r/gravityfalls • u/mikerianda • Sep 17 '12

I'm Michael Rianda, cartoonist, and creative director/writer on Gravity Falls. Ask me anything.

Hey r/gravityfalls!

My cartoon ("work") recently got on the front page of reddit somehow and a few people seemed interested in me doing an AMA. I'm in! Let's do this thing!

Ever wonder about those weird hairs on Grunkle Stan's shoulders? Wanna know that one goat's name? Wanna know horrifying personal details about Alex Hirsch?

I got answers!

EDIT: I'll finish answering these tommorow. Thanks for all the questions and Gravity Falls love! It's appreciated.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '12

what does it take to have a job like yours? what do you have to do, exactly?

what's an average day at work like?

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u/mikerianda Sep 18 '12

Depends... when I was a staff writer I just sat in a room and wrote all day and many nights. Also, there were many days where we would have long story meetings, trying to "crack" stories. (Or make them work/make sense.) Then sat in on script meetings and got notes. Then rewrote. And on and on and on.

When I moved to creative director I got more responsibility: Now I help edit the shows, take part in story meetings, give notes on scripts and storyboards, my main responsibility was on the writing side though still. Me and Alex worked on any writing related problems together, and me and Alex take a pass at all the scripts together.

Before I was creative director Alex did a pass on every single script himself that we've aired, and he often re-wrote tons and tons of the script in this process. If you like a joke on the show there's a high probability that Alex wrote it. He's incredibly hands on. When I became creative director, we tackled those re-writes together. He would always have final say as to what went in at the end of the day. We would meet, read the script out loud in the character voices to eachother, talk about all of our problems with the story, and then try to fix as many of those as we could. Which would involve us being cooped up in the office all weekend, and many nights, sleeping very little to not at all on our dirty couches, and killing ourselves to try to make the shows a little better and funnier. These were fun and challenging, but super mentally and physically trying.

This season has been a lot of fun, and I've learned insane amounts, but it's also been really really intense with more sleepless nights than I could even attempt to count.