“Dr.Havoc’s Diary” Exclusive Interview: We Play Toys With Carlo Moss and Mark Cope

 

Carlo Moss and Mark Cope did what every aspiring filmmaker dreams of doing. Fresh out college with little money and few connections, they gathered a bunch of old Barbie dolls, put them in front of a camera, and uploaded the result—a high school parody which they called The Most Popular Girls in School—on YouTube. Almost a decade later, Moss and Cope not only amassed a loyal following of several millions strong, but also built a creative foundation for their next project, Dr. Havoc’s Diary, which can now be seen on Syfy. In this exclusive interview, the ever-resourceful creators talk about the ways in which their production process differs from the studio system they sought to circumvent, explain how and why their animation methods evolved over the years, and give some advice to young creators looking to start out, like they once did, deep within the corridors of the worldwide web. 

 

Tim Brickhof: Before we start talking about your own work, I was wondering if you have any advice for creators who want to put their content out on YouTube rather than go through the studio system.

Mark Cope: If you are looking to get into the industry, if you’re an animator or storyteller what have you, it’s fine if you put your stuff out on the Internet, but don’t focus on making a lot of money; focus on getting eyeballs on your content, focus on really learning who your audience is. The biggest lesson that Carlo and I ever learned was to find out who our audience is. When we first started on YouTube making Most Popular Girls at School, we were just two guys in our twenties and we thought we were making a show for our friends, and we shared it with them and their families, and they enjoyed it, but it was only several months into making the show that the audience exploded and switched from being 50/50 men and women to being 75% female ages fourteen to twenty-one—and we were like, “Oh, this show is for them!” We didn’t know that, originally, but that’s what the Internet told us, and then we knew how to write it, who we were talking to. That’s the great thing about making content online, you can find out who likes it. 

Carlo Moss: Another piece of advice that I’d give to people, especially when they’re first starting out, is: just write the things that make you laugh, that you like, that you’re equipped to tell. Mark and I both came up in the improv world, and I cannot tell you the number of times that I was in sketch groups, sat around a table, and went, “Okay, what are the big movies that we should parody so we can get to the front page,” and it was only when we began writing what actually made us laugh that we started getting traction. 

T: Coming back to that sudden surge in viewership, do you guys got any idea what might have caused that?

C: We actually do. Once Most Popular Girls had kicked off, we were able to trace it back to a single Tumblr post six months after we launched the series—

M: I think it was a whole year, because we had done the first twelve episodes of season one. We’d only begun to talk about maybe doing more when we watched this happen over the course of three days. I think it was a fourteen-year-old kid on Tumblr who was not even famous, but shared the first episode, and it just took off on social media and funneled everything back into YouTube. 

T: It’s crazy to know that a small thing like that can cause a chain reaction that ends up defining your entire career. That said, what were some of the advantages and disadvantages of using YouTube as your main distribution channel? 

M: In order to make YouTube work for you as a platform, you gotta feed it constantly. Carlo and I, we always think of it as a game of Hungry, Hungry Hippos. Now the challenge with animation, stop-motion animation included, is that a lot of work goes into a single video. We can’t just sit in front of a camera and talk about our day or review movies; we have to fully script, cast, record, and shoot each episode—it’s a tricky model for an animated web series. That being said, there’s a massive audience which can give so much amplitude to what you’re turning out that it makes it worth it. 

C: It also allowed us get our reps in quicker than most people who begin their career working at production companies. By the time we got to Most Popular Girls, we had already written upwards of seventy, eighty scripts, and were releasing them every week. The best way to get good at something—especially writing—is to do it over and over again, and get to know your characters like the back of your hand. Going our own way, we were able to build up these skills that, say, a writer’s assistant who spends most of his day making photo copies would take a much longer time to learn. Another perk of being a YouTuber is that we could get to know our audience, and they us. Because we did it grassroots, our audience came along for the ride, as it were, and we had complete transparency with them. 

T: Towards the later seasons of Most Popular Girls, how many people were working on the show? 

M: Working on the actual production, not counting the cast—which for any season could be up to fifteen people—the crew has never been more than four, maybe five people. It’s always been kept tight-knit. Our company was designed around me animating the first few seasons by myself, and everyone working on the show has to be able to handle multiple positions. The guys and girls who animate, they also build the sets; the editor is also the one lighting the shots. The multitasking made it easier for us financially, too, because when you’re making a web series, your budget is not nearly as large as that of a full-fledged production. But everything we learned on Most Popular Girls came in handy when we moved to larger, more expensive productions like Dr. Havoc. That show was, of course, way larger: we were making our own characters and building bigger sets, yet we still had only four people, one DP, and one editor. We kept our crew small to continue doing things differently than the average production company. 

T: Can you go into a bit more detail about how exactly you guys do things differently? 

M: When we started, I didn’t know anything about stop motion. Frankly, I didn’t even watch tutorials before we began filming. I thought I’d just take a bunch of pictures, put them in my computer and make it work. When you’re making content online, the main thing is: delivering the jokes, the message, whatever it is you’re trying to communicate, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Normally, in stop motion, every little detail in the frame has to be perfect. The props have to be detailed. We don’t need any of that, because it has nothing to do with the jokes we’re telling; it only needs to look like there’s some books behind the character so they can go on telling their joke. The way we animate also has a different aesthetic than traditional animation. We don’t let our characters walk; we slide them around as though they’re on conveyer belts, because walking is a time-consuming process to do in stop motion. We don’t need it. Once everyone understands they do not walk, they don’t even see it anymore. Last but not least, we make sure our animators constantly have new shots to work on. Typically, when an animator finishes a shot, they may start on the next only after waiting up to two to seven hours for the last one to get approved. If one of our animator’s finished, we should have their next bit ready to go and if we don’t, we’re making a mistake. We don’t fuss over perfection because, at the end of the day, we’re not making something you can hang on your wall: we are making something you will hopefully laugh at. 

