Big Thank You to March Contributors- And How To Write Dialogue

Read this out loud and see if you can make it sound natural.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the blog as of Mar 30 08...

Benjamin Hernandez

John Faso

Blorch! Studios

Tim Maloney

Matthew Glenn Nunnery

Anthony Rizzo

I took all your cash and bought my sick chihuahua a warm sweater, so Killer thanks you too!


I found an old page of notes (from 1994) with tips to my storyboard artists on how to write natural sounding dialogue. It's your reward for contributing. I hope it's helpful:

DIALOGUE

The first thing a dialogue writer needs to know is that people do not speak the way a writer writes. Especially a cartoon writer.

Dialogue should sound natural, off the cuff, spontaneous.

It should be structured but it shouldn't sound structured, or deliberate.

It should be poetic, not in a rhyming sense, but in a lyrical, flowing sense.

Know your characters.

This doesn't mean that certain characters always say certain things; don't substitute catch phrases for personality.

Be aware of context - how the characters feel at this moment.

Suggested approaches:

(There is no right way to write dialogue.)

1. Structured Approach:

Figure out what a character needs to say in the story context, structure it for the story's purpose, then rewrite it in the character's words.

2. Empathic Approach

Be the characters: put yourself in the scene. Turn the lights out except for a desk lamp.

Know who the characters are and how they express themselves. Know the situation that the characters are in. Know their specific motivations and feelings at this moment in the story.

Now act. Live the scene. Spontaneously, free-form; just act the scene out loud.
Walk around the room, loosen up.

Improvise the dialogue. Just say your character's feelings as they gush out of you.
Have an assistant take notes.

Don't worry if all your lines don't connect perfectly or smoothly.

You are looking for inspirations.

*This is a good method for artists too.

If you are a S.B. or L.O. artist, Director or comic artist, act it out a few times to get used to it.

After you finish, have an assistant type up notes, categorize your ideas and directions, give them headings.

You edit, arrange, and smooth out, fill in gaps, connect ideas, and write your scene.
This is the better method for writing dialogue. You will find more surprises. Your dialogue will sound more natural and spontaneous.

*There is no perfect, calculated way to write good dialogue. Of all the elements of writing for the screen, writing, dialogue is the one that most closely resembles art.

This requires feeling as well as skill.

Good dialogue does more than just tell the story, it sounds good, it is aesthetically pleasing just for what it is.

CONSIDER THE ACTORS!

Good dialogue must be easy to read. A director always knows if a line or passage of dialogue is not working when the voice actor repeatedly stumbles through the line. This has happened to me many times. A writer (including me) will write a line that is just too long and the actor can't get enough breath to get it out. Or the words just don't flow easily together;they aren't musical, so the actor keeps getting tongue-tied.

To write good dialogue, you should have some experience reading dialogue, so you have empathy for the actors.

This is what's wrong with today's cartoon writers; they have no experience doing any of the things they are demanding of the actual creative people, so what they write simply doesn't work and everyone wants to kill them.

So...test your dialogue before you hand it in. Read it out loud. Is it smooth?

Ask someone else to read it out loud.

Dialogue is perhaps the hardest part of the cartoon writing process. Writers with a natural feel for dialogue are rare. I've worked with lots of funny people, or people who are good with structure and story ideas, but usually end up rewriting much of the dialogue myself.

With that said, it is also the most creatively rewarding part of the process of putting words together. The characters' dialogue are the only words that the audience or reader will ever hear or read of the writer's work. These words can directly affect the audience, can make it believe that the story is really happening.

Again: The audience will never hear your descriptions of plot or action, so use as few words as possible there and be strictly matter of fact and instructional:

Ren does this.

Then Stimpy does that.

Then this happens.

Then Stimpy says (looking deep into his own soul with extreme sincerity, religious resolve):

"I know now what I must do! I must use my gift of invention....to save Ren"

Put your creativity into the dialogue. That will actually be heard.

And make it sound natural - even though it has dramatic purpose hidden under the faked spontaneity.

