The story so far; Oh, just go back and read the other stuff.

Some other advice I’ll give you for nothing, though one day I’ll expect you to buy a book.

And the answer to last week’s quiz question…

REMEMBER CHARACTER IS IMPORTANT

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in the last fifteen years in the industry (other than never expect any money from your first invoice) it’s that audiences love characters who intrigue or enchant them. They might be Homer Simpson. They might be an anglepoise lamp. They might be a cute mouse or a reprehensible monster, but if the viewer feels a degree of empathy with them they will stay the course because they like the things that happen when that character is around and want to see what they’ll do next.

As an exercise go back and look at all the You Tube clips linked in part one and part two of this whatever this is. What do they all have in common? Every one of them stars characters that we know and love – or love to hate. Character comes first. A strong character is the audience’s guide to your world – the door into your story. It’s the first thing you should talk about when you try to sell a show too.

But often the characters I see in student scripts and show pitches are flimsy and over familiar. They’re clichés, because we’ve all seen a million movies and archetypes are what most easily come to mind when we write. Now archetypes aren’t bad, especially in animation (a medium that excels in characterture) but when they’re too familiar they don’t excite, or are sexist or racist or crap. So beware the stock cast of characters you have in your head. They’ve been put there by a lifetime’s exposure to other people’s stories and it’s easy to repeat too accurately something we’ve all seen before.

Great characters intrigue because we can’t understand everything about them at a single glance. We do get the gist, but there’s extra to intrigue and surprise us more.

• Ren and Stimpy?
• Spongebob Squarepants?
• A dumb blond girl
• A hungry fat guy

Who would you rather watch?

Decide what your story is really about

Usually it starts with an image. A moment. A kick ass scene. It starts with something singular that gets you all excited and makes you want to run off and tell your friends “There’s this great bit where…”  Then you have to stick a story around it. Then you have to ask yourself ‘what is my film really about?’

I don’t mean what is the story? That’s just the surface. What is it really about? The theme? What’s the secret objective of the tale you are telling? You’d be surprised how often filmmakers don’t answer these questions early on in the creative process, then go badly wrong because nothing underpins their work. Their scripts are walls without foundations. They don’t know what inhabits their building.

Great films have strong subtexts that the viewer often doesn’t even notice, but the film maker knows well. That’s how they made a great film. Their self-knowledge helped them make the right decisions – what to reinforce and what to take out.

If you have an idea for a story but no idea of what it is really about, you have a truck but no cargo. Think about something you really want to say, then make your story serve that higher purpose. Before you start a script answer these questions…

• What does your film seem to be about?
• What is it REALLY about?
• How do you want to make your viewers feel at the end?

The answers will be your yardstick for judging how successful your script is and how much further you have to go. They will also help you find that ending.

Your film may not reach any firm conclusions, but it does need a sense of closure or it won’t satisfy. It’ll just stop. A good ending is the natural but entirely unpredictable result of all that has gone before. It is your ultimate weapon for leaving the audience in the state you want to leave them – be it laughing, crying or arguing about what you meant. By deciding what your secret intentions are you can better devise an ending that is appropriate and affecting.

Show don’t tell

In every screenwriting book this is rule number one, yet it’s one of the hardest to master for many.

Show don’t tell

So I’ve said it twice.

Show don’t tell

And then again – slightly louder. Always strive for the most visual ways to tell your story. Let your pictures do the talking and save the talking for things that pictures cannot do.

If you’re come to screenwriting from other forms of writing you’ll find this hardest tool to master. Just saying something out loud will be the most natural thing in the world to you and reducing it to pictures a challenge. But this is screen writing – a visual craft – and it truly becomes an art form when amazing images tell your tale.

Screen writing secrets three. When scripting for animation write every scene without dialogue first. Doodle it. Scribble it. Watch the pictures in your head and then jot them down. Not because that’s the way your script may end up eventually but as an exercise. Visual solutions to storytelling problems are almost always more original than those solved by dialogue, which often end up cliché. Removing words forces you to be more creative.

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The story so far; Historically storyboarding is the way to take animated projects forward and it may also be the best. Putting drawings on the wall, narrating them to others and feeling how your film takes shape by actually performing it is a very powerful tool for this very visual medium.

But this is a world where the people who may give you money need things they can read on the train, so it’s not very practical handing them a wall. It’s therefore very likely that you will have to sit down at a keyboard and type a formal script, but I’d still recommend you try some live storytelling first.

Getting up and pitching your project to people (any people ) is the best way of taking a tale forward that I know. As you tell it you’ll embroider it. You’ll feel the limp bits sound.. well, limp, and make a mental note to improve them later. You’ll hear your story thrive or die as you try to keep your audience wanting to know more.

