If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.
I guess that if I was a normal cartoonist who did things properly, I'd think up the background information first and then come up with the story. Saying that, you'd think that I don't really think through anything.
When I record music I like to be in one place and kind of have a base to keep going back to.
I never listen to music when I'm writing.
My process is really about little bits of inspiration. I just record them really quick on the guitar or something. I have a huge folder full of them. But if I start a song, I finish it.
Some scenes comes together really quickly, and some scenes are disasters that take forever. But it sort of works itself out over time.
It's a very organic process, and it has a specific order to it. I love to write, and once you've written, then you arrange. After the arrangement, you record it, and then you tour it.
I can find myself in a situation where, by the time I'm releasing an album, I have the next one written. It is a bit old school.
I'm always interested in seeing how other artists work. I want to know what their working patterns are. I even like to know if they listen to music when they draw or what time of day they draw, even materials they use, what they research, if they use photographs.
I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.
I develop my own film. And I work in spurts. I pile it up.
My studio is fully analog. There's nothing modern. There's not even a computer in my studio.
We finished 'Spaceman,' and before we were even done with that, we had already been talking about what we were going to do next.
When I'm directing, I'm pretty much not writing, but when I'm not directing I am writing a lot. It's strange: people have asked me what my schedule is and what is my process like, and I can't even answer it. I don't keep regular hours.
The writing is done on the computer, and the drawing is done by hand. I write, write, write, then I hit the illustration.