Bill Peet says what he thinks

I was just reading this really interesting interview with Bill Peet at Hogan's Alley.Peet is generally considered to be one of Walt's top story people. A writer who draws his stories.
In the interview, he is very candid and says things that if anyone said today, they would be lynched. His gruff statements remind me a lot of Friz, who I've worked for and had many funny encounters with.

Here are some highlights:

Dried Up Newspaper Cartoonists, Walt's Favorites in the 30s

Province: Obviously not receiving screen credit bothered you a great deal.

Peet: Yes, it was a crusher. There was a committee of the older men which was kept secret. These were mostly old dried-up newspaper cartoonists and people Walt felt had experience even though they couldn’t draw as well as the younger men. This was who decided who got screen credit. They hated the younger men who had talent because they were a threat to their jobs. They gave credit to themselves and their friends. We dared not complain since in the long run it would always be Walt Disney’s [name] and that long list of names [below his] like a page in the phone book. The drawing quality had to be improved when we went into features, and that’s when the younger talent began to do more. Walt began to realize that these people were real artists and not just dried-up old newspaper cartoonists.

Peet Redrew Timothy

Province: Fred Moore is often described as the boy genius of the studio.

Peet: There’s nobody that good. He was a great Mickey Mouse artist. He had the juices and was very creative. He created the dwarfs for Snow White, and he had a real loose, natural style and was a natural for animation. He gave a new flexibility to the whole art of animation. I think he was too young when he hit his peak, for one thing. He was only twenty-four. Freddy drank himself out of sight and got a little bit cocky and thought he was too good for the whole thing. He would hardly do any drawing, and his assistants would cover up for him. He thought you could draw and drink and you can’t do that. I worked on the mouse [in Dumbo] a lot for Freddy. It was his last big animation assignment. Ironically it was the drunken mouse scene. The champagne bottle falls into the tub of water, and the bubble comes up and then the mouse falls into the tub. Freddy just couldn’t draw a mouse that didn’t look like Mickey. It was so ingrained in him after drawing just thousands of them. The nose was too round, so I went over Freddy’s things including the storyboards. Freddy did a fine animation job on it, but I refined his drawings so they looked like Timothy.

Peet fixed Tytla’s Elephant Drawings

Province: Two of the best, Bill Tytla and Fred Moore, worked on Dumbo.

Peet: People were always amazed at Bill Tytla, that he could draw the giant devil for “Night On Bald Mountain,” and the giant in “Brave Little Tailor;” these ponderous, muscled characters, and then do this little elephant. After he got his first scene on Dumbo, he passed me in the hall and said, “Y’know, Bill, I can’t draw these goddamned little elephants. If I send Nick [his assistant] up with the scene, would you see if you could work it out?” Nick brought up this stack of drawings, Bill’s scene where the elephants first appear was just a mess. So I went over every one of them, probably a couple of hundred drawings, every damned frame in the picture, and redrew the whole scene. They shot the pencil test and showed it to Walt. He was ecstatic! Nick came up and told me, “Walt loved that thing, and I want to shake your hand!” Well, Bill never bothered to thank me, Walt either.

Disney’s Humor was suspect, but he could organize people

Province: Would you say Walt Disney had forgotten where he came from? After all, his own artistic ability was modest.

Peet: He couldn’t do any of the things he was famous for. His humor was suspect. I would call it sarcasm at best. He also couldn’t write or draw. I ran into a barber many years ago who had a Donald Duck drawing on the wall of his shop down in Hollywood. He said it was an original drawing by Walt Disney. It was from around ’36 or ’37. I thought it was funny because Walt could never have done that. He would sign the stuff, but he was always scared to death that somebody was going to ask him to do a drawing. He was a catalyst. He could take a room full of people and organize them into doing it. He could spot talent and pick this guy as good for that and someone else would be good for this.

Walt Hired Screenwriters and Playwrights and Didn’t Use Their Work

He was always hiring these big-time screenwriters and playwrights. These people had no conceptions in visual terms at all, all dialogue. So they really couldn’t handle the stuff. He paid them a hell of a lot of money to fail. When it came down to it, we had to do it. He was very excited about Disneyland and working on that. Then to have to come back to the studio and work on the same old stuff he had been doing for years.


