CHAPTER   3

The Basics

This section covers the fundamentals of how animation is created; the format of a premise, an outline, and an animation script for television; and information about feature-film animation writing. After that, we get into “Beyond the Basics,” where I give additional tips, tricks, and advice.

The Animation Process

Many books have been written that cover the animation process from beginning to end. Unless you work up to a position of producer, most of these steps don’t have much effect on writing the script. To be thorough, here is a brief description of the process by which animation is created for television:

•  DEVELOPMENT: The concept is born, whether it’s an idea pitched by someone from the inside, developed by a producer on the inside, or adapted from an acquired property (such as a comic or game). Someone is hired to write the bible and a pilot episode. For details on writing an animation bible, see Chapter 4. Development can go on for a long time until the concept is either approved and moved into production, or killed.

•  SCRIPT: A story editor is hired (unless the producer fills this role), who in turn hires writers and has scripts written.

•  VOICE RECORDING: The scripts are sent to a voice director, and the dialogue is recorded. The storyboards and animation must be matched to these dialogue audio tracks.

•  STORYBOARDS: The final, approved scripts are given to storyboard artists to break into storyboards, which become the primary template for the rest of the animation process. Directors time the storyboards to arrive at an estimate of running time.

•  BACKGROUNDS AND CHARACTER DESIGN: Usually at the same time as storyboards are being done, a production designer or art director will be designing the look of the show, the major backgrounds, and the major characters, creating model sheets to be used as the template by all other artists and animators. Additional model sheets will be created for new characters, creatures, props, specialized effects, or what have you for the individual shows. Something called a Special Pose is a model sheet for an established character wearing an outfit that hasn’t been seen on that character before.

•  ANIMATIC: An animatic is a very roughly animated storyboard (sometimes also called a leica reel or a pencil test), edited with the vocal track, which is used to judge the timing and length of a show. It’s also a good place to catch errors that need fixing before the animatic and other art is shipped overseas to complete the animation.

•  ANIMATION PRODUCTION: For a 2-D show, this is the process of painting the backgrounds, inking the cels of the moving elements, painting the cels, and shooting the cels to create the moving animation. Virtually all 2-D animation for the United States is sent to studios in Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, France, and elsewhere.

   For a 3-D show, it goes to the CG studio, where the background and all the elements are created on computers using 3-D software. Much of the CG work is being done in Canada, Hong Kong, and India.

•  POSTPRODUCTION: The completed animation comes back so that the producer and directors can check for errors, do color correction, fix pacing or timing problems, and send problems or errors back to the animators for retakes (fixing the errors). Once the retakes are done, the dialogue, sound effects, music, titles, and other elements are edited together to create the completed show.

As you can see from this, there is only one step of the process where the writer is involved, and that’s early on. You might, on occasion, get a chance to look at storyboards if you ask for them. Most production companies won’t think of sending storyboards to writers, but anytime I’ve asked for them, the company has been willing to send them. By studying storyboards of your own scripts, you may be able to pick up on areas where you can improve your storytelling or writing skills.

The Script Process

The script process I’m covering here is for television. Feature-animation development would happen on a longer schedule, and the process will vary from studio to studio (see section on feature scripts (The Animated Feature Film) later in this chapter).

With a few rare exceptions, it all begins with the script. An animation script is usually created in a series of stages:

•  Springboard (not as common)

•  Premise

•  Outline

•  First draft

•  Second draft

•  Polish

I’m going to use as an example a produced half-hour script from X-Men: Evolution, cowritten with my partner, Randy Littlejohn. The episode was titled “Spykecam,” and featured the skateboarding character Spyke.

The Springboard

A springboard should be no more than a few sentences with just a very basic concept for a story idea. If we had written a springboard for “Spykecam,” it would have been something like this: “Spyke is given a class assignment to make a documentary about his family … just as Sabretooth decides to attack the X-Men.”

When there are a lot of stories already pitched to a series, a story editor may ask for springboards. This keeps the writers from having to do too much development when the odds are high that an idea may already have been done. If the story editor sees something interesting that hasn’t been done, he or she can then have the writer work it into a premise.

Note that all scriptwriting—including springboards, premises, and outlines—is written in present tense.

The Premise

A premise must contain the beginning, middle, and end of the story in concise form, but with enough detail to sell the idea. There are two different methods of developing premises: outside pitches or internal development.

OUTSIDE PITCHES: The first step, of course, is being invited to pitch. Story editors will not accept unsolicited pitches. On most shows, you’ll receive the show bible and other material to work from. If it’s a brand-new show, you should also get the pilot script. If the show’s been on for a while, try to get a synopsis list of all the episodes approved or produced so far. This will save you from pitching something that has already been approved or done. Be very familiar with an established show before pitching for it.

Unless told otherwise, you should come up with three to six premises to submit. Try to keep it within that range. Fewer than three doesn’t make much of an impression, but more than six is getting to be too much.

Submit the written pitches as quickly as you can (these days, usually by e-mail), because you’re in competition with other writers, and inevitably more than one writer will submit similar or the same ideas. Being the first one to submit an idea gives you an edge, though a story editor may go with someone who came up with the best take on the idea, rather than whoever submitted the concept first.

INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT: On some series, it works out better for the producer, story editor, or others at the production company to come up with the story ideas first, then hand them out to writers. Most commonly, these will be springboards, and you’ll be asked to develop them into a premise first.

LENGTH: For a half-hour show, a premise should consist of not much more than two double-spaced pages or one single-spaced page. The premise doesn’t have to be broken into acts, but it’s a good idea to do so if you’re writing a longer, more detailed premise.

THE “A” STORY AND THE “B” STORY: The main plot is called the “A” story. Most of the time, you’re expected to also have a “B” story. The “B” story is a smaller subplot that parallels and intersects with the “A” story. It usually involves characters different from those used in the “A” story (because those characters are busy dealing with the main plotline), and often tends to reinforce the theme of the “A” story. For example: X character is wrongly put in jail. X’s friends try to prove his innocence (the “A” story). Meanwhile, X might have an encounter in the jail (the “B” story) that gives him an insight regarding his situation.

Or you might start with all your characters involved in the “A” story and need to spin off a couple of them into a “B” story. For example, a team of heroes needs to attack a stronghold. The main attack is the “A” story, but two of the heroes (the “B” story) are separated during the action and face a different danger that tests their loyalty to the rest of the team.

The “B” story can directly tie into the “A” story or have a more indirect effect. Sometimes the “B” story provides a complication or obstacle for some part of the “A” story. For example, your hero learns that his car is wired to explode and he has one hour to defuse it (the “A” story), but a car thief makes off with the car (the “B” story). The main story is the hero having to find the car in time, while your subplot revolves around the unlucky thief who is unaware he’s driving a ticking bomb.

Once in a while, you might even insert a third thread, a “C” story. This can be tricky when you have only twenty-two minutes to tell a story, but it can be done if the plot threads are simple enough.

