Mayerson On Sympathy

One of the most intelligent blogs I've found on the subject of animation is Mayerson On Animation by a multi-hyphenate from Tornto, Mark Mayerson. He consistently writes thoughtfully and intelligently on the subject of animation from the perspective of a writer, director, teacher and Masters candidate.

My favorite of his posts is the first one I discovered called The Importance of Sympathy. It's an interesting look at character, in particular the the conventional expectations of a lead character, both then and now.

Here's an excerpt:

The conventional thinking these days about film scripts is that you need a main character to actively struggle against obstacles to achieve a goal. Thinking of characters, I found it interesting that some of the most successful early animated features starred passive characters.

Snow White is almost an entirely passive character. She yearns for her prince, but does nothing to win him. She is a victim of the evil Queen and is rescued by the prince. The only positive action that Snow White takes in the film is to befriend animals and to serve as a housekeeper for the dwarfs.

The Importance of Sympathy

The Nevermending Story

Logic--the bane of a cartoon writer's existence sometimes. The argument, "it's a cartoon" too often fails to win the day when trying to justify actions in the script that defy logic--even if you're writing about a dead child's ghost who befriends a suburban everykid.

Oftentimes, when presenting scripts to studios, it feels like the goal isn't to entertain kids, it's to make sense. Are kids tuning into their favorite shows because, "Hey, this one makes sense!" "I love Skippy & Flippo because it's so LOGICAL!"

The link below will download an article by Andrew Nicholls, who's wrote the book I posted about last week, "Valuable Lessons."

Click Here for The Nevermending Story

Here's an excerpt:

Meanwhile, you are trying to think of a way to have a character who’s never been on a date or talked to a girl stun an auditorium full of kids with his dancing skills. Sorry; skillz. And the same people who want you to do that because it will be funny (actually, because it was in a movie they saw) urge you to keep it “truthful.”

Hard work and craft get us through 99 percent of our days, but every writer prays for an epiphany. Over the past year – my tenth writing animation, overlapping 30 years of live action – I’ve begun to have a heretical one. It’s that when we alter reality in order to entertain, Story cannot be fixed, not properly, anyway. It’s not only broken, it’s inherently broken. The best we can ever do is to find the least conspicuous fudge to glue it back together.

Andrew Nicholls Valuable Lessons

Andrew Nicholls & Darrell Vickers have written more television than you. The number of shows they have on their resume is in the hundreds. In the past ten years, many of those shows have been animated series for the very company you're trying to get to hire you right now. Since I'm not their press agent, I'll stop there, except to say this--they've written on a lot of shows. They're also wickedly funny, prolific and fast. In the time it's taken me to write this post, they've finished act two.

Andrew Nicholls wrote the tell-all book "Valuable Lessons" about their life in television, and the fun people they've met along the way, I predicted success. I was wrong, but Andrew's loss is your complete gain. He links to the manuscript for a free download on their website, and you should read it. The book is eloquent, acerbic, terrifying and depressing, as he tells the stories about the rollercoaster ride of their career. He talks about money, he names names, he shares his valuable lessons.

If you would like a free download of the manuscript no publisher has yet been smart enough to pick up, then go to their download page, and click on the button for "Valuable Lessons" for immediate download as a .pdf. NichollsVickers.com

Writers and Artists Part II - Taking a chance on the new

Today I was thinking about "new talent."

I'm at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen - watching stand up comedians, sketch artists, improv groups... There's also a very large film festival here, with full length films... shorts... stuff like that.

A lot of agents and managers are here to sign and look for new talent, and more than a few people are here looking to find new comedic voices to write for them... which got me thinking about the different paths toward a person's first shot, and how the very path in which writers and artists are found and hired shapes their feelings toward each other.

My story first, if you'll indulge me.

My first job was writing on Johnny Bravo. To say I had little idea of what I was doing is an understatement. Whether it was jokes that were inappropriate for children's television, or simply mediocre animation story telling, I was learning on the job and I knew it. As I'm sure, by the way, did every artist on that show.