More to come....

Great Quotes From Uncle Walt - cartoons are written by artists on storyboards

The following paragraphs were written by Walt Disney for "Wisdom" magazine in 1959."The early cartoon-makers were hampered in an orderly preparation of stories because of the nature of their medium. The written script used for live-action filming couldn't convey the swift action and fantastic effects that could be achieved in cartoons. A need for a better mode of presenting cartoon stories was felt.

When the Walt Disney Studio was bursting forth with creativity in the early thirties, the first storyboard was born. Today it is standard procedure in the cartoon industry.

The storyboard is ideally suited to cartoon making. It tells the story graphically, exactly as the camera's eye will see it, and is also flexible.
Changes in the storyboard can be made by merely unpinning sketches and substituting others or even changing the sequence of the boards. The boards show pace, movement, excitement.

Sixty boards generally comprise a board. No attempt is made at art. The sketches are made boldly, so they can be read across a room.

Usually they are done with black pencil or charcoal since color can give a board a jumbled appearance. However, color is occasionally used to suggest a mood or illustrate a costume.


With its many sketches underlined with strips of paper containing the dialogue or musical lyrics, the boards take on the appearance of a comic strip.



Three storyboards can usually tell a short subject. (by "storyboard", he means a 4 by 8 bulletin board filled with individual story panels, not the individual panels themselves)

A feature requires 25 or more.

When the story is complete, the boards are photographed and photostatic blow-ups are distributed to all the artists working on the production." - Walt Disney

to be continued...

Here's an interesting interview with one of Disney's top story-men - Bill Peet. According to him, Walt would periodically hire big time screenwriters, but they never worked out and it was a waste of money.

http://www.cagle.com/hogan/interviews/peet/home.asp


Warner Bros. cartoons are the best written and funniest cartoons in history. They also have the most developed personalities. The storyboard artists drew very rough and not on model, because these writers were more concerned with telling the story than doing finished art as they drew the storyboards. It was up to the animators and assistants to do the finished slick art.

from Baseball Bugs by Friz Freleng

How many of you storyboard artists out there go insane when you read scripts written by non-artists that just don't work? Post some horror stories in the comments.

Real Dialogue versus Cartoon Writer Dialogue -On Dangerous Ground

Here's a scene that's typical of what happened at Filmation's cartoon studio all the time.

I had just read the script for "Disco Droopy" and someone tipped me off on where the scriptwriter was hiding out.
I chased him down and began to deliver God's justice upon him I beat him within an inch of his cheap life
I felt the foul meat of his face tear off on my fists
in a flash my older wiser supervisor stopped me in my murderous rage
His knuckles connected with my skull and loosened my enraged flesh

When my brains stopped rattling, I woke up to have the harsh modern world explained to me in the coldest meanest wordsI felt the nastiness of reality ooze over me like fish vomit coating a fresh babe


reality sunk in slowly; it produced a last rebellious and futile spasmic outcrythis is what artists face every day of their lives in the terrible icy world of animation scripts.


The scene starts out with the evil writer's whimper.


CLICK HERE TO WATCH AN ARTIST SMACK A WRITER GOON



How about the dialogue in that scene?! When you have great words to say and really good actors to say them, and great direction, you can get intense performances like these!

I've seen these same actors in movies with lesser scripts and they can't do as much with them, despite their obvious talent.

Compare that dialogue with the kind of dialogue animators today get to work with:

What can you do with this kind of dialogue??? Except what Robert Ryan did.

Try reading the lines out loud and see if you don't turn beet red.



Now you could spend 30 bucks and learn how to write dialogue like this:


Or, you can read my articles on writing cartoons for free and aim for something like this:

CLICK HERE TO SEE REN THREATENING STIMPY AND SVEN



By the way,Evan Oliver did this great restoration of that Sven Hoek clip. That is a sequence that Nickelodeon kept cutting up every year until there was almost nothing left of it.

