Nico Colaleo on showrunning Ollie & Scoops

Have you ever wanted to know what was going through your cat’s mind? Ollie is a 9-year-old girl with a secret ability: She alone can speak with and understand cats, including her best friend in the whole world, Scoops. Nico Colaleo is the creator and showrunner behind Ollie & Scoops, an independent self-funded series. His show currently spans 8 episodes, with more than 1.5 million cumulative views across YouTube and Newgrounds. 

Nico Colaleo was also the creator and showrunner behind DreamWorks TV’s Too Loud, and has a storied career as an animatic editor on productions, including Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Kid Cosmic, and Pig Goat Banana Cricket. 

In January, we invited Nico onto our livestream to discuss his experience showrunning an independent series, as well as his advice to artists curious about creating shows of their own. The following is an excerpt from our live discussion. You can also watch our full interview with Nico on our YouTube channel or on Twitch.

How would you describe Ollie & Scoops to someone who has never seen your show before?

It's about a 10 year old girl, Ollie, and her best friend is the family cat, Scoops. When I was coming up with the show, I thought: “It’s great that you found the characters, but you always need a hook. What's the hook?” 

And then I thought: “What if Ollie is the only girl in the entire world who can communicate with cats and understand them?” She can talk to them, and nobody else can. Because of this, she ends up learning that cats have a whole underground secret society that humans don't know about, and adventures ensue. 

Would you want to be able to speak with cats?

Sure, why not? I'd know what my pet cats would want. If they wanted me to clean their litter box earlier than usual, I would know. That'd be great!

As a cat owner, I could see it being really annoying. 

In the latest Ollie & Scoops episode, the eighth one, it opens up with that actually happening. With Ollie hearing cats all over the place; hearing a little too much talking going on at once. And she just needs some alone time. 

I loved that scene! What drew you to explore the secret underground society of cats instead of, as Ollie mentioned in that episode, squirrels or dogs?

Dogs and cats are everywhere in cartoons. Cats are usually portrayed as sneaky, usually the villain or the antagonist. The dogs are the sillier ones. And I kind of got tired of that. Let's see the cats being… all kinds of different cats. 

There are antagonist cats, but they're not all sneaky or aloof. A lot of them are silly and goofy, more laid back, quieter, louder. I wanted to explore a whole bunch of different characters and not just sort of one or two. I'm just more of a cat person, and I find that cats in real life have different personalities.

How would you describe the job of being a showrunner?

Most of it is making sure that your crew is happy. That's the main one, because you don't want to have your crew be unhappy; otherwise they leave. Showrunning is first about keeping the crew happy, and also checking in with the crew often to gather up the work they've been doing, giving whatever notes and tweaks you may have, etc.

As showrunner, you're involved with and in charge of every single part of the show. So your main job is to follow up with each member of the team, giving them notes to perfect what they're working on, and then cobbling it all together to create the finished product.

In terms of working together, it’s learning how to collaborate and… it's not always just my idea or the highway. Whenever crew members have ideas, I'm open to hearing them. To be a good director and showrunner is to have your ears open and listen to your crew. Collaboration is a beautiful thing.

How many people do you work with on a typical episode?

Including the storyboard artists, we always have a couple per episode; including the voice actors, usually eight to 10 characters per episode; the animators, that's usually 10 to 12; cleanup artists, there's usually around eight. I'm thinking maybe 30 people per episode? That might change from episode to episode. 

A year ago, when we were starting, it was 10 to 15 people. It’s great that we're growing!

How have the premise, characters and design changed since you first pitched the show in 2014?

I learned a lot on Too Loud, the show I did before Ollie & Scoops. That really helped me. If you look at my designs from 2014, they were just white characters. It was just something that I wasn't thinking about. But I learned from Too Loud to have a more diverse cast, and I think more people can connect with that.

For Too Loud, Ollie & Scoops, or anything that I make, I like to do the initial designs of the characters. And then, as time goes on, I'll find a character designer. In this case, for Ollie & Scoops, my designer was Natasha Weir… she's just amazing. I was a fan of her work before I was even friends with her. In 2019, she took my initial designs, and she put her spin on it and just made them 100 times better. Her stuff is very asymmetrical. It's really all over the place and wacky and that's just what drew me so much to it, originally.

