Writing for Animation

Laura Beaumont, Paul Larson

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501358654
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Film & Video

Animation is one of the fastest growing mediums in the film and television world – whether it's Frozen or Paw Patrol, Family Guy or Rick and Morty. This book is the definitive guide to storytelling for writers, directors, storyboard artists and animators. Suitable for both the student and the professional, it provides indispensable knowledge on the entire process of writing for animated movies, TV series and short films. The reader will be provided with all the tools necessary to produce professional quality scripts that will start, or further, their career in animation. Beginning with the fundamentals of 'why animation?' this book will lead the reader through a series of principles that will raise the level of their storytelling. These principles are tried and tested on a daily basis by the authors who have a twenty-year track record in the animation industry. Many people are trying to break into the world of writing for animation and a lot of the people who are 'already in' would like to get more work. The reality is that writing for animation is a very specific craft that can be learnt like any other craft. This book will give the reader both the basic and advanced techniques that will put them ahead of the rest of the field.

Chapter 1

Why Animation?

A lot of writers will tell you that you cannot learn to write; it is a gift you either have or you don’t. There is a small element of truth in that; some writers have more natural ability than others but everyone can get better. Everyone can learn principles of structure and dialogue, and they can learn to apply elements of drama and comedy that will make their stories better. That’s what we aim to do here, but before we get into the nuts and bolts of how to make your scripts great, we need to have a reality check.

The Business of Animation

Animation is expensive. It doesn’t need to be; it is now possible to create animations on your phone using paper cutouts for next to nothing, but animation as you would see it on TV or at the movie theater is costly to make. At the time of writing, the cheapest form of computer-generated imagery (CGI) animation costs around $15,000 a minute to make. A good one can cost upward of $50,000 a minute. To get a rough idea of a series budget, let’s take the lower number of $15,000 per minute. If it’s a ten-minute episode, the body of the episode will be around nine-minutes long, giving us a cost of $135,000 per episode. If you’re making a series of twenty-six episodes, you then need to multiply that number by twenty-six. That’s a lot of money. Your idea for that quirky new cartoon series about a robotic samurai is in fact a multimillion-dollar business proposal.

To illustrate further, moving out of the world of animation for a moment, we are going to look at a show called Shark Tank (Dragon’s Den in some territories). In this show, members of the public are given the opportunity to pitch business ideas to successful entrepreneurs, or “Sharks,” in the hope of finding an investor. There are a lot of bad ideas on the show, but there are quite a few ideas that seem like good ones too. But when you watch it, it’s amazing how often the ideas that seem good suddenly start to fall apart under the scrutiny of the “Sharks.” The idea might be innovative but the numbers don’t add up; it might be the best-tasting jelly that’s ever been invented but the branding is all wrong. Sometimes the person making their pitch has done everything right, that is, the accounts add up and the marketing plan is perfect, but it turns out that someone has already started something just like it and is six months ahead. The list of the ways that these business ideas can fall apart seems endless. These top entrepreneurs know what they’re looking for and know how many different ways a business can fail. But how does this apply to you as a writer of animation?

Most companies that make animated shows either have a lot of money or know investors that have a lot of money. People and companies with lots of money don’t tend to keep lots of money if they take too many risks. Now, what if we told you that the way to see your ideas and stories come to life on the screen is as simple as making people feel more comfortable about the risk they are taking? The more comfortable you make people feel, the more stories you’ll get to write. And that’s what this book is about. That doesn’t mean this is a checklist on how to project the right body language and say the right buzzwords. This is about bullet proofing your ideas. It’s about the fundamentals of what you need to do to give the industry (and your audience) what they want, at the same time as allowing yourself to be creative.

But, how do you make the decision-makers feel comfortable about choosing your project?