Here is the premise for “Spykecam”:

X-MEN: EVOLUTION

Spykecam

(PREMISE)

by Christy Marx & Randy Littlejohn

Mr. Vandermeer is at his wit’s end trying to get Evan to do an actual book report; that is, one based on the book, not the movie version of the book (no, there are no musical numbers in the original version of Les Misérables). Claiming he wants to put Evan’s media mania to good use, Mr. Vandermeer arranges for Evan to participate in an NPR-style “day in the life” visual journal. Evan gets a cool, hi-tech camcorder, and is told to record every aspect of his life for a few days for a TV show on today’s American teenagers. A new Spielberg is born!

Evan thinks this is the coolest thing ever, but his constant in-your-face camera is driving his teammates and friends crazy. He’s following them around the halls of the school, recording every little deed and misdeed … with the exception of the Toad, who desperately wants to be on film and is edited out constantly. The Toad threatens to get even. Mystique doesn’t miss any of this action either. In a disguised form, she gives Evan encouragement and reminds him to get plenty of tape of his home life as well, to “balance” things out.

At the Xavier Mansion, Evan rolls tape with abandon: not only does he tape normal stuff, like Institute defense drills and Xavier operating Cerebro, but Kitty and Rogue have a mutant-style tiff over their musical differences, and Evan gets it all. Kurt stages some swashbuckling action and teleports himself and Scott into the Danger Room for the “action sequence,” but Scott loses his shades, making the sequence a bit too hairy for their taste. Jean is caught using her powers to do an extra-fast cleanup in the kitchen, and when she realizes Evan is taping her—CRASH!!! She lets her power lapse, and half the kitchenware is in pieces.

The kids, all annoyed, chase Evan outside, planning to make him eat his blasted camera. But this is what Mystique’s crew has been waiting for. Leaping onto the grounds, they attack our heroes in a spectacular frenzy that is actually a diversion—in the ruckus, Toad manages to switch Evan’s camera with a duplicate before the villains flee.

Prof. X is concerned and has a heart-to-heart with Evan. The boy glumly admits he knows he can’t use any of his cool footage … but he has to turn in SOMETHING. Maybe some judicious editing … but when he hits “playback,” there’s just footage of the Toad having what he thinks is that last laugh. Mystique’s crew has made off with a videotape detailing some of the Institute’s most closely guarded secrets! The X-Men must rush to track down Toad and the others and recover the videotape before Mystique gets information that could seriously endanger them all!

The Outline

With luck, the premise is approved, though there may be notes and changes as required by the story editor or producer. It would be extremely unusual to rewrite a premise. Instead, you’ll take the notes into account when you write the outline.

An outline is usually a beat-by-beat description of the script, broken into the necessary number of acts, with the major sluglines (interiors and exteriors) indicated. I say usually, because you will write the outline according to what the story editor wants, and I know at least one story editor who hates the beat-by-beat format. Instead, you may be instructed to write it as straight descriptive prose without EXT. or INT. sluglines.

Either way, the outline should convey enough information for the story editor and production people to know how many locations there are, how many locations are new (requiring new background art), and other production items that may need to be taken into account even before getting to script.

A half-hour script that has a teaser and two or three acts should be broken out as “Teaser,” “Act 1,” “Act 2,” “Act 3,” and so on, but you don’t need to include fade-ins or fadeouts or transitions.

An outline is written single-spaced in most instances (unless a story editor specifies otherwise). The length of an outline will vary. An outline for a half-hour episode normally runs around five to eight pages, depending on how detailed you get. I’ve done outlines as short as two to three pages (single-spaced), and up to eighteen (when they wanted it double-spaced). If you’re working on a series, the story editor should give you some guidelines for the length of the outline. If not, ask the editor what length he or she would like to see, or get some already-completed outlines to look at.

A good outline should cover everything that will be in the script in quick descriptive passages, minus actual dialogue. It’s all right to indicate joke lines or even to include one or two actual lines of dialogue within the body of the outline (not broken out in dialogue format, as you would do in a script), but generally speaking, you should not put actual dialogue into an outline.

You need to be sure you cover all the action beats, the essence of what the characters are saying to one another, the humor beats (if any), the emotional beats, and whatever else is crucial to conveying what will be in the script.

You should be allowed a week to write an outline. If the schedule is very tight, you may be asked to turn an outline around in as little as three days.

In the outline for “Spykecam” that we already had one large change from the premise—instead of having Mystique as the villain, we have Sabretooth. The “A” story remains the same—Spyke has to make a video about family. The “B” story is Sabretooth stalking Spyke to get at Logan. And we also had a “C” story, the rivalry between Kitty and Rogue. The “B” story intersects with the “A” story, but doesn’t resolve it. The “C” story is resolved by the “A” story. You will find this outline at www.christymarx.info.

The next step will be to get notes on the outline. The story editor might let you go directly to script, or might ask you to rewrite the outline before giving you the go-ahead to write the script. That will depend on the nature of the notes, how comfortable the story editor is with your ability, and what his or her schedule allows. A story editor on a very tight schedule might even present you with his or her rewrite of the outline and have you go to script from that, simply because it can be faster for the editor to do the rewrite than to give you notes.

One rewrite of an outline is perfectly reasonable; a second rewrite would be unusual but O.K. Multiple requests for outline rewrites are not reasonable, unless you’re very, very new and the story editor is doing you a favor by mentoring you. In that case, do the rewrites.

If you make it past the outline stage, you go to script.

The Script Format

There are significant differences between an animation script and a live-action script. I have also written in “hybrid” formats that are somewhere halfway between animation and live action (more on this under Difference No. 1). There is no one single, absolute, unvarying script format for either animation or live action. However, there are some basic rules. The key things you need to know are how to lay out the page (margins, spacing, indents) and how to use the five basic elements from which every script is built:

SLUGLINES / SCENE HEADINGS

ACTION DESCRIPTION

DIALOGUE

PARENTHETICALS

TRANSITIONS

It’s rather like someone handing you a set of five tools from which you can build anything from a five-minute skit to an epic three-hour movie. What makes you stand out as a writer is how you use those tools to create an exciting, evocative read that conveys the images and emotions you want the reader to experience.

Too often, I see newer writers obsess over the tools of a script. Know the basic rules, but then make them serve your purpose. The script must look professional, but ultimately the quality of the script is what gets you a sale, not how prettily your slugline or action or dialogue is arranged on the page.

If you don’t know how the tools work, read the previous chapter on script terms for definitions and examples.

The Basic Layout

As far as margins, spacing, indents, and font, animation and live-action scripts are basically the same.

A standard layout for a script page is:

SPACING: Double-spaced for everything except the dialogue and action description.

FONT: 12-point Courier font. For emphasis on a word, use either CAPS or underlining. Don’t use italics or bold.

MARGINS: One and a half inches for the left margin (the extra half inch allows room for the binding). One inch for the right, top, and bottom margins.

INDENTS:

SLUGLINES, ACTION are on the left margin.

CHARACTER NAME is two inches from the left margin, one inch from the right margin.

PARENTHETICAL is one and a half inches from the left margin, two inches from the right margin.