I found a 3/4" tape of the rough cut, made before before Nickelodeon destroyed the master. I cut the missing scenes back in, but they had timecodes on it.

Evan Oliver and David Mackenzie took the finished cut and using digital magic, erased the timecodes:

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT RESTORING SVEN HOEK

writing for cartoons 9 - Dialogue

I was pleasantly suprised when my cartoons first hit the air and people I had just met would quote whole passages word for word to me. Passages that I had never memorized myself. Stuff I had never really even thought was that important at the time. People have asked me many times what the secret is for good dialogue. Is there a secret?

Hmmm...I thought writing about dialogue would be easy, since I have done so much of it. It turns out that I don't think much about it when I write it. I just do what feels and more important sounds right... but that would be lousy advice to give someone else who wants to know the tools of good dialogue. I also know when I read bad or awkward dialogue -when I do it or anyone else does it.

The main tool and one that can't be acquired is an ear for words that sound good together, but not just random good wordplay, but character driven wordplay.

Dialogue has to sound good out loud and you don't know if your written dialogue works until you try to say it. Or maybe until the voice actor says it...or stumbles over it. I learned a lot from having to act out my own characters and I'm not much of an actor, but if I got into the recording studio and couldn't read a line right, I would change the line to something that read more naturally. I did the same for my other actors. If they couldn't get a line right, I blamed the writing, not the actor and would ask them to help me come up with something that had the same meaning but flowed off the tongue better.

When I try to analyze all the considerations that have to be controlled when creating good dialogue, my list gets longer and longer.

Dialogue partly tells the story, but should not be the main storytelling tool.

Dialogue has to sound natural. It will never actually be natural, because that would be boring, but it should feel natural and that is a vague quality that is hard to define.

Dialogue should be appropriate to the characters. You have to have a feel for character if you are to write good personality dialogue.

Anyway, I'll try to backtrack to see what tools I have to either be aware of or instinctively apply when I write my dialogue scenes.

Dialogue

Be In Character- Good
Dialogue needs to be prompted, motivated and be in character-and hopefully be funny too! Ren and Stimpy say different kinds of things and say them in different ways. They use different combinations of words.

Boo Boo, Yogi and Ranger Smith are different characters and have to show their emotions in different ways.
When Boo Boo gets mad he has to say it in a way that sounds kinda sissy, because he is usually such a nice goody-two-shoes guy. You have to push him pretty far to get a cross word from him, and that was the whole story for Boo Boo Runs Wild. He has to have trouble getting his frustrations out.







Writerspeak - Bad:

A lot of characters in modern cartoons are simply mouthpieces for the writers. They speak in the writer's voice rather than the character's voice, tell the jokes that the writer and his writer friends think are funny, but are totally out-of-character for the character who is actually saying them. This common writer's flaw is known as "writerspeak".

"I'll bet that asteroid will burn out in the atmosphere and shrink to the size of a chihuahua's head". That's writerspeak. It's informational, a setup for a gag that is supposed to happen at the end of the cartoon. A gag that the audience will predict the second they hear the writerspeak setup and congratulate themselves when they find that they were duped into being right. A gag that the cartoonists are not allowed to actually make funny by drawing the payoff funny.

This is a line of dialogue that could be read by any character in the story. To the writer of a line like this, the characters are interchangable, just an assortment of extra mouths for the writer, whose mouth doesn't appear on screen.

The writerspeak writer avoids writing character specific dialogue by using catch phrases. If you just tack on "D-oh" at the end of the line, then you know who said it. You could change that to "Cowabunga" or whatever else and instantly define your characters.

Exposition - Bad.
Many writers use dialogue as exposition-they have the characters tell the audience what is going on in the story, instead of writing the characters as characters living out the story.

"I am really sad."

"I am going to walk to the door and open it."

Sometimes exposition can be funny, as in Tex Avery cartoons or in slapstick comedy. It's funny because it's so ignorant. In a way, funny by default.


