Animated Storytelling

Simple Steps for Creating Animation & Motion Graphics

Second Edition

Liz Blazer

Animated Storytelling, Second Edition

Simple Steps for Creating Animation & Motion Graphics

Liz Blazer

Peachpit Press

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Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Blazer

Executive Editor: Laura Norman

Senior Production Editor: Tracey Croom

Development Editor: Jan Seymour

Copy Editor: Jan Seymour

Proofreader: Becky Winter

Compositor: Kim Scott, Bumpy Design

Indexer: Valerie Haynes Perry

Front Cover Design: Ariel Costa

Cover Illustration: Ariel Costa

Back Cover Design: Laura Menza

Interior Design: Laura Menza

Notice of Rights

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The information in this book is distributed on an “As Is” basis without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of the book, neither the author nor Peachpit shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described in it.

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Unless otherwise indicated herein, any third party trademarks that may appear in this work are the property of their respective owners and any references to third party trademarks, logos or other trade dress are for demonstrative or descriptive purposes only. Such references are not intended to imply any sponsorship, endorsement, authorization, or promotion of Pearson Education, Inc. products by the owners of such marks, or any relationship between the owner and Pearson Education, Inc., or its affiliates, authors, licensees or distributors.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-13-566785-9

ISBN 10:        0-13-566785-2

This book is dedicated to:

My son Evan and my husband Jeff Oliver

Acknowledgments

Ariel Costa, for sharing his spirit, immense talent, and artistry. His illustrations on the cover and throughout this book are the work of a multitalented wizard.

Laura Norman and Nikki McDonald for supporting this book in every way. It has been an honor and privilege to work with you.

Jan Seymour, the editor every writer hopes for—supportive, sharp as a whip, and creative. Jan, you made the editing process free of stress and full of joy.

To the Pearson crew, Tracey Croom, Kim Scott, and Becky Winter, thank you for your care and expertise in making this book sparkle.

I humbly thank and am deeply indebted to Robin Landa, Christine Panushka, Justin Cone, Joey Korenman, Greg Araya, Bill Moore, Colin Elliott, Erin Elliott, Brian Oakes, Peter Patchen, Carla Gannis, Mike Enright, Robert Lyons, Claudia Herbst-Tait, Brooke Keesling, Karin Fong, Kim Dulaney, Yoriko Murakami, USC School of Cinematic Arts, Pratt Institute, MODE Summit, TED-Ed, Stephanie Lo, Jeremiah Dickey, Elizabeth Daley, Kathy Smith, Sheila Sofian, Lisa Mann, Mar Elepaño, Gretchen Caldwell Rinnert, Leah Shore, Carlos El Asmar, Laura Menza, Denise Anderson, Marc Golden, Bonita Blazer, Jon Blazer, and Sheldon Blazer.

This book could not have been written without the collaboration, editing, and love from my husband, Jeff Oliver.

Art Credits

Ariel Costa, Cody Walzel, Richan Li, Phil Borst, Jamie Caliri, Louis Morton, Christopher Kezelos, Job, Joris & Marieke, Maya Eliam, Max Porter, Ru Kuwahata, Cyriak Harris, Réka Bucsi, Linda Heller, Richard Borge, Kino Jin, Sterling Sheehy, Shuhei Matsuyama, Lauren Indovina, Kim Dulaney, Passion Pictures, Psyop, The Mill, Denyse Mitterhofer, Ian Wright, Jordan Bruner, Gregory Herman, John Morena, Hsinping Pan, Ed Fernandez, Tara Mercedes Wood, Richard E. Cytowic, TED-Ed, Jake Zhang, Jorge R. Gutiérrez, Amanda Bonaiuto, Karin Fong, Sony PlayStation, Imaginary Forces, Felix Sockwell, Miguel Jiron, Maciek Janicki, Marsha Kinder, Mark Jonathan Harris, Scott Mahoy, State Design, Sirirat Yoom Thawilvejakul, Max Friedman, and Julia Pott, HerminUtomo/Getty Images pages 38 and 149, Natalia Darmoroz/Getty Images page 83, CSA-Printstock/Getty Images page 128, RichLegg/Getty Images page 199.