DIALOGUE is one inch from the left margin, one and a half inches from the right margin.

TRANSITIONS are aligned to the right margin (or four inches from the left margin).

NUMBERING: Page number in the upper right corner, except on the cover page. You can leave it off the first page of the script as well.

ACT BREAKS: Begin each act on a new page.

You won’t get into trouble using this basic layout. You may encounter a company or a story editor who has a specific template that he or she wants you to use. In that case, the editor will have to provide you with the template or give you the specific parameters. These vary only slightly from the format given above (maybe half an inch this way or that), but the layout on the page will look the same. Obviously, you use whatever parameters you’re told to use.

Otherwise, use the parameters given here. If you’re using scriptwriting software, it will set the standard parameters for you.

The Title Page

If this is a spec script, your title page should contain the name of the series, below that the title of the script, below that “written by Your Name.” This should be centered and in the upper one-third of the page. At the bottom of the page, aligned to the right, put the name and contact info for your agent (if you have one), or your own contact info. I do not recommend putting a copyright notice or WGA registration info on the title page of a spec script. Many people consider that the mark of an insecure amateur.

If you’re working on a show, you’ll see an example of what information the company wants, but generally that’s going to be the name of the series, title of the episode, the episode production number, your name—centered and placed as described above. The company may want a date, and usually they’ll want the copyright and the company’s name centered along the bottom. You don’t need to put contact info on this type of script, because you’re already doing it under a contract.

COVERS: Most of the time when hired to work on a show, you’ll be turning in an electronic version of the script. For a spec script, put on covers (front and back) mainly to keep the script intact, and fasten it with two brass brads (that way, if the script needs to be taken apart and photocopied, there are only two brads to deal with rather than three). Avoid ridiculous colors or patterns or outlandish finish for the covers, and don’t go any heavier than 20-lb. stock (many readers like to fold over the pages as they read, and you don’t want a cover that is an obstacle). Bizarre covers won’t do you any good or garner special attention (except maybe to look silly). What matters is what’s between the covers.

The Differences

That’s how live-action and television animation scripts are the same. Now let’s get into how they’re different.

Difference No. 1: Calling Out the Shots

A live-action script uses “master scenes.” This means that a slugline establishes the location, but the rest of the action and dialogue is laid out without specifying the individual shots. In fact, that’s strongly discouraged in a live-action script, because deciding on the shots and angles is the turf of the director. It’s the live-action director who translates the script into the final visuals.

A television animation script is exactly the opposite. The person who interprets your script and turns it into visual form is the storyboard artist. As an animation writer, you are expected to call out (specify) every single shot. You’re storyboarding as you write. You decide how to open each scene and what is in every shot in the scene in order to convey your action and dialogue. You decide the pacing. You decide what the visuals will be. A good storyboard artist may tweak what you’ve done, but it’s still up to you to call out every shot.

An animation writer must be able to clearly visualize the script as animation. This is where watching a lot of animation becomes valuable. Some things that you can do in a fully animated feature you can’t do in a half-hour TV series episode, due to time and budget constraints for TV. You need to be familiar with the look and techniques of the type of animation for which you’re writing. Some things that you can do with 3-D (such as swooping around in a 360-degree circle) you can’t do in 2-D. Many of the techniques developed for anime have less to do with creating a style than with finding ways to do animation on a tight budget, such as the “speed lines” background to indicate movement rather than showing a background speeding past. You need to study and be aware of how a story is visually told shot by shot in animation before you can re-create that in a script.

I developed and was story editor on a half-hour kids’ series called Hypernauts, which was primarily live action, but featured a substantial amount of CG. We wrote the live-action parts in live-action format, and the CG portions in animation format, which led to scripts that were slightly longer than the live-action people were accustomed to seeing. Because I was familiar with how both formats paced in airtime, I was able to arrive by instinct at a correct page length for that hybrid style of script, which came out to about twenty-four to twenty-six pages for twenty-two minutes of airtime.

Here are two examples of the same scene: as it would be laid out for a live-action script, and then as it would be broken out for an animation script. First, live action:

Now an example of how this would be done in an animation script format:

In a live-action script, you can get away with less detail about the surroundings, which will be filled in by the director in conjunction with a production designer, art designer, set designer, prop master, and so forth.

In animation, the artist knows what to draw only if you tell him. You aren’t trying to keep the storyboard artist in suspense, so if you need something specific (such as a crystal skull) in the setting that he has to create, let him know up front. Sometimes an important prop will be designed in detail by the prop artist, and that design will be given to the storyboard artist. Either way, the artists need to know that the prop requires special attention. Keep your description as concise and to the point as you can. Animation scripts must be written to a specific length, and you can’t afford to waste a single line on superfluous description.

If you’re using backgrounds that already exist, don’t worry about description, unless you need to add something new to it.

Notice that you don’t necessarily need to have an action/description line underneath every slugline, particularly when all you’re doing is cutting to a character so he can speak a line.

You can leave most of the choice of angles up to the storyboard artist, and specify only certain angles (high, low) or type of shot (wide, close, pan) where needed.

HYBRID ANIMATION FORMAT: A new format has been used more frequently of late, and may be on its way to being the norm. In this format, the writer is still required to call out every shot, but without using a separate line for the sluglines. Instead, you would begin a new shot with elements of a slugline, but continue directly into the action description without dropping down to a new paragraph. It would look like this:

This format allows the writers to pack more story into a shorter script (around twenty-four to thirty-three pages), but retains the underlying structure of an animation script and makes for a smoother read. As long you understand that it still gets down to using the five basic tools, in one form or another, you should have no problem with this.

Difference No. 2: Dialogue and the Lip-Synch Factor

Another major difference between live action and animation is the nature of the dialogue. In live action, you can do long passages of dialogue because you have a real person delivering the lines. The director decides how to move the camera or break up the delivery of the dialogue into shots, but no matter how it’s shot, you have the reality of that live actor on-screen to carry the dialogue using eyes, facial muscles, body language, and a host of subtle factors.

Full animation in an animated feature can come closer to this at a greater cost in artist hours, but it won’t equal what a live actor can do. In the limited animation of television, the last thing you want to have sitting on the screen delivering long speeches is a flat animated face with minimal expression. First, because it’s not very interesting. Second, because lipsynching takes time (and time = money).

Some anime takes a shortcut around this by not bothering with a realistic mouth, so no lip-synch is necessary. You’ll find that the requirements of short dialogue still apply, perhaps even more so because there’s no lip-synch and it looks funky when it goes on for too long. The same has been true for CG. As CG-animation techniques improve, lip-synching will become less of a factor, but if you look at the early CG shows for TV, you’ll notice how often they tried to design characters wearing full-face helmets or masks in order to trim down the lipsynching work as much as possible.

Dialogue in animation is expected to be minimal, pithy, concise, strong, and punchy. Each piece of dialogue should be kept down to one or two fairly short sentences at most. In the examples I gave under Difference No. 1, notice how I took one of Jack’s longer speeches in the live-action format, split it into two shorter pieces, and spread it across two shots in the animation sample.