Musical Rhythm- Good.
Dialogue has to be easy for the actor to read. It can't be clumsy. It should have natural flowing rhythm. It's best to write dialogue by actually speaking it out loud until it sounds good, then sitting down and typing it up after you know it works. If it's hard for you to read aloud, it will be even harder for the actor.

Listen to the word music in this scene from Baby Bottleneck:

Acting - Baby Bottleneck
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

I find that if the dialogue has a musical beat with the accents on the important points of the sentences, it makes the meaning of the sentence sink in harder. It's much more effective than just informational dialogue.

Role-Playing Dialogue:
Sometimes a character plays a role, besides just being himself. Daffy Duck in the beginning of The Great Piggy Bank Robbery is playing a little kid-or a big kid that hasn't grown up. He loves comics, and his emotions reading his newest comic are the same emotions that little kids have. His dialogue reflects it-as does the animation and Mel Blanc's great voice acting.

The dialogue also has great rhythm and music.

GPBR - acting
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Here's a clip of George Liquor from Man's Best Friend. Most of the dialogue is character driven. There is a bit of exposition in the beginning and there is one line of "writerspeak" that I couldn't resist putting in the speech. It was a line that I thought was just funny and ironic by itself, but it's not really something George would say. I sinned.

MBF_couch
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Chris Reccardi wrote the line "Maybe I would take the car, but the goldfish took it." I laughed and put it in.




Here is a clip from Ren and Stimpy that is particularly dialogue heavy.

StimpyBreakfastTips
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

There were a lot of things I had to balance to make the dialogue work without competing with the ideas and gags.
Maybe I'll try to break it down in another post.



I will continue writing about writing cartoons and go into more detail on each of these writing tools, and give you step by step procedures of how we wrote our stories.

I'll also include premises and outlines from cartoons that I've had quoted back to me by fans.

I can't help you be creative or show you how to have original and funny ideas, but I might be able to help you make the most effective use of the ideas you do have.

More Gruntspeak - Boo Boo woos Cindy Bear

I started really getting into the gruntspeak after a while and found more places to use it.
You know how when you listen to classical or instrumental music, you understand the meaning of the music but you can't put it into the words? I tried to do that with grunt speak. I put in lots of inflections and even some dirty feelings.

It's too bad I don't have the raw track for this section to play you. You have to listen closely because Cindy talks over some of it. I tried to weave the most meaning full grunts through the pauses in her dialogue.












CLICK HERE TO SEE BOO BOO CLIP!

Writing For Cartoons 8 - Writing Gruntspeak

CLICK HERE TO WATCH GRUNTING CLIP!

How would you write a scene like this? Not with a script obviously.

That was my problem. I acted this scene out for everyone during the pitches, but then had to figure out how to translate it to film.


I knew every exact emotion Boo Boo was feeling as he rooted through the picnic basket. I had a grunt for seeing a sandwich, one for pulling the sandwich up, one for waving the sandwich, etc...
There was a different grunt for a chicken leg of course because chicken legs cause different emotional responses than sandwiches.

I didn't have to worry about the exec not understanding the scene. I had already pitched it to Mike Lazzo, who laughed and shook his head and said "Go do it." So there was no need for a script for executive reading purposes. If I had just sent this whole cartoon story as a script to anyone, they would have not been able to make any sense of it.



But I'd still need something to follow along in the recording session. Usually we use a dialogue script that is written from the storyboard. But an actor can't read "mwaaaaa" or "Grrrrrrroan" on a script page and know what myriad of inflections to act aloud.

Then there was the problem of what to call each feral grunt after we recorded it so we could put it on the exposure sheet.

Add to that, that the animator would need to know how to animate to the grunts. He'd have to know what they meant and where the wave patterns were in the sounds, so he could move Boo Boo at the appropriate moments. This was a real bugger of a problem to solve.

Words are a primitive medium.