I'm sure I came off as a jackass. I'm sure, at points, I still do. :)

Couple that with the fact that since I didn't know whether my first job would be my last job, I split my attention between comedy and writing animation, with most of my chips on comedy. But by the end of the season - when cartoons started coming back, and I started seeing my words turned into the kind animated stuff I loved as a kid... it became something I wanted to continue doing.

I admit that now, but I didn't know then, obviously. What I knew about the HOWS of animation you could fit in a thimble, although that didn't diminish my enjoyment of it. And my desire to get better at it. And my being thrilled to find a new way to do what I loved to do - write comedy - in a different format.

But that's how I got my shot. I could have been a car crash, I could have been brilliant... I was... something of a fender bender that learned, I think, as I went. And I think that's a learning curve that writers get, that artists get much less of.

Correct me if I'm wrong - because these are just theories - but when an artist gets his or her first job, it's based on a portfolio. Be it boards, character designs, student films... there's a body of work that shows a network, a studio, or a producer that that artist can handle a job. The opportunity might be a position a level or two above the one they've done before - but you pretty much know what you're getting... it's right there on the page.

Its different for writing. Because you have to take so much more on faith. Yeah, somebody can write a great spec script, but you don't know how long it took. Yeah, you can read a great freelance script from another show, but you never know how much others put into it. And yes, you can test writers with freelance scripts... but you never know how they'll do on a production schedule, and you have to cut slack for them not knowing the characters as well as you do.

So, consequently, writers get hired with a lot less certainty in their skills than artists. But once you're hired, you're hired. You'd have to kick an employee in the face, or pee in the Executive Producer's office, to be let go.

I'm sure, as an artist with talent who can execute their job to the standards in which they were hired, looks at a shaky writer who cranks out one, two or three scripts that need work (but hopefully improve along the way) and it triggers an arched eyebrow, or an annoyed grumble.

Artists don't get to suck when hired. Mostly because, you probably don't. You've got a big ass portfolio of not sucking to prove it. If your designs don't match the show, it's obvious pretty fast. If your boards don't work with the show, you learn that after one pitch. If your timing blows, you see it fast. And so on and so on and so on. Even if you're a bit hacky, if you're hacky in the way the show wants you to be hacky, you're probably not going anywhere.

But writing is subjective... and if you (producer / studio) have seen somebody KILL on stage, and make a room or a theater roar with laughter, you already have somebody saying "This person HAS to be hilarious!"

Whether they can tell a story or not is the surprise.

I saw several comics today I would love to come in and pitch the shows I work on. If I like the logline, it'll go to premise. If I like the premise, it'll go to outline. If I like the outline, it'll go to script. That person gets to follow their idea all the way up until the point where it's obvious they're still looking for the skillset to do this regularly. and if they write a great script, they'll get a second one. It's only fair.

An untested comedy writer's portfolio is the script writing process - the ability to learn by doing on someone else's dime, really. Artists don't get that luxury, and I think that's another thing that drives a wedge.

I don't have a solution on this one. I don't even have a theory. But I do think it's one more perceived unfairness that creates tension.

How do you hire a new writer, without burdening or marginalizing established artists?

Thoughts?

Writers Versus Artists Versus Writers... Cause And Effect?

So, now that the whole anibation thing seems to have imploded into a free porn site (wow), I'd like to pick up where the angriest man in animation left off...

...take the rubble and maybe build something a little less angry.

But the one thing I've figured out in the last 48 hours is... there is a huge sea of untapped resentment and anger about non-drawing writers and producers in this business.

So perhaps that's a good place to start figuring out what THIS blog should be, now that apparently, Voldemort has disappeared for a bit.

Cause and Effect #1 - Doors and Walls

Writer Ingredients: New writer comes in to studio, instantly gets an office.
Artist Ingredients: Artists, regardless of time in the industry, find themselves in cubicles, or jammed two to three in a room.

This one's easy to figure out, I think. A pilot gets green lit to series through the work of an EP, and maybe ONE writer... then produced by a talented team of artists who see the vision through. It gets picked up, more writers are brought on...
...and then each of them, including the story editor, gets an office, while artists are placed in group rooms, or in cubicles based.