You might be wondering what I mean by “strong and punchy.” When I wrote my first animation scripts, I had no mentor, no guidance, and no one to tell me anything about the craft.

It was learn-as-you-go. After I’d done one script, I was able to show it to someone who at the time was one of the major animation producers in the business. When I asked for feedback, he told me, “Your dialogue is too soft.” I was baffled. I had no idea what he meant by that. When I asked him to clarify, he couldn’t. The producer knew what he meant, but he wasn’t able to explain it to me. “Soft” was just “soft,” that’s all. My dialogue was short, and there were no wasted words in the actual lines. My guess all these years later is that he meant I used too much back-and-forth dialogue to get to the point. My characters would use twenty pieces of dialogue to do what should have been boiled down to maybe five pieces of dialogue or less. Having pages of characters trading one-liners is as much of a mistake as having long pieces of dialogue.

When you craft a story and set up a scene for animation, you need to boil down your dialogue to the bare minimum and make that dialogue have the maximum impact, utilizing visuals in place of dialogue as much as you can. Avoid exposition like the plague. If your character absolutely must say several things in a row, break it up across a number of shots and make those shots interesting. Either give your character something to do (what’s called “business,” as in “give this character some piece of business here”), or have some other action going on.

Difference No. 3: Script Length

One of the other things you should notice from these samples is that calling out the shots for animation makes for a longer script.

Scripts became codified in their present form of font and layout for numerous reasons, but one of the big reasons is to write scripts that are the right length for specific periods of time, especially when it comes to television.

There’s an old formula for how much time = one page of script.

LIVE ACTION: one minute = one page.

ANIMATION: one minute = one and a half pages.

Theoretically, then, a twenty-two-minute live-action script would be twenty-two pages. A twenty-two-minute animation script would be thirty-three pages.

This is why the “standard” length for a live-action movie script is 90 pages to a maximum of 120 pages, because most movies are expected to run between 90 and 120 minutes in length.

To fit their airtimes, television programs require scripts written to fairly precise lengths, but even here you run into exceptions. Some live-action shows that are heavy in dialogue exchanges without a lot of action might run to fifty-five or sixty pages for an hour show. This is because dialogue alone eats up a lot more pages than heavy action or a combo of action plus dialogue, but dialogue usually takes up less airtime.

When I first began writing animation scripts, we were doing fifty-five- and sixty-page scripts for a half-hour action show, and most of it ended up on the screen, in contradiction to the formula given above. Over the years, I’ve watched the length of half-hour animation scripts shrink to forty-five pages, then to thirty-eight pages, and now to around thirty-two to thirty-three pages.

There are a couple of reasons for this. For one, the actual airtime of these shows has shrunk. The granddaddy of half-hour animation, The Flintstones, had twenty-seven minutes of airtime. Over the years, more and more commercials and breaks have been added, so that the current half hour of animation is about twenty-one to twenty-two minutes. For now.

The other reason for today’s shorter scripts is that less actual animation per minute is being done (being shot on twos or shot on threes), due to shrinking budgets. Stories by necessity have become simpler, and the pacing slower, to accommodate the shorter script length.

Writing to Length

Getting back to television, when a story editor says that the length of the script should be no more than, say, thirty-three pages, you must take that seriously. You should turn in a script that is between thirty-two and thirty-three pages. TV writing is precision writing. If the script is too long, it simply means that pages are cut—and you may not have any control over what gets cut. Naturally, your script shouldn’t be too short either—at the risk of annoying the story editor, who will then need material added and may have to do it herself if she’s in a rush.

The overall length is one issue. The other issue is act breaks.

Working Out Act Breaks

If you’re writing a script for a show that’s already on the air, you’ll get the act structure from watching the show. Otherwise, you’ll get the info from the show bible or from the story editor. A very common structure is a teaser and three acts, or a teaser and two acts. An alternative is a teaser, two acts, and a tag (rarely seen these days). One-hour animation is extremely rare, but a live-action one-hour show commonly has a teaser and five acts—some do without a teaser; some add a tag. For a ninety-minute animated TV movie, there are usually eight acts.

You might occasionally encounter a show that does individual eleven-minute segments (two per show), rather than one half-hour story. Those are generally written as one act without teasers or other breaks.

The acts must be roughly equal in length. You might observe that in some one-hour or two-hour live-action dramas, they will let the first act run extremely long in order to make sure they’ve hooked the audience before cutting to the first set of commercials. With a longer form, such as a ninety-minute animated TV movie, you can also get away with a longer first act.

In half-hour animation, you have the option to make the first act a little longer, but not by any more than one or two pages. Assuming a thirty-three-page script, you should strive for a formula that is as close as possible to eleven/eleven/eleven (eleven pages per act). If you have a teaser, you have to carve out a couple of pages for that, so your formula might be two/eleven/ten/ten, or two/ten/eleven/ten, and so on depending on the demands of the story and the best place to put an act break. You can probably get away with two/twelve/ten/nine or similar variation.

What you absolutely don’t want to do is let any one act get out of control. If you turn in a script that breaks out as nine/six/seventeen, you can count on your story editor wondering what on earth you were thinking, and telling you to fix the act breaks. There’s room to be somewhat flexible, but no more than a couple of pages in any one direction.

Act breaks provide an extra challenge in working out the pacing and dramatic three-act structure of your story. By dramatic three-act structure, I refer to the triad of exposition-conflict-resolution that is the blueprint of your beginning, middle, and end. Exposition-conflict-resolution applies equally to a three-minute comedy short or to a ninety-minute epic adventure. Keep that dramatic structure in mind when you’re crafting the overall story, without tying it to any specific act in the script. It might seem easy to divide up the dramatic triad to a three-act script, but do you really want to spend the entire third act solely on resolution? It’s more likely that the resolution will take place halfway through the third act of the script, especially given the compressed nature of animation stories.

So we’ll assume you have a grasp of your dramatic three-act structure as it applies overall to your story. Now you have to figure out how to build to a critical act break that takes place at approximately so many pages into the script. Your act breaks must be gripping, exciting, and dramatic. If you don’t have your viewers totally hooked, you’ll lose them during the commercial break. The purpose of a cliff-hanger act break is to keep the audience in enough suspense to stick around. The act break doesn’t have to be a cliff-hanger based on physical peril. It could be a moment of suspense or mystery, or it could be a moment of emotional confrontation.

Which means that each act must have its own internal momentum that brings it to that critical point at the right time. In a ninety-minute animated film, this means finding seven points at which you can break the story with either a physical or emotional cliff-hanger … while not making it look contrived.

This is where having a solid outline is so important. Most of your scenes are going to run somewhere around two to three pages. Simple math tells us that trying to fit, say, ten scenes into an eleven-page act isn’t going to work, unless you have an insanely frenetic story. This is where you need good instincts to estimate how many pages you will actually need for a scene vs. how many scenes you can realistically fit into a single act. As you work out your major story beats, you can reasonably estimate being able to fit three to four major story beats into an eleven-page act. You might be able to squeeze in five scenes if one is really short. By the time you take into account dialogue and breaking out all the shots, you’ll find that three to four beats, or scenes, will easily fill eleven pages. You might have an instance where you’re cutting back and forth between two major story beats rather than having separate scenes, and you’ll need to estimate how many pages that will eat.