I started by writing Boo Boo's emotions and continuity on a storyboard with drawings. This way I could see exactly what he was feeling at every moment.
I scribbled out, not only each key emotion, but the transitions between them. The transitions make the character seem real and alive. You can't just jump from one emotion to another contrasting one...unless you're Bela Lugosi, but he's allowed because he's a genius.
The written grunts on the board don't begin to describe all the inflections in the actual track that was recorded. I wrote those on after the recording just to give me some idea of which was which.
Luckily I was the one who was doing Boo Boo's voice. I don't know how I would have communicated my grunt language to another actor without just giving him line readings. But then he wouldn't have felt all the deep underlying meanings as I did. I knew the story intimately because I wrote it and performed it many times to live people and had been grunting to frightened audiences since I was a tot. (This was the language we used to speak in at the school cafeteria when we were kids. It was inspired by the great grunter in Roger Ramjet.)
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/03/roger-ramjet-woodsman-clip-3-grunting.html


I took the storyboard into the recording and spent a few minutes grunting and groaning. Then the engineer had a hell of a time keeping track of the grunts.

We wrote up notes like this:
This was just the beginning of my problems.

I still had to figure out how to get the right pictures to match the right sounds.

I had an animatic that we made in Premiere and I had been cutting all the action to the music from the APM stock library. This was the first time I had ever tried this, and it was kinda clunky to edit back then.

I input all the grunts and then cut the appropriate ones to the right drawings. As I listened to the grunts I heard more inflections that carried meaning that hadn't been drawn yet, so I added more poses in the layouts.

Then I had to give this mess in some form to the animators. I made a quicktime movie so that the animators could see and more importantly, feel what Boo Boo was going through. If I has sent this to Korea, or even Canada, it probably would never come out the way I wanted it to. They would never have looked at the animatic. They would have simply taken the poses I drew and inbetweened them.

I was working with an animator in town- a Korean who thought I was crazy, because I didn't do anything the formula way, but he worked with me, and I acted it all out and everything fell into place.

The moral of the story:

Animation is a performance medium. A script is not the artform. The cartoon is.

Any words we write up are basically just transcriptions of scenes we either drew or performed live to each other in gag sessions.

The words on paper only carry the most basic germs of what the performance is going to be. It's just a guide to remind us of what happens when.

A writer who doesn't draw, act, play a guitar, sing, dance or ride a unicycle cannot take advantage of all the creative tools that are at the disposal of a cartoon director. It's a blind man choosing colors for Rembrandt.

The cartoon director is an animator that has many other creative skills, and he is the real writer of the cartoon. He decides all the fun that is going to take place and he works with specialists and coordinates all their efforts, so that everyone involved can be proud of the resulting work of entertainment.

http://klangley.blogspot.com/2007/02/walter-lantz-cartoon-director.html

You can't sit in a room somewhere all by yourself and write a cartoon. You need to be with the performers and get their input. In animation, the main performers are the artists and director. They are the ones who can tell you whether any of your words are gonna work. That's why you need to be one so you can converse in our language.

Writing For Cartoons 7 - Continuity, Personality

Continuity

Each idea has to be linked to the next idea. Each line of dialogue has to follow from the previous and into the next smoothly. Each scene should connect to the next.

There can't be gaps, where the audience wonders "how did we get from here to there?"

The outline should have the basic structure. It should link each scene.

The detailed continuity should be up to the person doing the storyboard.

This storyboard was done by Vincent Waller. Those little sketches were done by me, either in the layout poses first and then doodled onto the board to time from, or I doodled them first and then addedd them in the layouts. I don't remember...
Either way, pose artists animators, directors and assitant animators each fill in more continuity.


The storyboard artist/writer links the dialogue, the action and the acting. Between each major expression, there are smaller expressions that connect them.

The outline is where you contruct your story. The storyboard is where you write it and connect the dots.

Understand Personality

This is not essential, because many cartoons are not about personality. Tex Avery never used layered characters in his MGM cartoons, but still made some of the best cartoons in history.

Disney's characters are one-dimensional (if they are lucky!) but that didn't stop him from being pretty successful.

But you should know enough to not have your characters all of a sudden do or say something that is totally out of character-unless the story supplies a believable reason for it.

Your characters' actions and their dialogue should come out of their character.