Introduction

We live in a magical era for animated storytelling. Film festivals flourish worldwide to celebrate new animation; animated content is being produced and streamed on new platforms for both kids and adults, and advertisers are hungrily seeking fresh talent to connect with audiences in a meaningful way. Skilled storytellers specializing in animation are in high demand, and the opportunities to thrive in the field are ever-expanding. And yet it has been difficult to find a resource aimed at providing the skills necessary to become a successful animated storyteller.

This book is a step-by-step guide on how to make great stories for both animation and motion graphics. It’s based on the idea that whether you are creating a character-based narrative or experimental film for festivals, an advertisement for television or the Web, or a motion graphics title sequence, being intentional about storytelling is the key to success.

In ten simple steps beginning with pre-production and storyboarding through color and sound and finally to animation, this book will provide you with the tools you need to create an effective animated story. You’ll find concise explanations, useful examples, and short assignments allowing you to set the theory you’ve learned into action. You’ll also find hints on how to take full advantage of animation’s limitless potential.

Big consideration went into the idea of exploring animation alongside motion graphics in the same book. The two forms are often treated as if they come from different worlds. Certainly, they grew up in different neighborhoods. Animation (for the most part) has been lumped into the filmmaking discipline, with its commitment to experimental and character-driven stories destined for television, movie theaters, and video game consoles. The study of motion graphics, meanwhile, has been part of the graphic design discipline, where its focus on branding and content promotion has made it essential to advertisements, broadcast graphics, and film titles, to name a few. Animation and motion graphics have been kept apart, and yet these two forms have much in common and so very much to learn from one another. They are presented together in this book because they exist hand-in-hand and because their lessons are mutually beneficial.

For you animated filmmakers eager to get your experimental short into the Ottawa International Animation Festival, Annecy, or GLAS, you’ll find plenty in this book that speaks directly to your goal, but I also urge you to be influenced by the “commercial” culture of motion graphics which stresses discipline and strict deadlines. It will help you get that short completed and sent off in time. And for you motion graphics artists working on a new commercial spot, I address you directly and often, but pay close attention to the lessons of animation’s experimentalism and nonlinear story structures. Your motion work will thrive under its influence.

So flip a page and start the fun. Get ready to learn scores of practical skills, but know you’re also headed on a personal journey. This is about you gaining the confidence to tell the stories you’ve always wanted to tell and becoming the storyteller you were always meant to be. With that…may the animated storytelling begin!

1. Pre-Production

The doorway to creating a well-planned animated piece

Animation is a limitless storytelling medium. Artists can create worlds, defy gravity, flip from factual to fantasy, and transport audiences to places they never imagined. But jumping right into animation before completing the stages of pre-production is kind of like climbing into the ring with a prizefighter without having had a single boxing lesson. You might get a lucky jab in here or there, but after that it’s going to be a bloodbath.

Animated storytelling is all about planning. Most failed projects reach that low point because a director began animating before answering three essential questions about the project: What is it? What does it look like? and What is it made of? In this chapter you’ll answer these questions in three simple steps: Concept Development, Previsualization, and Asset Building.

If you learn nothing else from this entire book, learn that the animation muse is an anxious planner and you must learn from her example. When she comes to visit, she expects her guest room to be tidy with a detailed itinerary of all the places you’re going to take her laid out on her bed. Set up the muse’s guest room as she likes; in other words, take pre-production very seriously or risk wasting weeks, even months, working on scenes that don’t fit or, worse, fail to complete your project. Ignore these steps at your own peril!

Concept Development

What is it?

The single most annoying question you can ask an artist: “So, what’s your piece about?” The most prevalent response: “Um, I’m not ready to talk about it.” Well, get ready to talk about it, Picasso. Clarity is king, whether you’re making a visually-driven animated film poised to rock the festival circuit or a client-commissioned motion graphics piece with either “something to tell” (such as a public service announcement) or “something to sell” (like an advertisement). Until you can answer the nagging question of what exactly it is you’re doing, go no further.