The best way to become good at this is practice. Write lots of sample outlines and sample scripts.

In the past, it was common to allow two weeks to write a half-hour animation script. These days, it isn’t unusual to be given only one week to turn in a half-hour script.

You will find the “Spykecam” script available to read at www.christymarx.info.

The 3-D Script vs. the 2-D Script

I find myself being cautious in what advice I give about writing for CG (3-D) vs. traditional cel animation (2-D) because the field of animation is in a state of flux as CG continues to develop, transplanting 2-D in some areas of the business, but not others.

At the time I write this, the major animation-movie companies have abandoned 2-D entirely in favor of 3-D. This is a function of CG getting better and better, combined with dramatic successes in 3-D features. At first, CG elements were incorporated cautiously into 2-D films such as Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. The steamroller began with Pixar’s wonderful Toy Story and subsequent successes with Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, along with the great success of DreamWorks SKG’s Shrek and Shrek 2. At the same time, some expensive 2-D films didn’t perform well, and turned into large losses for the studios. What some of these companies forget is that the best visuals in the universe—whether they are 2-D or 3-D—won’t save a weak story or weak script. Disney’s Treasure Planet had spectacular CG, but a story that didn’t quite work.

Consequently, it’s hard to say at this point whether CG will remain the flavor of the decade, or whether 2-D will make a comeback in features. There will likely always be smaller studios that continue to produce 2-D features or direct-to-video features.

Meanwhile, in TV, there were some superb CG shows made early on (such as ReBoot and Shadow Raiders), but they were expensive, and it was tricky to churn them out on a tight TV production schedule. TV animation is trending toward more-stylized 2-D work, Flash animation, and whatever else will grab eyeballs to the small screen while keeping the budgets low. There is also a style in which 3-D is rendered to look like 2-D while retaining the ability to move in 3-D. MTV’s version of Spider-Man is an example of this.

I wrote for some of the early CG TV series, all for the same production company. At the time, we wrote the scripts in a live-action format using master scenes, rather than an animation-script format. This was due largely to that particular company’s method of parceling out the art tasks without using storyboards.

In most TV animation, one artist is given one act of a script to storyboard, so you can end up with three artists drawing storyboards for a half-hour show with three acts. Those three artists determine the look and flow of the visuals.

This company instead assigned a CG artist to handle particular characters, and the artist would create the animation for the scenes containing those characters. Essentially, the artist took the place of the storyboard artist on a rather piecemeal basis, but with a director to pull the various pieces together.

However, the last time I met with someone from that company, I was told they had gone to doing storyboards. Note that even scripts that are written in a live-action format have to adhere to other animation “rules,” such as keeping dialogue short.

When it comes to something that is evolving, as CG is, each company or studio will likely have its own approach to how it wants the scripts done. Your best bet is to be familiar with both live-action and animation formats, as well as with the rules and requirements of each.

As for writing TV spec scripts, as you will certainly need to do, my advice is to write in an animation-script format regardless of which technology will be used to animate it. This shows that you know how to do it, and is more likely to be the right way to go. Just be sure that the visuals you create in your script will work for the technology you have in mind. If you’re writing a feature-animation script that you intend for 3-D, your visuals should utilize the strengths of 3-D animation. If you’re writing a 2-D series spec, your visuals must be in line with what can be done in 2-D.

What tends to be “expensive” in CG is creating the three-dimensional characters, especially when doing a TV series. This is because of the time it takes to create the wire frame of the body shape, then add texture, color, and all the other details to it. As the technology develops, this may change, but when I was writing for Beast Wars, we had a specific set of characters and a very strict rule against creating any new characters. I pitched a story idea that I thought got around the “no new characters” rule by calling for a new character that would be a conglomeration of parts from the other characters, so that existing components could be recombined rather than something new created. The story editor nearly didn’t pitch it, but liked the idea enough that he went ahead. It became the episode “Transmutate,” and the company liked the story enough that they went to the extra trouble of creating something entirely new for the Transmutate character.

Restrictions Breed Creativity

I’ve heard writers enthuse about doing animation because “you can do anything in animation!” This was usually said in comparing animation to live action. This was truer in the past than it is now, due to the increased use of CG elements in live action. It also highlights the difference between feature animation and TV animation.

Features have multimillion-dollar budgets and a long development period. They can afford to pull out the stops. They need to because they have a big investment to recoup.

TV animation is about doing the best you can within the limitations of shrinking production budgets and tight production schedules.

Here are some examples of the type of restrictions I’ve run up against in animation. These restrictions called for adaptation and creative thinking.

THE CROWD SCENE RULE: One big example is crowd scenes. Movies can afford to use sophisticated programs to generate and control huge crowds of 3-D animated characters on the screen (look, a zillion CG orcs are storming the Hornburg!). For a TV episode, you need to avoid crowd scenes. When you need to have a crowd scene for some reason, you find ways to cheat around it. You stick to close shots, or pick shots that show as few random people as possible (such as a few feet rushing by at ground level). In short, you get creative. You also want to avoid lots and lots of small objects flying around. Asking a TV animation artist to draw a hundred Ping-Pong balls bouncing around in a scene could be dangerous to your health.

LIMITED BACKGROUNDS: One show had a very tight budget that prohibited more than a few new backgrounds per show. Remember my example of how quickly one location can eat up several backgrounds? The challenge with that show was to use the maximum number of already-existing backgrounds from episodes in production, and to sharply curtail how many new backgrounds were in the script. It’s also helpful to have generic backgrounds such as “jungle” or “rock wall.”

LIMITED VOICES: Another show would allow me to use only a relatively low number of voices. Let’s say it was ten voices. The trick here is that the cast I was required to use took up eight of the voices. The challenge was to come up with stories that stayed tightly focused on those characters with almost no outside characters.

LIMITED DIALOGUE: Besides limiting voices, I’ve had shows where I could have only so many lines of dialogue per episode. It was a matter of going through the script and counting the lines. If there were too many lines, I had to either find places to trim out dialogue, or else rewrite the speeches to be more condensed.

TOO MANY PROPS OR MODELS: Shows with a very tight budget might also prohibit the writer from asking for too many new characters that have to be designed, or even for new props that have to be designed. Once again, it’s a matter of finding a way to work around the restrictions by changing the scene or altering the story. Whatever it takes.

Other Things You May Be Expected to Do

Once you’re given a script assignment, you should be told what additional info you will be expected to provide along with the script. The most common ones are as follows:

•  LOGLINE AND/OR SYNOPSIS: The logline is one sentence of the type you’d see in TV Guide to give the gist of the episode. The synopsis is about three short paragraphs. This type of synopsis should be crafted to give other writers enough detail to gain a quick knowledge of what’s in your script, so they can avoid having situations or scenes that are too similar to yours.

