This article is a transcript of the SpongeBob SquarePants DVD bonus feature "Show Design." It can be found in the Nautical Nonsense and Sponge Buddies DVD, which was released on March 12, 2002.

• Nick Jennings: In "SB-129", uh, SpongeBob and Patrick go back in time, and they go into the future, and we had a lot of problems, uh, painting some of the future paintings because the creator wanted, in the future, for, uh, everything to be chrome, to look like chrome. And, uh, it's a very difficult kind of thing to paint, because when you're painting chrome on chrome, uh, chrome reflects everything around it. We can go talk to some of those painters right now and check some of that out.
• [Jennings walks down the hall and talks to a painter.]
• Jennings: Do you have that painting up for us?
• Painter: Yeah. So, on the show, we don't really paint the entire painting. We work a lot in the computer and this painting he's been working on, uh, it's the exterior of Bikini Bottom, and, uh, he has been painting it all to look like chrome and we're gonna be adding the sky in a little bit later. And he'll be doing some work in the computer adding some, uh, airbrushed, uh, highlights, um, playing around with the color a little bit, um, I think he could probably, uh, pull this back a little bit, it's probably a little bit too dark, probably needs to be a little bit lighter. Um, they're probably not as, really gonna, pull that idea of chrome off too well if they're that dark. And you make sure that you shift this entire painting a little bit more cool. Right now, it tends to look a little bit too gray. Let's take a look at it after that.
• Painter: Alright.
• Jennings: Alright? Alright, good.
• Painter: Good.
• Jennings: Thanks. Another important aspect, uh, of my job is to make sure that all the props, the characters, and the models, uh, are, work with the backgrounds. [shows a model sheet of Primitive Sponge and Primitive Star] So we have right here, uh, show 1-129, and these are how we mark up the characters', uh, different colors. So let's go talk to the painter about what's going on. [talks to another painter] Hey, Calvin.
• Liang: Hi!
• Jennings: How's it going?
• Liang: Pretty good.
• Jennings: So how's your painting going?
• Liang: Yeah, it's good!
• Jennings: This is Calvin Liang, one of our, uh, another one of our background painters. Um, it's important when he's making a painting that it works with the characters, uh, in the show. So a lot of the time he'll have, uh, [picks up a cel with the main characters of the show on it] reference cels of the characters. And they'll be put on top the background to make sure that, uh, each one of them works in this environment, so that, say, something that's yellow in the background isn't the same yellow that SpongeBob is. And you can see that all these characters work really well in this background, we can see everybody really clearly. It's a nice painting, Calvin, it's pretty good.