Start with a Creative Brief

If you’re working with a client on a high-budget film trailer, a public service announcement (PSA) for a website, or an advertisement for TV, you’ll most likely be given a creative brief. If done right, this document should explain the client’s aims and objectives (what the project must be and how long), target audience, and milestone deadlines for the project. Corporate culture doesn’t always get it right, but they’re onto something here. The creative brief forces the client and creative to get on the same page (or at least somewhere close).

If you’re not working with a client, then I highly recommend that you write your own creative brief. If you are planning an experimental animation that seems to reject all categorization and bucks corporate conformity like a wild bull…then I especially urge you to write a creative brief. You may be surprised to hear that some of the most out-there directors are obsessive planners whose creative briefs are more focused and deliberate than a royal wedding.

We all have our eccentric processes and nothing’s sure-fire. But I like to step away from the computer, tape a bunch of paper or oversized Post-its® to the wall, and break out a Magic Marker®. So close your computer, grab some kind of writing utensil, and jot down the following basic information:

What must it be? Short film, PSA, advertisement, movie trailer, animated documentary, etc.

Who is it for? Film festivals, TV audience consisting of 11 to 14-year-old boys, your Instagram followers, etc.

How long must it be? Thirty seconds, four minutes, etc.

What is your objective with the piece? To raise money for breast cancer, to introduce a complex world in a feature film, to visualize the patterns in a jazz track, etc.

When is it due? In a month, in six months, etc.

I highly recommend creating a calendar that works backwards from the absolute due date with weekly milestones that you intend to stick to along the way. Simply Google “blank calendar,” print that baby out, and mark a milestone on each Saturday that MUST be met or you don’t get to go to karaoke on Saturday night at Sing-Sing.

Done? Good. Answering the above questions is like tidying up for the muse, which is smart, because she’s now arriving for her first visit.

Summon the Muse

You now know what your project must be, who it’s for, and when the milestones are due, but you still don’t know what your project is. Again, step away from your computer; the muse will pop in to help when you’re active and brainstorming. Now, approach the blank pages or Post-its that you’ve stuck to the wall and write your Big Idea at the top. For a personal project that Big Idea is up to you; perhaps you want to create a short film inspired by a recent break-up and your Big Idea to explore is first love. With a client-based assignment you’ll likely be given the Big Idea, for example, a PSA on water pollution or an airline commercial about bringing family together. Now grab that marker tight because here goes!

I want you to write down everything that pops into your mind about your Big Idea, whether it’s first love or the airline commercial. Completely empty your brain of all free associations you have on that Big Idea, and get it down on paper.

With first love, explore the memories, wonders, pain, images that flash in your mind, and words that you associate with it no matter how bizarre or deeply personal. For an advertisement for an airline, write down recollections of past flights and imagery and emotional connections you have to travel.

Don’t worry if it’s negative (bad airline food or the size of the bathroom) because you can always flip that later. And please don’t get stressed if what you are jotting down seems crazy or even dumb, because often those ideas end up being the best ones. The point is total honesty. Write your free associations down, filling as many pages as you can until you have nothing left to write—literally until your head is completely empty of anything else to say on the subject.

Once you’ve released all thoughts on the subject, push yourself to write down two or three more things. This whole process should take between 15 and 30 minutes.

The Story is up There!

Now that you’ve emptied your brain on the subject of your Big Idea, circle the words and ideas that you find most compelling. Try to narrow down the list to your favorites—maybe two or three great ones. Sometimes there will be a nice connection between the best ones. If it’s first love that you’ve explored, then you might circle an idea like “It’s about accepting faults” or an image like “The way his shoelaces were always untied.” The subject of airline travel might offer images of being greeted by a loved one at the airport, the word “takeoff,” or even cramped space in coach and the dream of one day having more legroom and a soft cushion in first class.

Storytelling is as old as dirt. People have been making up stories since cave dwelling times. Our brains are wired to make connections and find narratives. Yes, your brain, too.

