Time is Lonely

That's why it never leaves us

As we travel onward through October, I wanted to talk about our more emotional ghosts. We held our Summer Camp wrap party last Thursday and I thought a lot about ambiguous loss that day.

Ambiguous loss is a loss that occurs without a significant likelihood of reaching emotional closure or a clear understanding.

The term "ambiguous loss" was first coined in the late 1970s by Pauline Boss, a researcher who studied families of soldiers who went missing in action. Ambiguous loss has since been used to describe how it feels when a family member is suffering from dementia, when they are still physically present, but the person had changed emotionally, resulting in unresolved grief. It has also been used to describe the loss one feels during a break up (when you could just slowly drive past your exes house and see them, but it wouldn’t be the same, you’re better than that and it’s hard to drive while you’re sobbing), or even the feeling one has when they are at dinner with someone who is on their phone the whole evening.

I am of course in no way comparing the loss of my summer camp family with the more devastating loss of having a parent with dementia, or a loved one MIA in military service, but the idea of an unresolved grief does resonate.

I started writing Summer Camp May 6th 2013 whilst living in New York. I took a picture of my desk set up that day because I had just bought a new notebook that I was fond of. Yes, there is a pumpkin on my desk in May.

I had been making short films and someone pointed out to me that making a television show was like a series of short films with the same cast of characters. I had seen the pilot for Adventure Time when I was in college and like most everyone, I really resonated with the humor and the drawing style, and now it was on Cartoon Network, it made me feel like there might be a place for me in the television world as well. The first thing I wrote in my new notebook was “Lobster Gilmore Girls.”

I pitched the show in October 2013 with a 41 page full colour pitch bible packed with every idea i’d ever had. At one point during the development process I realized that if the show didn’t get picked up, I probably didn’t have any other ideas.

The original concept of summer camp was much darker; a musing on homesickness and loss and perhaps better suited for teenagers than the boys 6-11 bracket that Cartoon Network was making content for at the time. One day i’ll take you through it, but not to-day.

A drawing from the pitch bible of pool noodle and a ghost of a girl who died in the pool.

They picked the show up to pilot, I moved to LA, got my drivers license, and we started (pool) noodling on how to make it more boy 6 - 11 friendly (sort of). After two years working on the pilot, developing more episodes with Kent Osborne and Kirsten Lepore, and writing on Adventure Time, the show got an official 20 episode pick up on January 2017. I shook hands with Rob Sorcher and off we went.

Still from Saxophone Come Home of Rob Sorcher and I shaking hands.

We started writing episodes, we designed the logo, hired tiny brilliant actors…

hired an entire crew of designers, storyboarders, revisionists, production managers, musicians, SFX folks…

Had the legendary Seo Kim write the title song (she wrote two…perhaps one day we will release the alt!) and board the title sequence…

…and sing the lyrics.

The art style was developed from illustrations by Yelena Bryksenkova

The original concept art by Yelena Bryksenkova

The final layout from my pencil drawing and art direction by Sandra Lee

A brief intermission to mention that before all this I had never worked in television before. My brief stint on Adventure Time while working on the pilot was the only other experience i’d had, and I spent a lot of the first season sobbing in the downstairs bathroom. On we go!

A lot of our story boarders came on from Adventure Time, which was wrapping at the time, and people from the comics world. I had spent so much of my artistic life drooling over other people’s work and now we had the opportunity to work together on one cohesive world. I was beyond excited.

The storyboards would be turned into beautiful artwork by our art department headed up by Sandra Lee, and then later, Jisoo Kim.

Storyboard for Midnight Quittance by Tom Herpich, Art Direction by Sandra Lee

We shipped the storyboards to Korea and they were animated by Rough Draft with pencil on paper.

We told stories about time, friendship, loneliness, grief, doing something later, and what to do when you accidentally spread a bad rumour about mushrooms. We wanted to create a space that made you feel like you were exploring tricky emotions, while sitting under a warm blanket.

So many things happened in the 3 and a half years we were in the office: crew members had babies, new relationships, broken relationships, we got dogs, Graham Falk left glorious Valentines Day cards in our cubicles…

Lucyola Langi made incredible office decorations…

we started a softball team…

…we were bought and merged with different companies and within all of it, the world of summer camp just kept getting bigger, more complicated, more beautiful and more emotionally devastating. Which speaks to the incredible group of artists who worked on the show. While I can sometimes become a puddle when I work alone, when we were together we would continue to inspire each other and could pick up each others slack when one of us was puddling. I would have them as my artistic family forever.