I think two things happen here:

1) The writer gets into work but... as always, these productions are lower budget, he or she has to hit the ground running, so as soon as that office is functional, the writer is squirreled a way in there, writing like a mofo, to catch up.

What it looks like, of course, is that the writer could give two craps about the rest of the crew, because the door is shut and he's "busy." The mistake is not to leave the door open, to meet the crew that will be turning the words into animation.

2) The artists see the writer disappear into the office with maybe a quick smile, but in general, disappear to work, or go away to work with the executive producer/creator of the show and by the time that first script is ready, there's already a "writers get access to EP, writers get to do what they want" hierarchy (real or imagined) in place and an attitude (assumed or real) that needs to be addressed.

Personal story: I've been lucky with that - all of my offices have been next to and near artists. Next to the art director, across from the character designer, spitting distance from the board artists...

...close enough to the color and background departments that when a script came in, and they could tell, in advance, what a nightmare it would be... I would hear it. Even if I couldn't do anything about it, I'd figure out SOMETHING else to do to make amends for it.

The common area for the crew was outside my office where I had brought in a Tivo so everyone could watch what they wanted to watch on their breaks. (Me: Daily Show and Venture Brothers.) Lunches were had together where we just hung out.

Consequently I felt like part of a team, rather than somebody who tossed words from on high and then went on with my life. I felt that I was creating on a show, even if it wasn't by drawing. Because these people weren't just humans huddled over a pencil or a wacom tablet or a stack of boards, they were people I saw every day, ate with occasionally, and went out for drinks with on occasion.

And because of that, I think people knew my door was open to hear story ideas for the shows I was on, and I learned more about the process, and the reprecusions of typing "1000 Zebras of Different color do individual dances down a flowered hill." Artists pitched premises. And at the same time, I pushed for doing a few board driven scripts.

I'm doing that on Yin Yang Yo right now.

Maybe I'm incredibly lucky, and incredibly blessed, and maybe I'm naive. But the easiest way to beat this part of the equation is simple:

Writers, make sure you mingle with the people who make your words animation. Artists, do the same and if you think a writer needs a little "impossible to draw 101" let them know in a proactive, constructive manner.

God knows that would have saved me years of figuring it out, and a lot of people pages worth of bullsh*t.

However, if in the process of reaching out to you, you find your hand slapped by ego, they have a word for that person. And it's not "writer" nor "artist."

It's "dick."

Lets all try not to be one!

Marmel: Calling All Cartoon Writers

Okay, so here we go.

I've been an animation writer for nearly ten years. Starting at Johnny Bravo, spending a good chunk of my career on Fairly Oddparents and Danny Phantom, and most recently, working on Yin Yang Yo.

I can't draw.

There are a handful of blogs - John K's blog, and This Doof (who unlike John K, doesn't have the courage of his convictions enough to post with his name) who consider cartoons with animation writers to be the work of the anti-christ.

Which is ridiculous.

There is also CartoonBrew which has, I think, a more even-handed coverage of things... but if you wade into the comments section when they discuss writing in animation, you'd think that writers were summarily killing their puppies or something.

And while plenty of writers have their own sites - my spaces pages, blogs and the like - I'm not aware of a place where we can all post together. So, that's the goal here.

There isn't a writer alive who thinks they can do this without talented animators. And there isn't a writer alive who doesn't think there are talented animators who can do this WITHOUT writers. But in writing, and animation, the people who do that well are few and far between.

Whether I'm one of those people is not the case here. Obviously, I'm proud of what I do, but that's subjective. It's the idea of writing as an artform... that some people paint with WORDS. That writers can have an idea, an image, a visual, or a story in their head and while they may be incapable of taking a pen to paper, or stylus to wacom tablet, it doesn't make them any less creative. It's just a different kind of creative.

So... that's the goal. If you're seeing this, chances are you're one of a handful of writers I personally know that I invited to publish here. But feel free to invite the writers YOU know to contact me and be a part of this.

And to those of you who think there's no place for writers in animation - you're welcome here as well. Post, comment, whatever. But just remember, as you do that... you're WRITING your reply, not drawing it.

- Steve