Recently on Twitter, I posted the 2014 designs versus the 2019 current designs. The designs for cats didn't change too much. A lot of the cats are like: here's like the really dumb one, here's the greedy one, here's the conniving one, here's the little cute one. But the humans, in particular, did. 

Her teacher originally was going to be a David Lynch cameo caricature. With Too Loud, I took that character and made him the mayor of town in the show. So when Ollie & Scoops came around, I had to come up with a new character for Ollie's teacher, since I had already done the David Lynch-type character in my other snow. The new character ended up becoming Miss Bivvins.

Then I continued the director thing: “Who is the principal? Let's have it be John Waters.” I like putting film directors in my shows. I don't know why. 

I thought it'd be fun to create these #OllieAndScoops 'before & afters'. Today's designs we know and love, alongside lineups of my initial designs from my 2014-2016 studio pitching times. pic.twitter.com/oB8T6VX8X5

— Nico Colaleo (@NicoColaleo) November 23, 2021

How would you describe the reaction feedback that you've received for Ollie & Scoops?

It's been great! We've been around for a couple years, but the sky's the limit. And we're getting more and more views and more subscribers on YouTube. The response has been just really, really great. I know they always say don't read the YouTube comments, but on my show, thankfully, I see really nice messages. 

If it's anything negative, usually the commenter is actually at least giving a good critique. If they're being negative, at least they're actually saying why they don't like it or whatever. Thankfully, I don’t get a lot of those either. It’s been really a positive experience.

What do you feel that viewers connect with on your show?

I came up with Too Loud and Ollie & Scoops both over the past eight years or so. And I'm not going to just name stuff, but we all see that there's a lot of ugliness out there in the world, both a decade ago and now. And I came up with these shows, because I just wanted to promote kindness, compassion, and characters caring about each other.

That's what I hope people take away from the show. You know, besides humor. I wanted to make a show about kindness, where with Ollie & Scoops, or with siblings Jeffrey and Sara plus their group of friends in Too Loud, you can tell that they really love and care for each other. Even the antagonists in Ollie & Scoops get redeemed by the end, usually. They don't just get thrown in jail like any other show. There are different levels of villainy, sure, and certain baddies get their comeuppance. But most of the time it’s like: Let’s cut each other some slack. 

I just realized that I never uploaded my clean up reel for Ep8 of @OllieAndScoops ! These were my first shots working with the team and it was really fun to learn the style! pic.twitter.com/r8b3LDSBJ8

— kirarara? (@kiradraws) October 28, 2021

I see animators and artists on Twitter posting samples from Ollie & Scoops scenes they worked on. What kind of direction do you provide to artists you work with?

A lot of animators already know what they specialize in, so I’ll give them certain scenes. “Hey, I think you would be really great at this scene where Ollie and Scoops are apologizing to each other. I think you'd be really good at the subtleties of the scene.” Or maybe Scoops has to do a wild take and react crazy to something. I tried to assign specific moods and scenes to the artists that I think would fit those really well.

At what point did you decide to go the independent, self-published route?

I pitched Ollie & Scoops all over the place. After a couple years, I sold Too Loud. When that series ended, I was like: “Well, I've been working for two years on my own stuff. If I just stop, I'm going to go crazy, so I should keep working on my own stuff.” 

I pretty much started working on it as soon as Too Loud ended. Though I came up with it before Too Loud, I have quite a few things even older than Ollie & Scoops. But I just felt that was what I really wanted to work on next. 

Before the livestream, we discussed that creators working on independent projects often feel a sense of relief, that they can get away with making content that’s edgier or more adult. And I don't think that was your intention with Ollie & Scoops.

In terms of like, in terms of the age range, and what kind of content we have… I find that a little more challenging to write for all ages. I'm not going to denounce anyone who makes adult shows; I've plenty of friends who make adult shows. A lot of what I see is farts or violence. And that's fine, and can be funny. But I've always felt that when I've had the chance to make something for myself, like Ollie & Scoops — where it's by myself, no studio, I can make it whatever I want — I still choose the all-ages route. 