•  CAST LIST: For established characters, you need to give only the name. Characters should be listed in order of importance. For any new, secondary, or incidental characters, you will need to give the character name, indicate whether it’s a speaking part (if a speaking part, you should give an indication of how many lines), and give a description of the character (usually the same description you put into the script).

•  SET LIST: This would be a list of your major INTERIOR and EXTERIOR backgrounds. If it’s a new background, include full description.

•  PROPS LIST: This isn’t as commonly asked for these days, but it would be a list of special or unusual props that would have to be designed for your episode, such as a handheld GPS that transforms into a laser gun, a type of vehicle not used before, or something that is more than just a background object (such as the crystal skull I used in my script examples).

Scriptwriting Software

More and more companies, especially with TV series, are requiring writers who work on their shows to use scriptwriting software. The two main pieces of software currently on the market are Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter. So far, every company that has required me to use scriptwriting software has used Final Draft, whether it was a live-action show or an animated show. Final Draft is now very prevalent on live-action shows, and has rapidly become prevalent in animation, including theatrical features.

This doesn’t mean you should run out and buy a copy of Final Draft. That depends on your budget. If you have plenty of money to spare, go for it. However, it is perfectly legitimate to ask the company to loan you a copy of the software if they’re requiring you to use it. The advantages to already having the software are that it sounds more professional to say you have it (and less hassle for the story editor to get it to you), and that you’ll have a chance to become familiar with it ahead of time, thus not having to deal with a learning curve while trying to get a script done under deadline.

Scriptwriting software has its good points and bad points. The software automates much of the process and gives you handy shortcuts. Some of those automated shortcuts have been known to drive me mad. I have to live with that, and you can make some adjustments to how you want the software to work. I haven’t had much luck importing previously written scripts into the software, or exporting scripts to a plain Word format from the software. Both actions left me having to do a lot of editing to fix the odd quirks that happened in the process. Because you can print a Final Draft formatted script only from Final Draft itself, you will either need to have the program in order to print out a copy later (for example, for samples of your work), or you will need to have an exported version in Word format or in Rich Text Format (RTF).

Final Draft Viewer is free software that will let you read and print Final Draft documents without having the full version of the scriptwriting software.

The Animated Feature Film

The animation-development process is different for theatrical projects. Writing actual scripts for theatrical animation is a recent development, beginning mainly when Michael Eisner (as head of Disney) mandated that for The Little Mermaid, the script be done before any animation work. This created a major shift in how feature animation was developed. However, it’s a far more collaborative process than in television.

On features, usually more writers are hired, sometimes one writer or one team of writers after another. Often, writers are hired as “story consultants” to give their input.

The writers go back and forth in a more fluid process with the animators—with script influencing storyboards, and storyboards influencing script. Big meetings are held in which everyone involved goes over storyboards in detail. Unspoken etiquette dictates that the directors get to comment first, after which everyone else in the room can give an opinion.

Storyboards are turned into “story reels,” which are carefully evaluated to get a sense of how the story is working, especially in a visual sense. At its most effective, a feature animation film should convey just about everything the viewer needs to know when viewed without sound or dialogue, as though it were a silent movie. After input on the story reels, there is more rewriting. The rewriting is a constant back-and-forth process.

One of the big differences is the time span of the development and production, which typically runs four to five years. In April 2005, Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation SKG, commented that DreamWorks spends three to four years in production, with budgets of around $125 million per picture. That’s a huge commitment.

I should mention that direct-to-video features are developed in a fashion more like television animation, and have the same kind of tight, short schedules of a television series.

I consulted with Terry Rossio, who, with his partner Ted Elliott, has written or worked on numerous feature-animation projects—including Aladdin, Small Soldiers, The Road to El Dorado, Treasure Planet, Shrek, and Shrek 2. Terry generously shared his experience in this area.

A feature-animation script runs about eighty to eighty-five pages (and no more than eighty-five), containing around twenty sequences. In this sense, sequences would be similar to beats. This refers to the major story beats, events, or action, or a series of events that are grouped together because they are related. Terry said, “[Jeffrey] Katzenberg (Dreamworks SKG) will speak of a five/ten/five-act breakdown of sequences (meaning five sequences in Act 1, ten in Act 2, and five in Act 3), but that’s very loose and informal. We tend to think of animated movies as having a two-act play structure. In the end, just about any structure fits a good story.”

The emphasis in features is on simple story, but complex characters. The focus is on the characters and on the underlying theme, not the plot. Having a clear theme is also at the heart of creating an animated feature. That theme should have a simple, strong core, such as “family is important” or “if you love someone, you must be willing to let them go.”

Because of the fluid process I described earlier of the writers working more closely in collaboration with the artists, the studios don’t want the writers to break their scripts out shot by shot. Instead, they’re written in a live-action script format, which keeps the scripts much shorter and leaves the scene and shot layouts to the animators.

Another reason for using the live-action format is that the first people to read the scripts are studio executives, who are more accustomed to reading live-action scripts. These scripts are shorter than the norm because animated features are (mostly) designed for a young audience with a shorter attention span, so they tend to be shorter movies.

I asked Terry about the inclusion of music, because it often plays a significant role in animation features. Terry said, “If music is important to the film, then it gets included in the screenplay, exactly as it is intended to be in the final cut. A musical sequence can be a montage, or we prefer ‘series of shots.’ But it can also be a single scene designed to move the story forward, or anything in between.”

Aside from these major differences between television and feature-animation scripts, a couple of the rules for television should still apply. You will want to keep your dialogue short and pithy. You will want to remember that you’re working with animated actors, and not live actors, when it comes to calling for subtle emotion.

Beyond the Basics (Advice, tips, and tricks)

Now we’ll assume that you’re actually working on a show. Here’s a grab bag of additional advice, tips, and tricks.

Keep Your Story Editor Happy

There are certain things you should never, ever do to your story editor:

•  Never turn in a script late, unless there’s a very good reason and your story editor has approved an extension.

•  Never fail to return phone calls or e-mail as a way of avoiding having to give your story editor bad news or an excuse. Avoidance is a bad, bad idea—as I learned the hard way. Be honest and stay in communication with your story editor or producer.

•  Never cheat on the format. If you’re using a program such as Final Draft, this is moot, because the program will set standard margins. But if you’re using Word or some other program, never deviate from the template or guidelines set by the story editor. Adding one extra line per page can add one entire extra page to the script. Don’t try to cheat the margins or use a smaller font or anything else that will provide the story editor with a headache later having to reformat your script. You only hurt yourself in the end, because when the script is properly formatted and comes out too long, it will have to be cut. Make it the right length the first time around. After all, the reason standard formatting came about was to provide a reasonably accurate way to judge how many minutes of airtime will result from a script of a given length.

