The creator and co-executive producer discuss how their series leans into archetypes, broken character models, and visor-based expressions to give its doomed crewmates more personality than their simple silhouettes suggest; the Innersloth hit-game adaptation is now streaming on Paramount+.
In 2018, the indie studio Innersloth released Among Us, a science-fiction murder mystery game that follows a group of spacecraft crewmates who have “Impostors” among them. The Impostor's goal is to sabotage the ship and kill everyone along the way. The crewmates need to complete tasks and vote out the Impostor before time runs out.
The game was a massive success; Innersloth received multiple game awards for their simple but very effective idea for argumentative fun.
So, when Regular Show and Infinity Train’s Owen Dennis – along with production partners Innersloth and CBS Studios – took on the task of adapting the game into an animated series, now available to stream on Paramount+, he knew it would be a blast. But it would also be a pain.
“It’s a show with 11 main cast members, which is larger than any project I've really worked on before,” says Dennis, whose series follows roughly the same plot of the game. “With the first episode, we have about 11 minutes to get to know 11 characters, who all look kinda the same, have no faces, and also introduce a plot and, spoiler alert, there's a murder by the end of the first episode. You have to set things up as quickly as you possibly can. And sometimes that means leaning on the classic signs of who these people are.”
Since each character has the same basic shape language and a blank bubble screen for a face, Dennis says he and the animation team at Titmouse decided the best course of action was to add accessories to each character that spoke to an archetype. There’s the wrinkly mechanic, the hunky doctor with a sparkly aura and big lashes, the white collared capitalist drinking wine, the punk girl with a spike collar (and bell?) and her hippy best friend sporting a tie-dyed shirt and a flower crown.
See for yourself in the trailer:
“We created these stereotypes of people whose personalities would bounce off each other well and then, as you get to know them through the show, you realize there's much more to each of them,” says Dennis. “We basically played into the first glance assumptions people have and then had fun with unraveling that through the storylines.”
But unraveling a character who has no eyes, eyebrows or a mouth to indicate emotion meant thinking outside the box.
“On Infinity Train, we had characters who just had two vertical circles that made up their face,” notes Dennis. “So, we did a lot of experimentation with shapes of eyes and things like that to understand how to emote characters with just a simple circle. And Among Us is even more simple. So, when it came to hiring artists, I wanted people who took a lot of inspiration from comedy and things like anime where they are much freer to break a character design to express a certain emotion.”
And Titmouse (Big Mouth, Fairfax, The Legend of Vox Machina), well-practiced in both, was happy to come on board. While the team used a variety of software – Toon Boom, After Effects and Photoshop – to animate the series, there was no character rigging used at all in the show. Everything was hand-drawn because the character models were constantly being broken and reshaped.
“I love that the characters can all be so widely interpreted and yet still be recognizable,” says Titmouse’s Madeline Queripel, who served as co-executive producer on the series and worked with the Korean studio Sunmin on the character drawings. “We could squash ‘em, stretch ‘em, and even add feet. And using the visor as the stand-in for an entire facial expression worked surprisingly well. Alex Cline did some fantastic character designs early on that really shed light on all the possibilities. We just really tried to do every character justice, and give them depth, even if… they don’t live very long!”
Each character gets to have their memorable moments with some big, goofy expressions. Queripel shared that Purple’s character was one of her favorites to work on because of her constant exasperations, typically brought on by Red, as well as Orange, whose character can go from dramatic highs to very deep lows in less than a second.
“We also tried to think not just about what their actual character design would look like but also the feeling of the moment,” explains Dennis. “They could be surrounded by hearts and bubbles or be wobbly and wiggly and weird.”
The ability to straddle the line between drama and comedy was also something Dennis asked of the voice actors. The cast includes Yvette Nicole Brown as Orange; Kimiko Glenn as Cyan; Liv Hewson as Black; Ashley Johnson as Purple; Wayne Knight as Lime; Phil LaMarr as Brown; Randall Park as Red; Dan Stevens as Blue; Debra Wilson as Yellow and Computer; Elijah Wood as Green; and Patton Oswalt as White.
“I needed people who were very talented and knew what they were doing to be able to really push where they needed to and bounce from being dramatic to comedic, from fearful to fearless,” notes Dennis. “And I didn't want extremely cartoony voices. We needed a certain grounded level to be able to show the stuff that's happening on screen. If everything becomes a joke or is super heightened, then you never get to have the serious moments that come later in the show.”
Like, you know, the murders.
“When we started putting in the violence, we all realized the power behind the juxtaposition of these cute characters and gruesome murders,” notes Queripel. “We carried it through into the writing as well. The audience is sort of set up to let their guard down when they see these designs and the goofy jokes, but in the end, we make you really care about them and realize that they each have a deep inner world. So, I think pushing the boundaries with some of the violence reinforced that. It was definitely fun but could be tricky.”
Dennis adds, “That murder at the end of the first episode had so many different iterations. We weren’t sure if kids would be watching this show or if it was just going to be older teens and adults. People at the top would be like, ‘Hey, could you maybe make this less bloody?’ And then they’d be like, ‘Maybe we can make it more bloody? And could you make sure the bone is already there?’ And then again, they’d come back with, ‘Actually can we take out the bone?’ Eventually we landed on cutting the character in half, blood spurting everywhere, a bone popping out and making a stupid cartoon spring noise. That seemed to cover all the bases.”
The other big challenge the Among Us crew faced in production was the continuity of the spacecraft layout. In the first episode, Orange takes Green and White throughout most of the rooms on the ship in true Among Us gaming fashion. And as fun as those sequences were to put together, it also meant the creative team couldn’t cheat when it came to getting characters from one room to the next.
“When you’re making a show from scratch, you can cheat on that stuff and people don't really notice,” says Dennis. “However, in this one, the map of the spaceship is so well known because that's the entire game. If a character is doing something in one room and it's like a secret evil thing that they're doing, and another character has to go from point A to point B, and they would have to pass through that room to get there, everyone who has played the game will know that. You have to keep so much stuff spatially in mind. It was hard.”
He adds, “In the actual game, if you go into certain vents, you can't come out of other vents. And we're like, ‘We're not going to do that. All vents lead to all vents.’ We already had enough to keep track of.”
A show like Among Us can be as deeply beloved as it is criticized by the original game’s fanbase. But Dennis welcomes viewers’ sharp eyes, even relying on them to some extent.
“We don’t get a lot of time to deep dive into things on this show,” explains Dennis. “So, I work on the assumption that whoever's watching the show is watching the show. If somebody has a question or doesn't understand something, they'll go online, ask the question, and one of those people who was watching the show will answer them. I don't need to talk down to the audience. I don't need to spell everything out constantly. Anytime you watch anything, there's a certain amount of communal experience to it. People will always talk to each other about whatever they're watching whether they like the show or not. Maybe talking about it will make them like it more. And, if not, at least they’re still talking about it.”
Queripel did offer up a hidden clue to viewers who want to go through the series with a fine-toothed comb.
“There’s a certain character… shall we say… that gets eviscerated,” shares Queripel. “And there’s a very small detail that’s only on screen for a few frames when it happens. In addition to loving the lead up to the death itself, I also like challenging myself to see if I can find that little Easter egg.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