And I think that's just because I feel like I'm more at home when I'm writing to everybody. I don't know, it's weird. Why don't you just stick to what you know and stick to what you do? Even when I had a public access show in Tucson, Arizona with my friends in college, and that was us, in our early 20s, it wouldn't get filthy. I'm pretty content finding something that everybody finds funny. I think it's a little bit harder to do and a little trickier; you have to be a little more clever to make something that will make a five-year-old and a 35-year-old laugh.

How do you feel that the series changed since the initial episodes?

Mainly in the runtime of the episodes. In Too Loud, all the episodes are five minutes long. That's what I was going to go into Ollie & Scoops with: “Let's just make them all five minutes. That's easy.” 

Matt Brailey, my best friend, who's also on my writing team, and a couple other friends, threw some ideas at me. We started writing, and found we were getting up to like, 10 and 11-minute ideas: “Okay, we probably won't go longer than that.” 

The last one was around 18 or 20 minutes. Okay, so this is getting pretty ambitious. Episode eight will definitely be the longest one for now, but I don't know. I'm sure I have other ideas that are going to be just as long but, we're going to reel back after that one. 

Because it was so long, it took us months and months and months to make. So I don't want to go for too long without releasing a new episode. I don't want it to be one episode, and then a year goes by before the next one. I'm going to try to reel it in and have the next episodes go back to 10 or 11-minutes. I also don't think I've ran out of all the five-minute episode ideas that we've started off with. 

But who knows? There are always going to be longer episodes. I also really wanted to do Ollie & Scoops quickies. We haven't done any of them yet, but those are like a minute; really short and we could do a lot of those in a short amount of time.

Do you have advice for artists and animators interested in creating an original series?

I'm just gonna say what worked for me. It's not necessarily what's gonna work for you. Everyone has a different path, and you should follow your path. Don't take this as: “This is how you have to do it, otherwise, you're not gonna make it.” 

I still work in the animation industry. I'm an animatic and animation editor. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, I take the storyboard panels, I build everything to the voice actors’ tracks, throw in the sound effects and the music, and I time out the episode, building a skeleton for the show before it gets shipped to be animated. That's my day job. 

So I've always worked in animation, for 11 or 12 years now. And that's what pays my bills. When Too Loud came along, they gave me a budget. So I didn't have to pay for Too Loud, DreamWorks did. But when Ollie & Scoops came around, I just got to the point in my career where I had saved up enough to make three episodes and just see what happens. As we were making the episodes, I was continuing to work during the day, and that helped me save up for the next three episodes. It was just a lot of saving up and it's going to take a lot of time. 

It doesn't really matter how much you save up… Honestly, best advice I've ever heard from multiple teachers and peers was just make stuff. It doesn't matter how much it costs. If it's $5, $5,000 or $50,000, just make stuff. And always be making stuff. Always be coming up with characters or stories, or come up with situations and characters that fit that situation, or situations that fits those characters.

Don't put everything on yourself either. I have a couple friends who are really great at writing, and they'll help me write episodes. Or if I write the script, they’ll come in afterwards for a punch-up session, where we go through and plus all the jokes; punch up all the comedy. And then there’s the designs. I’ll do the initial designs, then Natasha will work her magic and make them 100 times better. You can find a good group of friends to create your project's crew, and let them help you create your baby. Be in charge but, again, always make sure to let team members have their ideas and suggestions heard as well. 

Create whatever project you can create, something that makes you happy and something that is fun for your team to work on together. If these things happen, it will shine through enough that audiences will see it and enjoy it too. That’s the path I took to make Ollie & Scoops, so hopefully, that advice helps a few more artists create something of their very own!

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• Ready to explore the secret society of house cats? You can stream all episodes of Ollie & Scoops on Nico Colaleo's YouTube channel.
• Interested in more live interviews? Don't miss our livestreams at 4 PM Eastern / 1 PM Pacific every Thursday on Twitch.