Animators are performers with a pencil so getting up and becoming your film is a brilliant way to feel it’s rhythms and get an objective view of your work. But, there will come a time when you have to nail your thoughts to paper and that’s when things can go astray. So you have to work at…

Making music

It has been said by a great many people who draw far better than me that animation and music have much in common. Both are paced by beats and rhythms, although only one is good to dance to. Well, screenwriting is a lot like music too. A fully formed script is full of beats and rhythms that your audience will unconsciously tap their feet along to IF you get them right.

Not all good films are tightly structured, but it sure helps. In animation a fresh style or a stunning technique can be very exciting to watch – for a while – until the viewer gets used to it and boredom sets in. The tough truth is that if you want to make movies that people will want to watch to the end you have to win, hold and deserve their attention.

Whether you’re making an episode of ‘She-Man and The Masters Of Tranvesticism’ or a film for the Prague Festival Of Animation Made With Rotting Dolls And Rusty Scissors, your holy creative duties are the same.

• To intrigue your audience
• To take them on a journey that exceeds their expectations.
• To leave them somewhere that made their trip worthwhile.

You have to make music.

A lot of filmmakers, especially those who hate the idea of screenwriting ‘rule’s’ have found this music making analogy useful. Of course you can be John Cage. You can make your name through eight minutes of cacophony or silence which make us reconsider the act of listening. But be prepared to play to much smaller audiences.

Mostly people prefer a good tune.

A good tune is a journey. It sweeps us up and it transports us. It carries us away, but It doesn’t disorientate. There are riffs and rhythms and a deeper theme that make us feel we are being guided by a composer who knows what they are doing, rather than a kid banging on saucepans with a spoon. We feel that our ride through music is going to worthwhile and that we may even want to repeat it again.

How do we structure that journey so there are twists and turns, not one verse and no chorus or middle eight? Well, most widely used and popular way to do that is to plan ahead using..

Classic Three Act Structure

There are many ways to hold an audience, but the oldest and most well known is to ensure that you have three acts.

Think of a joke. Any joke. It has three sections.

• Situation
• Complication
• Resolution

And if you complicate that a little bit more you get 75% of mainstream Hollywood movies.

• Oh Wow
• Oh Shit
• Halleluiah!

Secrets of screen writing two. The note most given to writers is ‘You’ve only written a two act story.’ Don’t let that be you.

Why does the three act structure work so well, and has done since the beginnings of drama ( it goes back a long way.) Because it plays with the human attention span. It feeds us new information on a regular basis to keep us interested.

Imagine you’re making an animated short. After a few minutes of screen time the audience have usually got the point you are making. They’re not thick. If your theme is ‘War is wrong’ they’ll have noticed by now and their attention will be flagging. They need something to refresh them. That refreshment is your second idea – your third act.

I work stories out like this….

Many scripts go wrong because they only have two acts; the initial idea and it’s development. Reaching for the third act – the surprising – the less obvious – the place we didn’t expect to go – is what will make your film unique. So…

• Draw a flowchart of your film – with three boxes.⁽¹⁾
• Then scribble out your story so it divides into them.
• If the divisions feel slight or forced, do more thinking. Is there more that could happen? Is the story really over or is there somewhere else you could go that would bring fresh perspectives to your theme?

Make sure each box is a clearly divided stage in a journey, with a final destination you could not see from the point of departure.

Every scene and every event should push us towards what comes next.

Homework. Go back to You Tube again. Watch ‘Bad Luck Blackie’ and draw a chart of what you perceive as its structure. Does it fit the above or am I talking bollocks? Now think of Tex’s wonderful toon as a song. If the verses are the basic three act story. What would be the chorus? Can you find any riffs or refrains?

Next Tutorial; a series of disconnected extra bits like I didn’t plan this or something.

^{1. As above, act two is always the longest. It’s where the meat of your sandwich is (if I was using sandwiches as a metaphor and not songs).}

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A short history of telling tales in commercial cartoons continued

The story so far – people made things move and mostly made up stories as they went along, with directors imposing some structure through a sense of rhythm. Now Walt Disney has come along and proved people will watch silly drawings running around for more than seven minutes if they tell a compelling tale too. Some other people try this. It’s not as easy as it looks.⁽¹⁾

Whilst Walt was ‘Hi-Ho-ing’ his way into diamond mines of riches and respectability, there were other animators labouring at the coalfaces of commercial animation who were about to strike their own kind of fool’s gold.

Over at Warner Brothers and MGM Tom and Jerry and Bugs and Daffy were continuing the short comedy of the silent comedians, long after their extinction, amping it through the flexible reality of animated cartoons to hilarious new heights.

Here’s director Tex Avery at the height of his story structuring powers…

How could you possibly write a film like that on a typewriter? You can’t. The drawings have to be drawn. The lines have to set their own momentum. The cartoons must cartoon and then you scribble down what they do.

