About S13-E03: “What About Job?”

Written By Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin and Wendy Molyneux

Assistant Director: Robin Brigstocke

Storyboard Artists: Young Chan Jeon

J.C. Gonzalez

Otto Murga

Kyung Shin

Damon Wong

“What About Job?” was our Season 13 “triptych episode” in which the characters tell three fantasy stories. These episodes are governed by a fairly specific set of rules. While the stories told can hop from genre to genre, they have to relate to and have an impact on the characters in the show’s “real world”. Here we have Louise struggling to complete a career day school assignment with the rest of the family pitching ideas about what her future might hold.

Visually, one of the rules of these episodes is that the kids are always depicted as kids, even if the roles they’re assuming in the stories are technically adults. In Gene’s story Louise is a John Wick-styled “wedgie-ssasin” and in Tina’s she’s Louisiana Jones, so they’re pretty comfortably in the movie parody zone that the show has already spent a good deal of time in. The story told by Bob, on the other hand, posed some unique challenges.

Bob’s story will shift into film parody too, reinterpreting Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 feature “Children of Men”, but it’s prologue is a pretty grounded story of Louise transitioning from child to 30-something adult. It became a question of how to visually tell the story of that transition while still drawing Louise and the other kids who take roles in the story as children.

Our solution was to do the sequence in a single take with the world shifting and changing around Louise as her mind’s eye interprets the story in real time as Bob tells it, with Linda, Tina and Gene chiming in for good measure. Louise remains aware throughout, reacting to each change as it happens. Finally, as she takes a seat at her work station and interacts with her co-workers she’s fully in the world of the story.