All about Steve



		All about Steve
		The Everyday Adventures of Steve is very probably the most well-known Questionable Films' series on the Internet, and as such it's the one thing I get the most questions and e-mails about. Some people ask where the idea for it came from, some people just want to say 'nice one!', but most people just want to know when the next episode is coming out. Unfortunately I can't really give an answer to that last question, so hopefully this look into the history and creation of Steve should suffice!
			The Everyday Adventures of Steve is based off a comic series called 'Another Day in the Office', which I drew during a number of particularly boring lectures in my first year of uni. The basic principle of the comic is very similar to that of the cartoon - Steve has a pretty mundane office job, but every day some big drama occurs and Steve manages to sort things out. He also still loves porn.
		There are, however, a number of pretty significant differences. For starters, Steve in the comic is actually American, and served at some point in Vietnam. Secondly, Jimmy usually ends up dying in the comic, usually either through Steve's incompetence or Steve actually murdering Jimmy himself. That's right - Steve and Jimmy are not friends in the comic. While Steve seems to have something of a grudge against Jimmy in the cartoon series, there is ultimately a mutual understanding between the two men - Jimmy may be a bit of an idiot, but Steve would still call him a friend. Another large difference between the comic and the cartoon is that comic-Steve has far less respect than cartoon-Steve has for his boss. By 'far less respect' I mean that in one particular comic episode Steve shoots his boss through the head and then announces he's getting another job. Finally, the comic is excessively violent, even more so than the cartoon.
			It might be surprising to hear that currently none of the Steve cartoons are based off any of the comic strips. The reason for this is simple - Another Day in the Office was made purely as an excuse to doodle some action sequences with plenty of violence. While I love the idea behind the comic, clearly I needed to flesh things out a bit for an animation, and with this change in style came a change in the title of the cartoon. Plus, 'Another Day in the Office' would probably make people think of The Office. Perhaps.
		Steve is, as you'd expect, created in Flash, and as a general indicator of how bad I still am with that program Steve 2 took me about two months to create. The first step is to write out the entire script - I used to leave huge gaps in scripts for earlier cartoons (like the Mumblerhood), but I realise now that it really helps to get going with a cartoon if you've got it all planned out beforehand. Most of the actual action is drawn and planned on the spot, but for some of the bigger fight scenes I draw some extremely rough storyboards either on paper or in Paint, as you can see on the right. Seeing as Steve 3 is the first cartoon to be based directly off one of the comics, I've got a pretty good idea how I want the animation to look - however, I'll be adding a whole bunch of entirely new sequences.
		With the more important stuff out of the way, I'd now like to briefly focus on some of the smaller aspects of the Steve series. Firstly, Steve is not supposed to be me - I've honestly had people ask me about this before. The whole reason I got the Steve series underway was specifically so I could do a cartoon series which didn't involve real people or even cartoon representations of real people as the Mumblerhood had done. I enjoyed doing this for a while, but creating your own unique characters gives you much more flexibility in terms of what these characters can do and what kind of situations you can put them in. Another thing I briefly want to talk about is the voices in the cartoon. Steve's voice is basically just me doing a slight Burnt Face Man impression, and Jimmy is me doing an impression of a hallmate I had in my first year of uni. I've subsequently heard that my impression of Jimmy sounds like a whole bunch of other people (including someone's university lecturer), which I find pretty amusing given how stupid Jimmy sounds. As for the boss in the first episode, he was something of an afterthought, which is why he sounds exactly like Steve but with a bit of a blocked nose. In all subsequent episodes of Steve the boss character is played by one of my brothers, Ollie. By the way, the boss character does actually have a name but unlike Steve and Jimmy he's referred to only by his surname, which is Sullivan. I haven't thought of a surname for either Steve or Jimmy yet. Thirdly, there are several things people have suggested that I'm definitely going to be including in future episodes of Steve, including a recurring enemy and some more information about Steve's past. Don't expect anything hugely dramatic, however - Steve is and always will be primarily about comedy and action, but there's still a little room for some slightly more serious developments. Finally, it should be noted here that I don't personally feel that the Steve series has properly begun yet. This might seem a little odd given how long it took me to do Steve 2 and given how amazingly positive all the reviews were over on Newgrounds, but I still don't think the series has found the right formula yet. Basically, the comics start immediately with the episode's crisis, and the strip then follows Steve as he tries to solve it. This is what the Steve series is all about, and thusfar the first episode is really just there to introduce you to the characters, and the second episode only reveals the big crisis about half-way through. Not to worry though - the third episode throws everything at you right from the start, and the rest of the episode follows Steve as he attempts to sort things out. Well, that's about it for now. Ok, fine, I know what you really want me to tell you - Steve 3 will be coming out before the Summer. I know that's a little vague, but it's a better answer than "I don't know!". Anyway, I have started working on it, and trust me - you're going to love it! Right, I'll leave you with one last thing to think about - what is Steve's actual job?