Ren doesn't do things the way Stimpy does. Bugs talks and acts different than Elmer, etc.

I had a really good board artist doing a scene for "In The Army". Ren and Stimpy were doing KP duty, peeling potatoes, and in the board Stimpy was cross with Ren. He was chewing out Ren for getting them in trouble with the sergeant over and over again. It was beautiufully drawn, but out of character, so I asked the artist to rework the scenes so that Ren is the mean one and Stimpy thinks that KP duty is a reward. Stimpy almost always thinks that Ren's mischief is a good thing. You have to push him pretty far to upset him.

Needing to understand character seems obvious, but I have yet to meet another cartoon writer who can keep their characters consistently in character. I usually have to do that part myself, but I could sure use some help if someone exists out there! There are a lot of great and funny artists, but less that can create inspired characters and certainly none of the writers can. That's the whole history of the business. Warner Bros. seems to have been the big exception.

Character Treatment

I actually frown on writing up character treatments- a description of your characters' personality traits.

They (TV execs) make you do that when you start a project or pitch one. They make you write a "story bible" and as part of it you have to describe who your characters are and worse, what their catch phrases are.

The bad thing about this is that if you force yourself to try to figure out everything there is to know about your characters before you start making your cartoons, you end up restricting yourself to what you thought you knew about them early on. The execs make you stick to it and your characters are forever limited to being cardboard cutouts.

What you find from actually making cartoons is that you think of many more and better ideas along the way and your characters evolve as they find themselves in new adventures.
Ren and Stimpy, George Liquor, The Ripping Friends and old cartoons all evolved along the way. They would maintain some of their core traits, but they would get more shaded as more stories got produced.

Catch Phrases
If catch phrases happened, they happened by accident. They weren't "created" upfront, like they are now. How many times did you cringe as a kid when you heard "Welcome to the 90s!" or such other writer creations? (Hey share some of the most obnoxious catch phrases from your childhood cartoons here in the comments!)

When I had Ren say "You bloated sac of protoplasm!" and similar things, people would yell them at me at appearances. I would see them on t shirts. People make me say "No sir, I don't like it" all the time. None of the lines in R and S were ever meant to be catch phrases, but they would just catch on, and Nickelodeon would lean on me to use them again. I resisted as much as possible, figuring that funny dialogue in the next cartoons would also catch on naturally.

Characters should issue from your loins
If you are truly a good character creator, you understand your characters from inside. You feel what's right for them, but you allow them to breathe and grow naturally as you make cartoons. They aren't a list of arbitrary traits and catch phrases. They exist and you are just relating their adventures to the audience.

Many of the artists who work with me add shadings-although if they add something that I feel doesn't fit, I suggest something else. Voice actors would also bring new shadings to the characters when we rehearsed the stories, and their inflections would give me ideas for new stories and new ways to develop the characters' traits further.

If you watch the Ren and Stimpy shows, you can see the characters evolve not only in design, but in their personalities too. I would purposely write whole stories just exploring their personality traits-like Stimpy's Invention or Ren Seeks Help.

OK, enough crap...to get to the point, I did write up a character treatment for Ren and Stimpy-not for myself, but for the Nickelodeon executives and for the artists and story crew on the show. Here it is, if you are interested.



I have one for the George Liquor characters too if you ever want me to post it. Let me know.

Writing for Cartoons 6 - Spelling, Grammar, Clarity : The Boy Who Cried Rat Outline

Spelling and Grammar

You are going to have to use some words when you write a cartoon-in outlines and premises -which the audience never sees, and in dialogue - which the audience hears. If you spell badly and can't construct a sentence, then it's pretty certain that you'll have trouble constructing a paragraph, let alone a story. You also won't be able to write effective dialogue if you have trouble with language.

Spelling and grammar use the same kind of thinking that writing stories and doing storyboards does, so if you can't spell or construct clear sentences, you might want to give up on the idea of being a writer. You can still be a good artist. It's a lot harder to be an artist than a writer anyway.