When the pandemic hit, like most everyone else, we left the office without saying a proper goodbye because we naively assumed we’d all see each other in a few weeks. I remember looking around the pitch room in our final meeting on March 13th, seeing the storyboards pinned up for ‘A Barb is Born’ and having the ominous thought that: “we’re never coming back here.”

Our pitch room on the day that Graham Falk showed us a proportional model he made to help him storyboard ‘Midnight Quittance’

Cole Sanchez (supervising producer) and I in a production meeting, July 2018

We started work on the final 20 episodes of Summer Camp on the first Monday of the shutdown.

Working from home March 2020

…and finished writing them November 6th 2020 (the day before Biden was announced)

(Kent Osborne, Quinn Scott, Sarah Lloyd and I cheers-ing on our last writing day)

(not pictured here Jack Pendarvis!)

Our sixth and final season is a 20 part linear story that is so bloody gorgeous, I cannot wait for you to see it. I felt incredibly lucky to have my work family during the lockdown, it kept me grounded, gave me a purpose and felt like a cathartic outlet for all our bubbling emotion.

Alabaster Pizzo, Quinn Scott, Cole Sanchez, Abby Magno, Sarah Lloyd, Lucyola Langi and Ryan Pequin showing off their pets during a storyboard meeting.

We found out we would not get another season during lockdown, and we told the crew over zoom, which was of course, bloody awful. As people wrapped their production obligations, we would say goodbye to them, and then there would be one less box on the zoom calls.

The next time I was in the office was October 2021, most of the crew had wrapped and I was boxing up those same storyboards and other office tchotchkes that were still in the same place we’d left them a year and a half earlier. It took me about an hour to pack up my office and then I just sat there, staring. I remember Cole Sanchez, our supervising producer, calling me on the phone asking if I was still there, and I said ‘I can’t leave.’

Kent Osborne and I writing an episode in my office, December 2017

Sarah Lloyd, our head writer, and I, April 2018

The show officially wrapped in January of this year. I immediately got a chest infection and then fell into a deep depression (as is par for the course). I went to the UK and helped deliver lambs. I waited patiently for the final season to come out so we could all delight in these gorgeous episodes.

Our final season premiere was delayed two days before it was set to premiere on HBO MAX. Then the Discovery Plus merger happened, and we found out from a deadline article that the final season would not be airing on HBO MAX at all, and that all of the episodes we had worked on together would be taken down from the platform as well. The final season represented so much of who we all were during that first year in lockdown. We grieved over email - the most ambiguous of grieving platforms, and planned for a much needed wrap party.

The first time I saw a lot of the crew in real life again was at that wrap party last Thursday. I remember feeling exhausted and frazzled at the premiere party as we were just getting the show off the ground, and I left that night telling the crew i’d see them tomorrow. The wrap party naturally felt very different, I wouldn’t see them tomorrow, and I would never see them again in the context of making this show together. I am not a very party centric person but this event could have lasted forever and I would have been so happy. To be in the presence of this gentle crew made me feel warm and happy and peaceful. Much like the show also makes me feel, because it holds all of them inside it.

I told Ryan Pequin on the drive home that we should all hang out more often. He said yeah…but it wouldn’t be the same. And of course he’s right. Much like meeting up with an ex for a coffee, it might feel wonderful, strangely comforting, but you’ll never hang out again in your original context, and there is something devastating in that. When I made Belly, the short film which the character Oscar was derived from, it explored loss as well, and how even when someone is gone, you take them with you. You feel them in your Belly. My summer camp family is taking up a lot of room in my belly these days.

When we all worked in the office we had a birthday tradition, a spell of sorts, that was taken from my childhood. When you cut your cake, you scream when you get to the bottom to release your wish into the universe. We cut a cake, designed by Seo Kim, at the wrap party:

And wished that whoever needed to see the final season of Summer Camp would, and that we would get to work together again:

@julia_pottWe had our summer camp wrap party on Thursday. In our crew we have a tradition where we scream when we get the bottom of a cake to release our wish into the universe. On thursday we scream wished that the final episodes of summer camp would make it into the world and that we would all get to work together again one day. I hope you could hear us screaming! ❤️🌈

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I want to end on a passage from Midnight Quittance written by our head writer Sarah Lloyd. I found it soothing in a way I needed during the last week, an embrace of the tricky elements of time and a reminder that time can be a gift, something to welcome into our lives, and our faces.

Time is lonely
That’s why it never leaves us
Time doesn’t like to be invisible
That’s why it shows up on our faces  
And in our trees
We may not know time
But we know the gifts of time
For we receive them with each passing year.
Tonight we welcome time to our table
So that we may give thanks.