In a visual medium there’s no better way of writing for the screen, especially for comedy, then with a wall of drawings and someone acting things out in front of an audience. If something doesn’t work in the story they will feel it (and possibly see yawning.) Then they can go off to revise and reshape and re-pitch and revise.

Secrets of screen writing one. Verbal storytelling is the greatest writing and revising tool of all and it’s free.

But here comes television.

Television was different. It needed stuff. A lot of stuff. And it needed it now! The schedules of early TV are full of ancient cartoons, silent comedies and cowboy serials, filling it’s low budget schedules. But soon the idea of making new animated content came along – if it could be done for a bargain basement price.

It could, but the cost was lower production values too. Forget all that lush animated movement and 360 turnarounds. TV budgets demanded drawings, funny drawings, and if you were lucky their mouths could move a bit.

In television there was no time or money for artists to draft and redraft sequences till they got them right. There wasn’t even time for producers to go down to the studios. Execs needed something to read in their office or in the car – and so did the sponsors and corporate lawyers who had to ensure nothing snuck into their shows they didn’t approve of. What they screened had what they’d previously agreed to. So..

“Can you show me a script?”

Some turned this to their advantage, In the US the likes of Jay Ward Productions hired the hippest writers they could find and inspired cartoonists dashed off their stories in a deliberately stilted, tongue in cheek style.

You might enjoy this, I know I do…

But mostly it was the age of Hannah-Barbara, abandoning the lush renderings of Tom and Jerry for the limited animation of The Flintstones. Animation became sit-com and conventional script processes took over mainstream animation.

As a result a terrible disconnect happened between the animator and the writer. Where once they would have worked together, or even been the same person, now they never even met. Scripts arrived in the mail. Animation became less and less animated. Quantity was more important than quality. Though there are TV gems, the latter half of the twentieth century is mostly littered with awful kids series it’s only fun to remember because they were so naff.

There were high spots however. In the UK ⁽²⁾ the BBC funded some children’s programmes in such a hands-off way that they were either really into auteur theory or just didn’t give a toss. In the 1960’s and 70’s, largely left to their own devices, Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin made many of the classic series of British children’s TV from some cardboard and wool in a shed. Their shows feel like carefully crafted children’s books. They were labours of love and we loved them.

In Manchester Cosgrove-Hall Films also carved out a niche as a quirky British comedy voice (that mostly sounded like David Jason.) Dangermouse was the greatest and fantastic.⁽³⁾ Like Jay Ward’s productions the animation wasn’t flashy ⁽⁴⁾ but it’s distinctive humour made DM a national treasure – and he went over well in the States too.

In the US, in the 1980’s, the growth of Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon also put some power back into the hands of people who could draw with what they called ‘creator led shows’. Cartoonists wrote their own series once more, often on story boards, and banished bad memories of ‘The Happy Days Gang In Space’ and ‘The Partridge Family In Space’ with anarchic, truly animated shows like Ren and Stimpy (who were sometimes in space) winning back a cooler teenage audience long felt lost.

But the biggest hit of them all, and with audiences all around the world, was a strictly scripted show, written and rewritten and re-rewritten by a room full of stand-up comedians and gag men, although created by a cartoonist. The Simpsons became the longest running TV comedy of all time. Then Pixar came along and did pretty much exactly what Walt Disney had done back in the nineteen thirties but in CGI.

Today, though creator/board driven shows like The Amazing Adventures of Gumball and Adventure Time make me smile the most, the typed script and it’s numerous drafts still dominates as a way of developing and selling stories. Animated TV shows can no longer be runs of thirteen. They have to stretch to fifty two episodes – and hopefully fifty two more after that. They need to be bought by broadcasters around the world, which means no more nipping down the garden shed to knock out The Clangers. Instead there may be several year of pitching, adapting a show to a wide range of tastes and opinions, writing pilot after pilot and repitching until you get a green light.

Though you may get to make an animatic, mostly you’ll be asked to produce written scripts. OK. It may still not the best way to write for much animation, but sitting down with papers and pens and a PC can still be a massively useful tool for having more ideas, shaping your notions and creating stronger films – rather than just making it as he went along, like Windsor did with Gertie.

So how do you shape successful stories?

Next Tutorial; How to shape successful stories.

^{1. See ‘Gullivers Travels’ by the Fleischer Brothers. It’s on YouTube, like everything else in the world plus a kitten on a skateboard jumping a pit of ferrets.}

^{2. Sorry for the US bias, but to be honest, until the 60’s commercial animation in the UK was mostly pretty shit.}

^{3. Wherever there was danger he was there.}

^{4. DM’s mouth was usually behind his steering wheel of his car to save on lip synch.}

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A short history of telling tales in commercial cartoons

This is Gertie. She’s a Dinosaur – and she’s first animated character to really BE a character. Why not nip off to Youtube and watch her now?

