New details on the Live segment for “Simprovised” have been released!

Simprovised_Homer_Live_in_1_Week!New details for the upcoming 21st episode of season 27, titled “Simprovised“, have been released by FOX. The episode airs on May 15, 2016. Matthew Nastuk will direct this episode.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, showrunner Al Jean says “In terms of the anxiousness, I think this one’s very high. Admittedly, we always have a million safety nets. Now, we have far fewer.”

Al Jean and his team revealed that they’ll be using a software by Adobe called Adobe Character Animator that will capture the voice of Dan Castellaneta and create Homer’s mouth movement syncing it. Using the software, the team of animators will be able to control Homer’s movements.

David Silverman, producer and animator, adds “It’s not a computer drawing; it’s animation we’ve put in there that will be activated by these buttons, these triggers.”

Al Jean confirms that “It’s not something you’d want to watch for the whole show.” and will last only three minutes.

Tests on how it’ll go on both east coast and west coast airing has been done by the crew of the show and Al Jean, and also talked about future possibilities to expand on this “It’s an incredibly fluid medium”.

Al Jean also remembers that the number to call on Sunday night is 1-888-726-6660 and remembers the viewers to bring something sharp in the conversation with Homer “Homer’s popularity is in no small way [related] to how funny Dan [Castellaneta] is. He improvised ‘D’oh’ — it had just said ‘annoyed grunt’ in the script.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal

In another interview, this time with YourTVLink, Al Jean remembers again about The Tonight Show “Early on, when we were doing ‘The Simpsons Movie,’ we had talked about Dan appearing live as Homer on things like ‘The Tonight Show,’ but the technology that existed then seemed too rudimentary, and you really couldn’t get very much range with the animation. So, John Frink — one of our writers — was doing an episode about improvisation and he said, ‘Why don’t we try having Homer live at the end?’

And some more details about the program used to make Homer go live: “We checked into (the technical aspect), and it’s greatly improved. Some guys at Fox Sports, working in tandem with Adobe, have come up with a (computer) program that I think is pretty convincing. It’s going to be Homer taking questions on the phone and talking live … and we’re doing it because we can.”

Then he talks about how Dan Castellaneta’s movements will work live. “We don’t know what he’s going to say, but there’s no one better to be doing this. Motion capture (with the character mirroring the actor’s movements) is really the key to it, and the improvements in it have made this possible.”

And at the end he talked about how the process will be permanent in the show’s history, “There’ll be baseball games that Homer could talk about, and developments on the political scene also would seem likely that day. We won’t really know what’s going to happen until it happens, but there will be only three minutes for it. It’s a new process, so I didn’t think you could do a full show with it, I think people would get tired of it, so three minutes is an optimal length.” Al Jean remembers to the callers that will go live that “You’ll be in the show forever, because it’s going into syndication that way. We’re not going to change it.”

Source: YourTVLink

In an interview with ET Canada, Al Jean reports “Dan Castellaneta [who voices Homer] will be in a booth where he speaks into a mic, and obviously what he says goes out live. Abd he’s not hooked up by electrodes or anything, his motions are captured and translated into Homer’s moves, which will then appear in the animation. For viewers watching, it will look like the normal show. We have background animation that has been pre-animated with several jokes, but everything Homer does, the centre of it, is live.” As for why Homer was selected for this, Al Jean concludes “[Castellaneta] does improv all the time. He’s terrific at improv and it was just a natural fit.”

CiZ9gtMWkAAJtNESource: ET Canada

If you want to know more about the episode, check out our post on its plot!

Stay tuned for more!

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