•  Do not argue excessively with your story editor. This is something I encountered with new writers doing their first scripts. They wanted to argue about every single note I gave them. I’m not talking about asking for clarification on a note—I’m talking about a stubborn resistance to changing anything. Not only is this irritating on a personal level, but it takes a lot of time that most story editors don’t have. This gets down to two things: (1) if you don’t have the temperament to get notes from ten different people whose sometimes contradictory notes must be reconciled, then don’t even think about getting into scriptwriting; and (2) learn to pick your battles. I can’t emphasize this second point enough. To put it another way, don’t sweat the small stuff. Make the changes. When it comes to something that you truly consider significant to the story, don’t argue it—discuss it. This is a fine point of semantics, but an important one. What you really want to do is get at the precise reason for the change, to present your reasoning in a nonconfrontational manner, and—if you can’t win your point—look for a compromise. Often, if you listen carefully, you can defuse the change by coming up with an alternate way to do basically the same thing. Then both sides win. But the minute you get the sense that this isn’t a battle you can win, make the best of it with good grace and find a way to make it work for you, rather than risk never working for that story editor again.
   Needless to say (I hope), never flatly refuse to change something. That’s the kiss of death. If the notes are really that bad, your only remaining course of action is to give up the job and walk away, regardless of the consequences.

Be Kind to the Storyboard Artist

Don’t keep secrets from the artists. If there is an important prop that will be used in a room in a later scene, be sure to include that prop in the first description of the room, so that it can be taken into account when that background is being designed and created. Likewise, if you need some special feature in a location, such as a hidden trapdoor, give some indication of it in the first place you describe the location. Capitalizing the prop is a good idea. Even though the door may not be revealed until Act 3, the artist will need to design the room to account for it when working on Act 1. The same rule applies to characters. Don’t suddenly mention that your character has a scar on his right cheek several scenes after you have already introduced the character. When you first introduce or describe the character, make sure all the significant information is there.

Be consistent in how you refer to a character, prop, or place. Remember that there can be a different storyboard artist working on each act. You don’t want to confuse them by saying “trapdoor” in one act and “flip-up hidden door” in another act, or by referring to an “Aztec temple” one time and an “ancient Mexican temple” another time.

Present Tense and “-ing” Words

All scripts are written in the present tense in third person. If you’re not accustomed to writing in present tense, check your scripts afterward to make sure you didn’t slip into past tense here or there. Although it’s not absolutely forbidden to use something other than third person (such as “we see Jack at work”), you’d better be very good at it, or you may turn off a reader who is expecting standard third person. When ending an act or script, there is one fairly common usage of “we.” It looks like this:

This is a stylistic choice. Some people like it; some don’t.

It’s also a good idea to avoid writing passive sentences or words ending in “-ing.” For example, avoid “Jack is looking at Jane.” It reads better as “Jack looks at Jane.” It’s shorter and more dynamic. Make sure your characters “walk” instead of “are walking,” “run” instead of “are running,” “talk” instead of “are talking,” and so on. This is a not 100 percent rule, and there may be times you want an “-ing” word, but for the most part, go for shorter and stronger in your language. This holds true for dialogue as well.

Verboten Words

Have you ever wondered why the villains in a Saturday-morning cartoon will cry, “Destroy them!” or “Annihilate them!” In children’s animation, certain words are considered forbidden, with very rare exceptions. Words that are commonly forbidden include “death,” “die,” and “kill.”

I’ve also been told not to use supposedly offensive terms such as “idiot,” “moron,” and “cretin.” Sometimes it’s a personal quirk of the producer or story editor, such as one exec who hated the use of the slang word “idjit.”

Employ common sense when writing a script for kids. Avoid the forbidden words noted here, as well as swear words or words with explicit sexual meanings.

Everybody Gets Out Alive

You may have also noticed in most action-adventure cartoons, that no matter how big the explosion, anybody inside or riding the exploding vehicle/building/object will get out safely. As with the forbidden words, having anyone (good or bad) die on the screen in children’s animation is strictly taboo. There have been some rare exceptions, depending on the type of show, but generally you should take it for granted that you need to show good guys or bad guys escaping from explosive or destructive situations. This makes it clear that they didn’t die.

Imitatable Behavior

The following “rules” do not apply to full-on comedy, such as squash-and-stretch cartoons (for example, the Looney Tunes characters Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote), where the action is obviously not real. The rules apply to action or adventure shows or to anything that isn’t pure comedy.

“Imitatable behavior” refers to any TV show’s physical action that a child could imitate—action that would do damage or cause injury to that child or to another living thing (especially to other kids). This is something that anyone producing visual works for kids worries about, and it governs much of what is considered acceptable or unacceptable in a script.

A prime example of this is the use of fire. One of the reasons there was no Johnny Storm the Human Torch in the early Fantastic Four series is that the producers worried about kids trying to imitate him by setting themselves on fire. In scriptwriting for kids, use of fire in a way that could lead to imitatable behavior is strongly frowned upon.

Other forbidden behaviors include poking anything into eyes, punching, hitting, kicking, choking around the neck, and so forth. It means no guns, no knives, no weapons that kids could manage to obtain (which is why you see a lot of beam or laser or other unreal weapons).

There are exceptions, of course. Shows geared for an older audience might allow a careful use of weapons, but the show would specifically have to allow that. For a series that has martial-arts characters, the producers or the story editor will lay down guidelines about what type of martial-arts moves are acceptable and where on the body the blows can land.

Then we have something such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in which the heroes carry martial-arts weapons. When I wrote for TMNT, the unwritten rule of indirect use of force applied. By indirect use of force, I mean that the Turtles couldn’t use their weapons directly against an opponent. Instead, they would have to use the weapon against some inanimate object, which would then in turn have some impact on the enemy. For example, if the Turtles are in a store, the weapon is used to knock down a pile of canned goods. The cans then fall on the villain or trip him up. Or if the villain is standing under a tree branch, you have the Turtles cut off the branch so it falls onto the villain.

I have seen this go so far that on another show, I wasn’t allowed to have a character throw a cream pie directly into the face of another character! Instead, the pie had to levitate out of the character’s hand and then be thrown.

This rule about indirect use of force applies to a lot of shows, but a truly classic example was when I was asked to develop Robert E. Howard’s Conan character into an animated series. Conan is a barbarian. He uses a sword. He isn’t squeamish about using a sword. But I couldn’t let him kill anyone, not even the villains, or use a sword directly against them. This was a challenge, to say the least.

I began by researching the source material. I pulled an element from one of Howard’s original stories, then bent it to my own use. I gave Conan not an ordinary sword, but a “magic” sword. In this case, it was made of star-metal that had fallen from the sky. Any weapon made with this star-metal (and all of Conan’s regular companions ended up with some type of weapon made of star-metal) had the ability to reveal and vanquish Conan’s main enemies. These enemies were the lizard-men, who could assume a human disguise. Merely getting close to Conan’s sword made them revert to lizard-man form, and the merest touch of the sword sent the lizard-men POOF! into an alternate lizard-man dimension, where they couldn’t get back to Earth. The end result: Conan gets to “use” his sword (sort of) and get rid of his enemies, but nobody dies. Not even lizard-men.

And of course, any other use of Conan’s sword against a living foe had to follow the indirect-use-of-force rule.

Or you can have the villains be robots, machines, or rock monsters, or something else far enough removed from humanlike that the rule can be ignored.