For your story about first love, for instance, just focusing on the feeling that love is “about accepting faults” and the images of “his untied shoelaces” may spark a narrative in your mind. Just riffing here, but let’s say it’s about a neat and prim girl who loves a messy boy whose shoelaces are always untied. She keeps trying to neaten the messy boy up and always ties his shoelaces even though he prefers them untied. They get in a fight over it and break up. The neat girl is inconsolable—she misses the boy and even his sloppy, untied shoes. She runs out to find him but there he is at her door. He has flowers and is dressed very tidily with his shoelaces all laced up. The girl smiles seeing that he changed for her. She takes the flowers but then bends down and unties his shoes and musses up his hair. The boy giggles, seeing that she finally loves him the way he is.

For the airplane ad we identified “takeoff” and being cramped in coach and dreaming of sitting in first class with more legroom and a soft pillow. So, maybe we start with that image of a person (Jane) stuck in a cramped seat on a flight that won’t leave the runway, in total misery. She shuts her eyes tight and tries to visualize a better airplane situation: a spacious seat, a soft pillow, a kind and lovely steward…but BOOM…she’s woken by a nudging. Jane reluctantly opens her eyes but is surprised by the lovely face of a flight attendant (wearing the uniform of the airline you’re trying to sell). The flight attendant smiles and gently nudges Jane again with the soft pillow she requested. Jane accepts it only to notice that she is (as she dreamed) now in a much more spacious and comfortable seat. The attendant smiles again and says, “Time for takeoff.” Jane snuggles into her pillow on her spacious seat and closes her eyes again, this time with a peaceful smile as the plane departs.

I’m the first to admit it’s not exactly Shakespeare, but your brain wants to make connections between characters, and it loves to resolve conflict in stories.

So begin with those meaningful ideas or images that you’ve circled and start to daydream. Close your eyes, talk to yourself, pace the room, stand under a hot shower, get bored. And when images do begin to form, affirm them by using the number 1 rule of improv comedy: “Yes, and…”

The “Yes, and…” Rule

Saying “Yes, and…” out loud is your solemn promise to commit to whatever crazy/brilliant/random idea presents itself, and then to build on it with another new (possibly crazier/brilliant-er/random-er) idea. If you say “Yes, and,” then you agree that your previous idea was worthwhile and that you simply must build on it because this story can’t be stopped!

So, if an Australian Koala pops into your mind for some weird reason, you say: Yes, and it’s being transported to a foreign zoo… Yes, and it’s put on the wrong flight… Yes, and the flight lands in Newark, New Jersey… Yes, and Bruce Springsteen accidentally claims it at baggage claim… Yes, and he’s always wanted a koala… Yes, and he hides it from the police… Yes, and his way of hiding it from the police is by dressing the koala up as a member of his band… Yes, and the koala learns to play a mean saxophone… Yes, and Bruce’s current saxophone player gets jealous… Yes, and the next stop on the world tour happens to be Australia… Yes, and the saxophonist has an evil plan to get rid of the koala once and for all…

Try speaking this free association exercise aloud and record it on your phone. Do it a few times, until you get used to the notion of total acceptance. It may feel awkward at first, but speaking your ideas out loud will force you to acknowledge their gravity, making you more likely to accept them and build on them. And recording it will make sure you don’t lose any thoughts, because you just may be spinning story gold.

Your First Draft is #@$%

You’re brain is on fire with narrative, and new story ideas are popping like champagne corks at the Oscars. But if you do feel ready to start writing at this point please take the sage advice of Ernest Hemingway, who knows a thing or two about stringing words together: “The first draft of anything is #@$%.” If that’s true, then why worry? Just “Yes and” your way to a first draft. Even if it reads like #@$%.

If you’re not quite ready to put pen to paper on that first draft (and even if you are), then I highly recommend completing the following three exercises, which aim to focus your writing on the core idea of your story. Unlike the above “Yes, and…” exercise, which welcomes an outpouring of ideas, these exercises are all about distilling your idea back to its beautiful essence.

