I convinced Tim to add one song, and then we added five. We changed a lot of things while we were shooting, which you should never do in stop-motion animation. With this, it was a much smoother ship, so I wasn't getting sent the scratch reels of things.

When Tim asked me to do Frankenweenie, he had his original sketches from before he did the short, of what Sparky looked like, and he drew Victor and some of the other crucial people. The remarkable thing about working with Tim is that, once he's read a script, he sketches out everybody else.

Every once in awhile, Allison Abbate would drop a note and say, "It's going really well!," and I was like, "Great!" So, I had not seen it in about two years. They went off and started shooting, and I saw it all put together with almost the final sound mix and it was remarkable. I was so, so happy and relieved, not in the sense that I thought something had gone wrong, but you just don't know what something is going to be like until you see it put together. Everyone stepped up and brought their A+ game.

I knew that this was the movie in which a lot of the cinema version of Burton-esque first started. So, I knew that there were things that were hugely important to him for it, but it didn't really feel that different than working on any other of these projects.

I often say that a lot of my job, as a screenwriter, is sort of being a stock picker, in that I need to figure out what movies are probably going to get made because otherwise I'm spending a lot of my time on something that's trapped in 12-point courier. So, having Tim's interest in doing a movie is a huge asset. But, not everything shoots. I'm always grateful when those things do happen.

Most times a person grows up gradually, but I found myself in a hurry... Hoping to find an answer, I uncovered an article about the common goldfish. "Kept in a small bowl, the goldfish will remain small. With more space, the fish will double, triple, or quadruple in size." It occurred to me then that I was intended for larger things. After all, a giant man can't have an ordinary-sized life.

Josh [Friedman] and I have been friends for years, and he said, "Hey, if you ever want to do a TV show, I can take it over and run it," and I was like, "Yes!" He's always been so busy that I never dared to ask that, but it just worked out, time wise, that this was the season where we could probably do it, so I jumped at it. So, even though I'm busy with other stuff, I'm excited to be writing this.