One other factor is having an increasing influence on what level of action can be used in animation series. Many shows are being financed as foreign coproductions. Studios in France, Canada, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere help finance the production in exchange for having the rights to the series in their own country. However, Britain and other European countries have a lower threshold of acceptability in physical action (some people call it “violence,” but I draw the line at calling any kind of action “violence”). These sensibilities will affect what is allowed in a show. In general terms, Europeans want their kids’ shows to be less “violent” than American shows. When writing your physical action, you need to have a good mind for coming up with clever alternatives.

And if you think all this sounds extreme, writing children’s live-action shows is even more restrictive.

Subtle Emotion

Don’t write lines such as “There is deep sadness in her eyes.” Or “Standing stone still, he radiates cold anger.” Most animation, and especially the limited animation of television, can’t adequately convey subtle emotion. Flat, animated eyes can’t communicate the level of emotion that we can read from human eyes. This has to be done with broader facial movement and body language, as well as emotion in dialogue.

Slang and Fantasy Language

Using contemporary slang will make you sound hip, but will also quickly date the show (or, for that matter, a comic or a videogame). Many clever writers get around this by inventing slang that doesn’t really exist, but sounds appropriate for the show. This is even more useful when dealing with a futuristic or science-fiction show where you don’t want modern slang to sound out of place or archaic … unless that’s by deliberate intent.

If you’re going to use foreign slang, do your homework! It’s embarrassing to read slang for, say, a contemporary Australian that hasn’t been used for twenty years except as a joke.

Then there’s fantasy. It’s easy to forget how modern some of our phrases are when writing a pure fantasy show. “Fast as lightning” is fine, but “faster than a bullet” is a problem if your characters use only swords. You never want to hear Conan say, “Wow, cool.” Be careful to avoid anachronistic slang.

I came up with the Marx Fantasy Dialogue Scale to differentiate the various ways in which fantasy dialogue could be spoken, ranging from colloquial/modern (No. 1) to High Epic/Poetic (No. 5). Here’s an example:

1.  He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

2.  He does not know what he is doing.

3.  He does not know what he does.

4.  He knows not what he does.

5.  He knows not what his purpose is, for confusion lies heavy upon him.

You would rarely want to use No. 5, because it’s wordy and sounds least natural to modern ears. Using purely colloquial language can sound jarring in some fantasy settings. Creating the right fantasy dialogue depends a great deal on how you use contractions, on your word arrangement and sentence structure, and on the vocabulary you employ.

Dialect

Let’s say you have a character who is Russian and speaks with a heavy Russian accent, or a character who is Irish or Romanian or whatever. How do you express that in dialogue?

Mainly, just indicate the character’s nationality when you describe the character, and then leave it to the actor. Don’t try to write in dialect unless you’re very, very good at it—and then only if it doesn’t distract from giving the actors readable dialogue. You might want to play around with grammatical structure in a way that’s appropriate to that dialect, or toss in verbal quirks, but make sure you get it right.

If you want a piece of dialogue spoken in a foreign language, but you’re unable to come up with a translation yourself, I would recommend this:

This throws the responsibility onto the casting or voice director to find an actor who can speak French. Which raises another point: if you create a major, recurring character who needs to speak another language, make sure you include this in the character description before the casting takes place.

The Other Translation Problem

As I’ve mentioned, nearly all television animation these days is done overseas. This means that the scripts have to be translated into Japanese, Korean, French, German, and so on for non-English-speaking animation-production houses.

This can create some quite funny glitches, particularly when it comes to the use of English idioms. A friend of mine likes to tell the story of a G.I. Joe script he wrote in which his characters were in a desert location having an argument. He used the idiom “X decides to stick his oar in the water,” meaning X character decides to give his opinion.

When the animation came back, his characters suddenly went from standing in the desert to sitting in a rowboat with oars in water that suddenly appears out of nowhere!

It has become necessary to avoid using English idioms in animation scripts that will go overseas for production. This can also apply to using references that are too obscurely American and might mean nothing to an overseas animator. An overseas animator might understand something as internationally known as “he had ears like Mickey Mouse,” but a phrase such as “he had hair like Don King” will probably leave them mystified.

Getting Around the Lip-Synch Problem

As I mentioned earlier, lip-synching is expensive, and anytime you can come up with a useful way to have dialogue without requiring lip-synch, it helps the schedule and the budget. Here are a few tips:

•  Have dialogue begin during your EXT. establishing shot (as V.O. dialogue). Partway through the dialogue, cut to the interior shot with the character completing the speech. Or vice versa, have the character begin a speech about something, then cut to the location or object under discussion and complete the dialogue as V.O. or O.S.

•  A variation on this first tip would be to start the character’s dialogue during a long pan when the character is O.S. at the beginning of the pan, and then finish the speech when the camera brings the character into view.

•  Have the character turned away from camera in a way that hides most of the face (such as an OTS or POV shot).

•  If it fits the story, have something else (helmet, scarf, mask) obscure the face. In CG shows, they often create secondary characters with helmets or face masks for exactly this reason.

•  Go to an ECU on the eyes so the mouth doesn’t show. I wouldn’t recommend this for more than one very short speech, because of what I said about the lack of emotive power in animated eyes.

•  Self-reflective dialogue (such as the character’s inner thoughts) can be done as a narrative V.O. rather than having the character talking out loud to himself. However, whether or not this method of hearing inner thoughts is appropriate in your script depends on whether it’s been established in the show already. You wouldn’t want to suddenly have a character’s inner dialogue be heard when that technique hasn’t been used in the series previously—unless the story editor or producer says it’s O.K.

Capitalizing Character Names

It’s a common practice to put the name of a character IN CAPS the first time that character appears in the script, but not afterward. This refers only to naming the character in the action description paragraph—not to sluglines or dialogue, where the character name is always in caps.

Be a Good Net Citizen

Animation writing became one of the first sectors of writing to get wired. I attribute much of this to Steve Gerber, who in the 1980s required writers on G.I. Joe to do their scripts on a computer, to communicate via his bulletin-board system (BBS), and to send scripts by modem. That was what propelled me abruptly into the world of computers.

Since then, animation and television in general have become very wired. In animation, the majority of pitches, outlines, scripts, and notes are exchanged via e-mail. Sometimes artwork for a series is posted on hidden Web pages for the writers. In addition to having a good handle on using e-mail and browsers, it’s very important to have good antivirus protection in place so that you don’t become the pariah who spreads an infection to the story editor or other writers. Or conversely, so you don’t get hit by someone else who’s being careless.

The “Spykecam” Outline and Script

You will find the outline and the full script of the “Spykecam” episode of X-Men: Evolution (available to read and study by going to www.christymarx.info). If you happen to see the finished episode, you’ll notice differences between our script and the finished version after rewrites by the story editor. For example, we used a Shakespearean play in our version, not realizing that another writer had already used a Shakespearean play as a key element in her script. Rather than be repetitive, the story editor changed our script to accommodate using a different play. Noting such changes can be instructive when studying scripts vs. finished episodes.