Zeroing In—Clarify Tone and Story Objectives

Exercise #1: Elevator Pitch

Imagine: You find yourself stepping into an empty elevator at the exact same time as The Studio Head, the one person with the power to greenlight whatever project you are working on. For your purposes, this could be the head of your favorite film festival, the creative director of an advertising firm, etc. The Studio Head recognizes you and asks what you’re working on these days. You have the exact time it takes to get between elevator floors to pitch your story. So your elevator pitch has to be perfect and succinct. So much so that when you’re done pitching The Studio Head will say, “Let’s do that,” as one of you exits the elevator doors.

Here’s how you accomplish a perfect elevator pitch:

First, write down what you want the tone of your piece to be. That is, how would you want people to describe it? Should they be saying that it’s heartfelt, scary, funny, dramatic, informative? Is it quirky, melancholic, outrageous, urban, loud? Throw the best tonal words up on the wall. If you’re pitching the classic movie Jaws (for instance), maybe the word is terrifying.

Next, write down the plot of your story in one sentence. Plot is what your story is “about,” boiled down, and it should include the main conflict in the story. For the movie Jaws, it might be: “A great white shark terrorizes a small beach town until a brave group of shark hunters fights back.” Try to distill your story into that one super-clear sentence.

Third, you’ll want to identify the theme of your story. Theme is the deep message of your story that often becomes clear as a result of your plot. It is what your story is “really about,” instead of what it’s “about,” which as we said is your plot. For Jaws, what it’s really about could be “man versus nature,” “fear of the unknown,” or “human vulnerability.” What’s cool about theme is that it can be interpreted in many ways, so you can make whatever interpretation suits you as long as it makes sense to your story. A simple love story may end up really being about cowardice or about gratitude. It’s up to you to identify what your piece is “really about” deep down, so get that figured out now for your elevator pitch.

Finally, write one sentence combining the three concepts above to become your elevator pitch: “Jaws is a terrifying movie (tone) that pits a man-eating shark against a small beach town (plot) with an underlying man versus nature idea (theme).”

Exercise #2: Six-Word Story

The above exercise works beautifully for linear thinkers, those who love to communicate in a deliberate and succinct way. But what if you are more of a poet? In that case, I turn again to Hemingway and share with you the following “six-word story,” which (legend has it) he wrote on a bar napkin after being dared to write the shortest story in history:

“For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”

Amazing, right? Using only six words, Hemingway managed to tell a story with a clear tone, plot, and theme. You read those six words and think, “Oh, no! Something terrible happened to a baby! So sad! It’s about loss and…hope.”

This is not an easy one—so allow yourself to take some time on it. You may need to write five or six versions and combine them before you arrive at one that gets to the soul of your story. Focus on the key images, story turns, and lines of dialogue in your story. Remind yourself of the tone, plot, and theme that you want the audience to take away. And have some fun with it—the limitation of extreme brevity should inspire your poetic flare—go with that and see where it takes you. I assure you that when you finally write “the one,” that six-word story will encompass a clarity that even your elevator pitch lacked.

For additional examples of six-word stories, check out Larry Smith’s fabulous website sixwordmemoirs.com, where artists around the world submit their personal six-word stories daily.

Exercise #3: Tagline

Don’t go in the water — Tagline for the film Jaws (1975)

A few words. That was all it took to boil down Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film about a man-eating great white shark that terrorizes beachgoers at a small summer resort. Notice there is no mention of a shark or a beach. That’s already a visual on the poster art. “Don’t go in the water” hints at tone, plot, and theme, but leaves you with a petrifying question: Why shouldn’t I go in the water?

A tagline is a catchphrase or slogan aimed to nudge audiences to go see your film. Big corporations love a catchy tagline, and Apple’s “Think Different” and Nike’s “Just Do It” subliminally guide consumers towards their wares. For story, a tagline is equally important to establish your brand, and will further clarify its essence and meaning.