Clarity

You should be able to control your ideas in a way that the audience sees, feels and understands what YOU want them to see, feel and understand. You have to be able to present your ideas simply and clearly. Vagueness is a sign of poor writing.

Don't try to be fancy or show-offy. That tends to muddy up your ideas and baffles the readers, artists and audience. Use the fewest possible words to say what is happening.

Clarity is also important to the artists who have to follow up on what your ideas are. If they have to muddle through vague writing, storyboarding and overly complicated details, they will have trouble understanding what the point is that they have to convey to the audience.

If you are writing an outline, write with short simple sentences that tell clearly what is happening. Do not try to impress the artists with fancy-ass flowery prose and inverted sentence structures. They won't be impressed. They will be frustrated and confused and will not do their jobs well.








NOTE! This is an 11 minute cartoon. The outline is just 4 pages long.

Clarity applies to every aspect of art and entertainment-to the telling of the story, to the posing, the sfx, the music, the acting. The best directors are the ones who state their ideas in the clearest non-ambiguous manner.

Here are some notes a secretary wrote up from a meeting at Spumco. We were studying Tex Avery cartoons. Tex was a master of clarity.




http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5458467101259814270&q=tex+avery

Writing for animation: Keep it simple and short! Misconceptions of animation "writers"

Here are a couple of major misconceptions that animation scriptwriters have:

1) Animation scripts should be longer than live action scripts

This is from someone's webpage where she is trying to sell you a book on how to write cartoons.

"How to Write Animation Scripts

In writing animation scripts, there are two pages written for one minute of viewing time. This is done because you have to call the camera directions, angles, and scenes. In contrast, when writing cinematic scripts, you write one page of script for each minute.

That's why many cinematic scripts with live action run 90 pages in length for 90 minutes of viewing. With animation scripts, a 12 minute script runs about 24 pages in length." Yikes!!!

http://www.newswriting.net/animation.htm

It's actually the complete opposite. Animation writing should be short, because you have artists to fill out the visual details. Animation scripts are always too long and storyboard artists have to draw hundreds of extra scenes just to have them all cut out by the studio when they figure out that the show is too long.

Sometimes the whole show gets animated before the producers figure out they have wasted a hundred thousand dollars animating 10 minutes that doesn't fit into the half hour. This happens all the time and it seems no one will tell the writers to write shorter scripts. (I've done it myself and learned my lesson now!)

Every script page equals about 2 minutes of screen time, the way animation writers write.

2) You can write tons of complicated actions and details into cartoons because it's easy for someone else to draw it

Complicated backgounds and scenery:

"WIDE ON PAPA YELLOW NAPE, AND PICKLES

as they enter a brightly lighted room. There is a huge swimming pool surrounded by classical Roman and Greek statues. The pool

is rimmed by turquoise, blue and white mosaic tile. There are

tall, gothic windows. The white marble statues circle the large, kidney-shaped pool. The walls are tiled in the blue, white and turquoise fleur-de-lis mosaic tile. The pool has an open skylight

roof--an atrium where the sun's rays shine down into the pool

to show hazy beams of light."

Millions of characters to animate:

" PAPA YELLOW NAPE

That statue's pointing to the light

ahead.

The two scramble in the direction the statue is pointing.

They stumble upon a huge aviary filled with the eaglets

and other very rare birds, including blue macaws, green parrots, red cardinals, etc. The aviary is perched on a ledge high on the

stalagmites and under the stalagtites. Brainy climbs up on the

ledge and unlocks the birdcage door.

PICKLES

Okay eaglets and other birds.

You're free now, and big enough to fly away home.

All the BIRDS make an exit from the huge cage, except for the

eaglets. They look up sadly and vulnerable at PICKLES."

"

PICKLES takes the bracelet from Fledgling's outstretched wing and punches a white button on the bracelet. It lights up and pulsates for a moment. Then in an explosion of light, all the

statues are restored to life. The statues run free in all directions, cheering and shouting.

WIDER ON STATUES

as all statues with the exception of TWO scatter to the light at the end of the cave.

STATUES

(scattering wildly)

We're free at last,

after all these years."