Comicon Postgame and Production Journal

Monday, August 1st, 2005

Jackson Publick describes the Venture Bros. production process in his Comicon Postgame and Production Journal:

Recording takes the better part of a day and leaves me with hundreds of audio tracks to sift through. Generally, I’m given a disk (or two) of the tracks, I take them home or to the Astrobase, load them into iTunes, and start listening. I write down the name of the track next to its corresponding line in the script and then hand this off to our sound engineer. This takes hours upon hours and is often incredibly frustrating. Sometimes because I have to pick between two excellent, different takes of the same line to decide which is funnier, and other times because no matter how many versions I listen to, there just doesn’t seem to be a ‘right’ one. Also, hearing your own voice over a set of headphones, no matter what character you’re pretending to be, is…kind of embarrassing. All attempts to condense this process have been fruitless: 9 times out of 10, the track we thought was the best one on the day we recorded it turns out not to be upon a second, private listen. And lots of times the first take of a track that I recorded eight times because I didn’t think we were getting it right turns out to be the best of the lot. Anyway, the sound engineer takes this marked up script, pulls the noted tracks, cleans them up and trims them, and then lays them all out in script order in Pro Tools. Which brings us to the slug:

Slugging in this case (the term means something completely different in most other productions) is the process of editing said Pro Tools project to create a sort of Venture Bros. radio show. I sit with the engineer and more or less imagine what the pace of the show will be. We pull tracks together that were recorded hours apart, overlap them and so forth, in order to try to make the show sound like live conversation. When we hit a part of the script where big action is described, I have to kind of imagine how long that action would take, and we leave that part silent (unless of course henchmen are screaming during the action, or Brock is grunting or something). When our little radio show is all edited and sounds right, we check the time. If it’s over 23 minutes, I have to start cutting stuff then and there. Or, if it’s over but not by too much, I have to at least start seriously thinking about what’s going to be cut during the next two phases: storyboard and animatic.

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Bob Sykes: One way to hide information is to mix it into a sea of noise.
Bruce: Scott Alexander made the point that everyone texting all the time is at least practicing basic literacy. And everyone who uses social media instead of television video news is reading, like reading the papers fifty years ago. Kurt Vonnegut used to say that if you walked into a house and saw his books or Tolkein’s, it didn’t mean they were reading the stuff. It was just furniture for a certain sort of person. But some were reading.
Bob Sykes: For some time now, Russia has imposed a total blockade on the Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
Lucklucky: Since when did Afghanistan not initiate the conflict? Or Iran? Actually there are several times the US would have been justified to answer Iran’s aggression and did not.
Phil B: “It started giving more money to the Follow Through models that had not done well.” Or, as it is known in the trade, reinforcing failure. Had those funds been spent on schools and pupils that did well, then how much better would they have succeeded? Compare and contrast the results of spending $50,000 per pupil in an inner city school and $20,000 per pupil in a less “diverse” neighbourhood. But failure must not only be reinforced but rewarded with more cash.
Isegoria: Asking Grok about that claim was eye opening: The frequently repeated claim that the US “initiated 81% of 248 armed conflicts from 1945 to 2001” originates in a Chinese Society for Human Rights Studies report (circulated around 2022 amid US-China tensions). It is not based on transparent methodology matching UCDP, Correlates of War (COW), or similar standards, treats “initiated” expansively (including indirect involvement, proxies, or interventions in existing conflicts), and is widely regarded...
Bob Sykes: One is reminded that of the 250, or so, armed conflicts since 1945, 80% were started by the US, and almost always against countries at peace with us and our allies. Recent examples are Panama, Haiti (too numerous to count), Granada (a UK commonwealth member), Serbia, Somalia (still active after 34 years), Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq (twice), Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon (by proxy), and Ukraine. The coup of 2014 that installed the current neonazi junta was our doing.
Isegoria: From The Screwtape Letters (Letter 27), by C.S. Lewis: And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
David Foster: CS Lewis said (quoting very loosely) that if you want to destroy and infantry unit, you cut it off from its adjacent units…if you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from its adjacent generations.
McChuck: A mild fever for a day or two after an inoculation is nothing. It’s a normal response to your body fighting an infection — which is the entire point of the inoculation. The strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots after the mRNA Covid shots are of real concern — but of course they can’t possibly study those, because they “don’t exist”.
Ozornik: It’s funny to read it against this: “The CDC advised her to take her temperature”, posted here on October 14th, 2026 Both Marburg and Ebola are not airborn and require direct bodily contact to spread. Methinks the author of the book might be either one of the lowest form of human existence – a journalist, or might have monetary interest in scaremongering oblivious sheeple. Oh, wait.
Phileas Frogg: People who intend to sit atop hierarchies should acquire the skills for getting and remaining on top of hierarchies. The great delusion of modern education is that they’ll somehow accomplish this by being good at math or engineering. I didn’t realize until I was in my mid-20′s that networking is an art, a specific skillset that needs deliberate cultivation. The best part is that when you tell most people they don’t believe you and just keep on hammering on about...
McChuck: “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
PM: Phileas Frogg says: “The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.” Which puts me very much in mind of the Russian Federation’s ongoing initiative to load their bureaucracy with returning veterans of the SMO.
Bruce: Characters in 19th Century novels are constantly “overworking” and then taking off a summer or an entire year from their jobs. Getting ‘tired and emotional’? or other euphemisms for ‘publicly drunk’? Lot of overdrinking at work in 19th century culture.
Phileas Frogg: The side with better PPP is always more militarily dangerous than the side with better GDP. We’re going to learn that hard lesson very soon, but what do you expect? We’re ruled by bankers and merchants, while Russia and China are ruled by spies and engineers. The first country to fully re-embrace rule by warriors is going to be hellacious to deal with for a few years.
Bob Sykes: The novels of Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, truly excellent as stories, also provide detailed descriptions of life in Britain during the 19th Century. Austin for the gentry, Dickens for the urban poor, and Hardy for the rural working class. Also, A.J.P. Taylor’s history of WWI has an analysis of the economic conditions in the run up to the War, and he concludes that working class was materially better off under wartime rationing than during the peace in the early 1900’s. The...
Jim: Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop...
Steve Sailer: Characters in 19th Century novels are constantly “overworking” ; and then taking off a summer or an entire year from their jobs. That doesn’t happen that much anymore. It’s a little hard to grasp what that was about.
Dan Kurt: “Hely Hutchinson Almond, headmaster of Loretto School, who described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second…’” A late professor of modern history told me that the German military from the reforms in the early 19th century until its defeat in WW2 tried to select its officers under the chief criterion of one’s Character.

Isegoria

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