Master the Craft of Writing

Writing animation requires a complex and unique set of skills. To start with, you need to be able to think visually and process your ideas into a series of shots, you need to write dialogue that is both energetic and true to character, and you need to be able to think in terms of dramatic structure. In short, you need to be both technical and creative and, depending on your chosen genre, you may need to be funny too. This may sound daunting, but the truth is that no one is great at all of those things (if they were, Toy Story wouldn’t have four writers on the credits), but we can all improve our weak areas and get even stronger at our strong ones.

But how do you master the craft of writing? Well, we’re going to give you lots of tools that will help you. These tools will make your stories better, and the more tools you master using, the more accomplished you will become as a writer.

Tools Not Rules

There are no rules in writing. Although some people will tell you that there are. Some will tell you that they know the golden rule that you must stick to, the one thing that you must always do when writing a script. This simply is not true. For every rule that someone comes up with, you can find a successful story that breaks that rule. So, we’ve come up with a toolbox rather than a rulebook. Now, it’s important to remember that some tools are more helpful and should be used more often than others. If you’re a cabinetmaker, you probably use a saw on pretty much every job you do, but you might use needle-nosed pliers only occasionally. So, we’ll be recommending that you use some of these tools in pretty much every story, while others you might only use if you feel like your story is “lacking in something.”

It is important to note here that while there are no rules in writing, most shows do have their own format that make them successful—we’ll be covering that in Chapter 20. These formats are the “rules” for those shows, but there is no one set of rules that apply to all stories or shows.

Why Animation?

In theory, you could make any TV show as an animated series if you wanted to. But then why are Breaking Bad and Friends live action? And why were Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny animated? The answers might seem obvious, but we need to break this down to the fundamentals so that your stories always have a strong foundation. Laura once sat in a meeting where a creative with a series idea was pitching his concept to a producer. Part of the conversation went something like this.

PRODUCER

I love the show idea, but why is

it animated?

CREATIVE

Because it’s for kids.

PRODUCER

No, I mean why would you animate

this show? It would work just as

well if it was live action. Kids

watch live action too.

CREATIVE

I just think it should be

animated.

PRODUCER

Ummm . . . Let me put it this way . . .

This isn’t an animated show.

CREATIVE

It is, I’ve drawn the

Characters . . .

This went on for some time, but hopefully you get the picture. Just to be clear—that show didn’t get made. But also to be clear, the person with the idea didn’t understand why that show shouldn’t be animated and neither did Laura. We had to make quite a few mistakes of our own before our point of view switched from “that producer is wrong” to “I get it, I know the changes we need to make if it’s going to be animated.” So, it’s time to open our toolbox and start tinkering about with the nuts and bolts of animation.

There are three main reasons why a TV show should be animated. These are not in order of priority, and the reason can be any one or a combination of all three.

Fantasy

Let’s start with Tom and Jerry. Imagine you’re Hanna and Barbera and you’ve just come up with this idea. There’s a cat that’s trying to catch a mouse and the mouse is always one step ahead of him. You’ve got great ideas for slapstick comedy and exciting action sequences and you can’t wait to get started. So, why are you going to make it animation? Is it possible to do a live action version of the show?

You could get an animal training school to train some cats and mice and then film it with a real cat and mouse. The best we can say about that idea is “good luck with that!” Or maybe, you could get two actors who are good at physical comedy, put one in a cat costume and one in a mouse costume, build some giant props, and you’re away. But would that look as good as the Hanna Barbera animation? We doubt it. What if we make it that the characters are not a cat and a mouse but two people who don’t like each other? Someone who is big and aggressive chasing around someone who is small, smart, and agile. Well, that might work, but you would lose all the incredible sequences that rely on the cat and mouse scale. If you disagree, just watch the pool table sequence in Cue Ball Cat. On top of that, you’d also lose the legacy of cat and mouse conflict, you don’t need to explain why Tom and Jerry hate each other; we already know that cats and mice don’t get along.

We put it to you that in the case of Tom and Jerry the fantasy of two animal adversaries with some cat and mouse traits and some human traits was best ...