T: You said you had no background in animation whatsoever when you started out, but were there any animated shows or movies that inspired you? 

M: The two shows that were most influential in terms of animation were South Park and The Life & Times of Tim, which was an HBO show. That one was especially inspiring because it had very basic animation. The characters are not drawn well, the movements are almost non-existent, and all you’re watching is just really funny dialogue. My reason for doing animation was that it’s very hard, when you have no money, for you and your friends… to make a really high-quality live-action sketch that lots of people will enjoy, but in animation it doesn’t necessarily always have to look amazing to be hilarious. The first couple episodes of Most Popular Girls have millions of views, and they look pretty bad, but that was the idea. 

C: Something we discovered early on and which we say all the time now is: a limitation turns into a signature.  We have never apologized for the way this show looked, because it’s part of the joke. In the second season of Most Popular Girls, the dolls we were working with were so old and cheap that the hair of one of them started to fall out, and instead of fixing it we just incorporated it into the story: this character was developing hair loss, and had to deal with that. 

T: Sticking with that detail for a moment, would you say that the humor influenced the look of the show, or the look the humor? 

M: I think the look of the show influenced the humor because, when I was first starting out, nothing came out like I wanted it to. In fact, the first episode of Most Popular Girls came out so much worse than I had dared to imagine, that I didn’t want to post it. I actually threw the files away, and gave Carlo a copy, but he said, “Oh what the hell,” and posted it, and College Humor picked it up, and a week later it had over a hundred thousand views. It was only when we began to embrace the aesthetic and write into those jokes—like the fact that when the characters talk on the phone, they hold them way above their heads because the dolls can’t bend their arms—that the ball got rolling. 

C: It’s the same with any show. If you create rules for your world, and let your audience know how things work, that the characters’ mouths don’t move when they talk, or that they slide instead of walk—it only takes audiences about five seconds to accept these things and move on. It doesn’t matter that the faces don’t move, because the viewers’ subconscious starts to project expressions onto them without realizing it. 

T: It’s a little counter-intuitive, isn’t it? You wouldn’t think a show with this much dialogue would work with characters who cannot move their faces. And yet it does. I don’t know why. One of the reasons it might work so well is that kids in high school often put on a face which they don’t break away from. 

C: Here’s this sweet, smiling doll saying the grossest, most horrific thing. And the more episodes we made, the more people reached out to us saying, “Oh my God, my high school is exactly like this!” Which makes us go: “Oh my God, what!?” 

T: Most Popular Girls takes place in a high school, and Dr. Havoc’s Diary is a spy and superhero spoof. These are some of the most overused, familiar settings and genres in the history of entertainment. How do you guys find ways to make it fresh, to create characters that feel original and authentic rather than fit a preexisting mold? 

C: The original jumping-off-point for Havoc was: what if being a supervillain was just a job like any other; what would it look like? And, going along that train of thought: what if there was a supervillain who just shot people in the face, someone who doesn’t care about the trappings, the extravagance, the spectacle, but whose job was just to take over the world, and do it as quickly as possible? 

T: So, basically, the polar opposite of Dr. Evil. 

M: First we had to establish that there is a world of heroes and supervillains. Then we had to find a way to connect that to real life, and to do so we looked at it as a type of professional sport. It’s an extremely difficult profession that could yield extremely high reward, and make you famous. Throughout the first season, Dr. Havoc and his arch nemesis, Brock Mason, they obviously hate each other, and maybe want to kill each other, but they also have this comradery of: we’re all in this industry together, kind of like they’re players on different teams. On the field, they do battle. But if they see each other in the grocery store, they don’t flip each other off and get in a fight.  

T: When you guys were planning out the show, were there any tropes that you knew you wanted to avoid at all costs? 

M: Havoc is a villain, and he has no problem blowing up cities and killing people, but his motivation is not one of hate. He isn’t a terrorist; he doesn’t act out of hatred, it’s just that it is part of his job to, well, cause harm. In order to take over the world, you gotta threaten to blow up a city. The fact there’s people in that city, that sucks, but it’s what you gotta do. A lot of episodes actually deal with Havoc trying to explain that paradox to people, and that gets him into trouble, because being a villain is hard when you’re also kind of a good guy. 

C: In terms of avoiding tropes, we wanted to make clear early on that Havoc did not exist in one kind of superhero world. That’s the beauty of villains: they fight everybody. They’re largely the same across the board. If you take a Bond villain on one hand and an Avengers villain on the other, you can conceivably see them switching franchises, but you can’t see the Avengers show up in Skyfall. Havoc’s arch enemy, Brock Mason, is a secret agent like James Bond, but you’ll also see him face off against superheroes that can fly. 

T: Havoc was made back in 2016, aired on a number of VOD platforms, and is now being given new life on Syfy. Is there a second season in the works? 

C: We definitely have ideas for how the story continues and what the next season looks like. The first season finale finds Havoc in quite an interesting place: what if a villain won? How would his world change? 

M: At the end of the day, it’s up to Syfy. But I feel I speak for both Carlo and myself when I say that this was by far the most fun show either of us has ever got to work on. Nothing makes us happier than it getting in front of a new audience right now, and getting to talk to people like you about the show, and we think it would be so much fun to keep it going. 

 

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity. Dr. Havoc’s Diary airs as part of Syfy’s TZGZ block on Saturday Nights, check your local listings.