If you’re lucky, the words for your tagline may already be in your elevator pitch or six-word story. Regarding the love story we discussed previously (the girl who breaks up with the messy boy), you could focus on the untied shoelaces and go with a simple tagline like “Love, Untied,” or maybe something about the boy being messy like “First Love Can Be Messy.” The tone says “this is going to be sweet” and it’s likely going to be about love, and you get the sense that things won’t go perfectly (but won’t go horribly wrong, either). For the airline ad that we did (and I must remind you that we’re not looking for a tagline for the airline, just your piece), you may focus on the word “takeoff” and Jane’s daydream of a better seat that comes true. Maybe “Takeoff as You Imagined” or, even focusing on the spaciousness of the seat, “Dream Bigger.”

Once you nail your tagline you’ll want to write it down in large letters and tape it above your computer, as it will help guide your writing towards the true essence of your story.

Previsualization

What does it look like?

Look at you! You’ve worked out an entire creative brief for your story, plus an elevator pitch, a six-word story, and a tagline. What you’ve done is essential for you to move on to the next important step of pre-production: previsualization.

Previsualization is also referred to as visual development or concept art. Folks in the business call it previs for short. Whatever you call it, this stage helps define the look and feel of your production before it begins. Previsualization can range from simple sketches to fully rendered characters and backgrounds. Previs serves to both solidify design direction as well as establish animation techniques and methods. It gives you the opportunity to experiment with visual directions, materials, and animation.

Cody Walzel, Sketchbook art

We’ve discussed tone, plot, and theme, but how do you want your project to look and feel? Will people describe it as graphic, textural, clean, gritty, minimal, edgy, vintage? Will your project have a handmade aesthetic or will it be more simple and mechanical? Getting the look and feel right is the first step in expressing your idea visually.

Be Influenced

I’d love to tell you just to close your eyes and dream up a look and feel that’s uniquely yours. If you can, by all means do so. You may already have a firm grasp of how you want your piece to look and feel. But it’s okay to be influenced, and there should be no shame in checking out how other artists have done things in the past. I mean, you probably got into animation because you loved someone else’s work, so why shut yourself off to it now? When I tell you to jump on the Internet and watch lots of animated shorts and commercials, have fun, but remember that you are doing real work here. This is research, so be careful not to binge watch Old Spice commercials on YouTube and forget the plan (though that Terry Crews guy is hilarious!). Please spend time looking for good references; in other words, don’t set out to make something totally original without looking for influences. In order to make something truly fresh, you must study what has been done before, and that means finding those references.

Create a file on your computer called “References” and in it collect content that you like or feel is pertinent or inspirational to your piece. Maybe one film has a color treatment that appeals to you or a visual rhythm or story structure that feels right. Fill the file with lots of things you want to be influenced by. Think about what exactly draws you to each piece and let that guide the direction of your project. I recommend starting a journal that analyzes the most important images or films you’ve collected. Note the characteristics that excite you, what you want to emulate, and how these references will guide your film. Try to identify patterns in what you are affected by. These characteristics will determine the look and feel of your project.

Experiment

Oh, muse? We need you again! You’re busy? Shucks...

Oh well, we’ve got to do this one on our own. But guess what? We’ll do just fine without her because we’re learning to be more organized. Warning: It might get a little messy!

First, step away from the computer again. I firmly believe that the best experimentation happens in the physical world. After all that time Googling and collecting images and movies online, your mind will respond to the tactile. And you should get a little bit DIY here. Grab some colored pencils, cardboard, watercolors, cotton balls, sandpaper, Play-Doh®, crayons, coffee grinds…basically raid a kindergarten class and throw on a messy sweatshirt. Oh, and music, because as we all know, music helps spike creativity. So blast it—and if your neighbors threaten to call the cops, well, settle for headphones.

Now get wild: Draw with your non-dominate hand, spill coffee, melt crayons, let yourself be inventive. Think about some of the images in your piece and deconstruct them in an effort to see things from another angle. You may be surprised how freeing it is to treat design like a science experiment.

