week of production.

And a big big BIG thank you to the Executive Producers / creators of this show – Mark, Jen, Andrew, Nick and Kelly – they are the best EPs in the biz! Lastly, thanks to Anthony Lioi – the magic man, and the guy who makes all this animation sparkle and come together. I would have thrown in the towel years ago without that guy.

I could keep going – it would be an endless sea of thank you’s. So many people worked to make this show come together. Without rambling on – thank you to each and every one of you guys – big love, appreciation and gratitude that you were there with us on the journey make this amazing series.

Human Resources Season 1 came out today! Watch it on Netflix! Enjoy!

Human Resources Series Trailer

Last week Netflix released the full trailer for our new Big Mouth spinoff series – Human Resources! It’s hard to believe the series is almost here – we are a little under two weeks away from the premiere.

New humans, new monsters and we finally get to see what life is like for a hormone monster (and all the other monsters) working at the office. And yes, the hormone monsters can be gross to work with in an office environment.

The cast this season is amazing – we were very lucky to get to work with such incredible talent (you will see a slice of some of them in the trailer).

Shout out to our crew who absolutely killed it and worked together to make an unbelievable series we are all very proud of. Enjoy the trailer!

Human Resources Series Teaser

The new Big Mouth spinoff series

Finally, we can talk about this…Here is a look at our new show we have been working on for almost two years – the Big Mouth spinoff, Human Resources! This teaser does a good job explaining a little bit of the nonsense that is the Human Resources series.

If you ever watched Big Mouth wishing you got to see more of the monsters, then this will be right up your alley.

The cast on this show is unbelievable! Randall Park is Pete the Logic Rock (the Easter Island looking guy) and one of my favorite new characters.

Check out the trailer – this has been a labor of love for all of us – entirely produced remotely (from our collective homes) during the pandemic.

Human Resources season 1 – Coming to a Netflix near you March 18!

Big Mouth Puppets Behind The Scenes

Part of Big Mouth season 5 was creating a live action puppets version of our characters – it was a lot of fun (and stress) to produce during Covid, but totally worth it! Here’s a few behind the scenes stories / trivia about how we produced the puppet sequence from “A Very Big Mouth Christmas” episode.

99% of the planning was done remotely over zoom, without seeing anything in person, which was crazy! We didn’t know how anything would come together until we were physically at the shooting location.

The Director of the shoot, Tanner, was pushing us to use a snow machine early in our planning. I’m glad we went with his idea because seeing the snow falling outside of each shot with the window looked amazing! It really adds depth and immersion to the shots.

When you watch the very beginning of the episode, Maury was never supposed to drop the tree beads strand at the beginning (that was an accident), but it was the best take and there was something kind of funny about him dropping the beads so we kept it in. It was tough to get the puppeteers to have Maury hang those beads on the tree – did a few takes of that to try and get it right.

Another take that was difficult for the puppets was Connie throwing her glass. We did that take A LOT. It’s not easy to have puppets physically throw items, so we really had to work at it. The poor props department had to get glasses ready with her “drink” in it (which was little shreds of red mylar) and the puppet would throw it and they’d have to get the next prop out. There was red mylar shreds all over the ground below the puppeteers from pouring the “drink” out over and over.

If you look closely, you’ll see there are all kinds of penis and vagina themed cookies and ornaments. Props department had a field day there.

Most people watching probably won’t notice, but if you look for it, you will see these puppets blink! Ok here’s the secret – it’s not actually part of the puppet rig. We did all that in post. The compositors did a lot of beautiful work on these sequences. It really brings life to those characters and it’s super subtle (that was one of Anthony Lioi’s many ideas on the puppets sequence).

Puppet Wrangler (Rachel) getting Rick covered with ‘soot’ and ready for the shot

Some other stuff the compositors did: adding smoke fx to Rick coming out of the fireplace, putting the reflection on the penis sword, removing the puppeteer rod from the penis sword (so it looks like Maury is actually holding it), and removing all the wires / rigs from when the Shame Wizard flies away offscreen.

The Vader Johan was actually a big laser cutout piece just strapped to a baker’s rack so we could roll him past the window. The art department came up with the idea to light up his eye at the shoot, so they modded him and put an LED behind some red plastic. It looked great!

The DP (Yuki) checking the lighting on the stand in puppet

It was a great shoot and wild to do early in the pandemic. Hopefully we get to do some more Big Mouth puppets in the future too.

Big Mouth s5 Trailer

Glad to see the trailer finally released out in the wild – everyone gets to witness the wildness that we have been working on for season 5. Lots of surprises this season – new monsters, love triangles, hate / love themes, Christmas, and one of our biggest episodes ever.

Also one of the big secrets that you can finally see in the trailer – we did stop motion and puppet versions of Big Mouth!

Those were a lot of fun to collaborate on and build out. Will add some behind the scenes posts on those later.

Check out the trailer to see all the shenanigans we have been up to. Season 5 comes out on November 5!

When is Big Mouth Season 4?

The wait is over (mostly) – It’s launching December 4!

Netflix finally announced it today, along with dropping the season 4 trailer. I watched the trailer again this morning and sometimes I forget how much crazy stuff we packed into one season.

The cast for s4 is just as crazy – Maria Bamford, Zach Galifianakis, Seth Rogen, Sterling K Brown, Lena Waithe, John Oliver, Paul Giamatti (FYI you will be surprised which character he is in the show), and a bunch of other people that they probably haven’t announced yet.

We started this season back in January 2019, so we are excited for everyone to get to see it. Check out the trailer below!