Created by pioneering animator Windsor McKay in 1914 Gertie is quite clearly a child. She is petulant, has tantrums and sulks. She has a personality and Windsor took her on tours of America, performing in music halls, interacting with her image on the screen.

Before Gertie (20 years B.G.) animation pretty much just moved. Scissors danced. Toys jerked around a playground. The hands of cartoonists drew faces and then they blinked and smoked cigarettes. Really it was just a magic trick; dead things were animated to life; and that was enough for a while. Audiences were happy to watch this little miracle. But then they got a bit fidgety. The novelty was wearing off.

They started to tire of diving out of the way of films of trains arriving at stations and wanted cowboys to rob them also. They desired more in their animation too.

Gertie’s time in the spotlight didn’t last long. Although McCay was hailed as a genius⁽¹⁾ he despaired of the way cartoons were becoming a vehicle for slapstick, not sophisticated drawing. He went back to newspapers and ‘Little Nemo In Slumberland.’ Animation was left to less graphically gifted entertainers.

Felix walked into the spotlight next. Mixing an irrepressible spirit (‘Felix kept on walking. Keeps on walking still’ was his theme song) with a casual surrealism only possible in animation, Felix channelled aspects of Chaplin to become the first globally famous cartoon character. In a time of depression it was good to have a hero who got knocked down and then got up again.

Although the adventures of Felix were pretty basic, scenarios were created to tie the gags together and they looked like this..

Now that’s not a script in any accepted sense. That’s a framework to stick gags on, and the sticking was done by often competing artists who’d pitch bits of business to the boss. If there was an author here it was the director of the film, who chose what to use and where to place it to better pace a film.

Then along came sound and made all this a little easier. Animation began to syncopate and a relationship with music was established that remains potent to this day. Because in cartoons anything can move and throb and dance to music, anything suddenly did. The animations of the jazz age are full of bopping lamp posts and motor vehicles, as whole townscapes began to dig Louie Armstrong and his band.

No cartoons were Jazzier than those of the Fleischer Brothers, two Jewish guys hanging out with the hipsters in New York, who often took a popular song and shaped an entire cartoon around it. Wild invention and the kind of surrealism that would have freaked even Felix out were their trade mark and their star was Betty Boop.

I now advise you to haunt yourself forever by nipping of to YouTube once more and watching this…

Who wrote that? The method was much the same – a scenario, artists pitching suggestions, people given different sections to animate and a director to pull it all together. But now notions of song structure have begun to creep in. Bimbo’s Initiation has verses and choruses and a satisfying ending, even though it makes very little literal sense.

Enter Walt. Well actually Disney’s already entered and made the first sound cartoon.⁽²⁾ making Micky Mouse (a more clean living Felix) a star. The content of his early animations aren’t much better than anyone elses, but he has a questing spirit that will soon make his name synonymous with a better class of toon.

Never a great artist, Walt is attributed with two major skills – a desire to do better work and a knack for spotting talented people and putting them in the right jobs. This he did building a studio that soon becomes known for higher production values and innovation. He sought respectability too, so the cocaine fuelled fantasies of the Fleischer brothers were out. Walt did wholesome, and for the first time the idea that animation was primarily a children’s medium became established.

‘Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs’ was a game changer. Known as ‘Walts Folly’ until it’s release, no one else believed an animated film could hold anyone’s attention for more than seven minutes, but it’s seventy Technicolour minutes wowed the family audiences of the world.

Walt’s third great skill was as a story man and in myriad, often traumatic, meetings he broke the story down, testing the ideas of others to breaking point, forging a full length film from a simple fairy tale. Semi-completed song sequences were binned. Snow White was pulled back from release to have new bits inserted at great cost. Although only a few writers/cartoonists are credited, it was the work of a great team of contributors, with the boss of the company pulling it all together through his sense of shape.⁽³⁾

From now on animated movies could be any length they liked, but the major tool for their writing would still be the storyboard. Yes, there would be scenarios and scripts, but talented story artists pitching scenes with a stick, some silly voices and a wall full of drawings to a critical audience became the norm.⁽⁴⁾ But television was just a world war away and so was the triumph of the script.

Want to be boggled? There’s only seven years between Mickey Mouse uttering his first ‘Oh Boy!’ and the release of ‘Fantasia.’

Next Tutoriall: “Sod the fairy tales. I want gags!” From Warner Brothers to Cartoon Network

<sup>1. He made the first animated documentary too. ‘The Sinking Of The Lusitania’ – which although not that factually correct has some of the best Art Neuvo smoke effects ever.
2. Except he didn’t really.
3. And not the director. Every heard of David Hand? He didn’t do much else.
4. And in movies still is. Look at the extras of most Pixar DVDs. Monster Inc is a great one. There’s a whole not so good version of the film being pitched on there.</sup>

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