Impact Your Story with Design

Doing the kind of previsualization work that you’ve done so far will inevitably impact and evolve your story. Animators and motion artists often go back and forth between designing and refining their concept and the story beats (more on this in the next chapter). This happens because previsualization forces you to point a magnifying glass on the primary images of your story. A dark rain cloud featured in your animation to represent coming danger might work better shaped like a trombone…and suddenly you realize that the cloud doesn’t have to be the ominous rumbling kind and instead can be jazzy and cool. Your crowd of city dwellers may dance under the droplets of musical rain instead of scurrying away to avoid getting wet. Remember this example of story changing due to visual development and experimentation. And please be prepared and flexible for the design process to inform concept development. It’s an essential part of the storytelling process.

If your story does change as a result of visual development, please go back and change your elevator pitch and (if you need to) even your tagline to match.

Asset Building

What is it made of?

At this point, you are probably sketching away and creating concept art to help visualize your film. Some of this may even become assets for the final animation. Assets are all of the pieces you’ll need to begin animating. Assets could range from logos, character designs, replacement pieces, props, backgrounds, live action files, fonts, color scripts, sound effects, and more. All of the “stuff” you’ll need to go in there and make the magic happen. While you won’t be able to finalize your assets before creating your storyboard and script (which we’ll tackle in the next chapters), you can get started on asset building and creating an organizational system with well-marked files. Do this in a deliberate way so that you have satisfaction adding, subtracting, and exploring your assets. And who knows? Some assets that you’ve made here in previsualization may be the most important design directions for your future production.

Rough out a Style Frame…

To further impress upon you just how important previsualization is, I’m going to ask you to jump way ahead in the animated storytelling process and “rough out” a single style frame for your film.

Simply put, a style frame is a single image that nails the overall look and feel of your film. It’s not a finalized storyboard and doesn’t have to be anywhere near polished at this point. In the commercial world, a style frame is often the thing that wins a pitch as it helps a client understand the color palette, medium, textures, and mood that you are aiming for. With this style frame in hand you can feel confident explaining why your style choices serve the story, and no longer what your choices are, since they will be plain as day on the page.

In the case of a short film about a purple alien trying to save their planet from environmental degradation, your alien hero can be a mere outline of its six-legged form, the planet a glimmer of textural gold light, and the planet-threatening pollution a thick green muck filled with bits of garbage. The key here is that your style frame expresses the visual intention of the project you are working on.

I know this seems advanced for Chapter 1. And we’ll revisit style frames later on when I’ll encourage you to insert a couple into your storyboards. But roughing out a style frame now will force you to further visualize the intended look and feel of your film. It will also be a helpful reference as you move forward, since it will likely capture the visual spark that first inspired your story idea. Imagine a message from your younger self that reads: “Don’t forget your love of Norwegian poetry!” Even if your tastes in verse change later on, that early reminder of what lit your creative fire may provide guidance when you need it most.

So, give a rough style frame a shot and stick it on your wall. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but it should serve as a reminder of what inspires you about the film at this early stage. And who knows, you might still love Norwegian poetry…

Guess what? You’ve completed the important steps of pre-production! Pretty soon you’ll be off and running, animating through the night, headed for fame, fortune, and a shelf full of awards. And I’m sure you’ve internalized everything we’ve gone over, right?

As a reminder, here are the important steps of pre-production:

Pre-Production Recap

Write a creative brief.

Identify your Big Idea and create a storyline.

Be open, follow the Yes, and… rule.

Clarify tone and story objectives by writing an elevator pitch, six-word story, and tagline.

Determine your project’s look and feel with influences and by experimenting with design directions.

Make changes to your story based on design decisions.

Begin building and organizing your assets.

Rough out a style frame.

Assignment

Create an advertisement for a place

Now let’s try a short assignment where you get to create your own advertisement.

Using all of the steps we’ve learned in this chapter, take a stab at pre-production on an advertisement for TV. Create a 20-second ad for a place (real or imagined): a city, state, country, mall, zoo, bar, bowling alley, planet, or the like. The goal is to make it feel like somewhere people would actually want to go. The demographic you’re reaching and the reason for them wanting to go there is completely up to you.

You can flesh out your concept using the eight frames below to communicate this concept with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

2. Storytelling

Tame the limitless medium

There are lots of reasons to love telling stories using animation. But the best reason? There are no limits. You can break the rules of gravity, toss aside the space-time continuum, invent impossible worlds, and take your audience on a journey simply with shapes, sounds, and colors. Want a glorious swirling moment in human history to take place on a single blade of grass? Go for it. Want people to literally wear their hearts on their sleeves? It’s your world! Anything is possible and anything goes.

With such possibility comes the opportunity to stretch the limits of your imagination and indulge in the medium’s boundless world. But do you think your mind hasn’t the capacity to create never-before-seen worlds? Think about the last dream you had—likely it broke all sorts of laws of physics, and maybe even morality! Your mind is a deep well of the impossible, and is boundlessly creative, I assure you.

First we’ll cover a standard storytelling model, followed later by “non-narrative storytelling” in which I’ll encourage you to see for yourself how far beyond the bounds you can go: You’ll be prompted to tell two stories, one straightforward and the other like a jazz riff, a post-modern poem, a dreamscape that takes audiences on an unpredictable and even uncomfortable voyage. I will encourage you to go hog wild.

But the great challenge in creating meaningful animated stories is less about letting your imagination fly free. We know it can do that. The great challenge is more about disciplining yourself to reel it in and be intentional about your storytelling choices. Because what is most consistent among well-crafted animated stories is less how mind-bending of a world the artist created but more how much discipline they exercised in limiting their choices, especially as it pertains to storytelling. With this chapter we’ll follow the two storytelling paths that each allow for disciplined creativity.

Story Structure

In the last chapter you summoned the storytelling muse and established your narrative idea. You even whittled down your story idea into a few choice words. Now it’s time to plot that baby out and see where the story “beats” are.

You’ve Got the Beats

Beats are all of the moments or active steps that move your story forward, and “plotting them out” means laying down those beats into an order that creates the most emotional impact. Every writer’s room in America uses good old-fashioned cue cards to plot out story and establish the beats. Cue cards have a magical quality because they can be moved around, thrown out, and amended in seconds. They remind us that stories are malleable and that no card is more precious than another until they’re all in their final order. So please step away from your shiny, souped-up computer, grab a pack of three-dollar cue cards instead, and let’s get to work.

Artist’s Note: If sketching out your beats on the cue cards is more intuitive for you than writing, then by all means sketch your beats. Just make sure that the sketches are rough enough that you don’t mind throwing them out later.

On your stack of cue cards, go ahead and write down/sketch out all of the moments that move your story along until the conclusion. Each card should represent an active step or beat in the storyline, and can be both physical and/or emotional. For example, suppose you have a story of a lion hunting for food. The lion stalking prey is an active step, as is the lion feels hungry. Treat each of these beats as the same level of importance for now. And don’t worry too much if you haven’t yet figured out the specifics of how you will show these beats. Your cards might read “Lion stalks prey” and “Show that lion is hungry.” You jot these down on the card, even though you may not yet have figured out how to show the hunt and if you want your lion’s tummy to rumble or you want to express his hunger in another way. For a short animated piece, you should end up with a nice little stack, between 15 and 30 cards in total.

Three-Act Structure: Problems Solved

Now that you’ve got your stack of cue cards that encompass every element of what happens in your story, tape those on the wall in chronological order in three separate rows. These three rows represent a traditional three-act storytelling structure, which, at its most distilled, is a linear story with three basic steps or acts (and is perfectly suited to shorts): 1. A character has a problem. 2. The character works towards a solution. 3. The character solves the problem, usually in a surprising way (see the Three-Act Story Structure chart that follows). Next, create a fourth row of “additional beats.” You’ll put cards here that either don’t fit into your structure or that you simply don’t yet know what to do with (and which you may never use). Note on theme: We’ll discuss theme more below, but do keep your story’s theme in mind as you create these cue cards. Whether you incorporate that theme as you go along or you go back and supplement the cards later, theme will play an important part in the storytelling process.

These three acts form the fundamental arc of a traditional short story. Three-act structure is so engrained in us as human beings that it permeates even the most common storytelling medium: jokes. Unless your beloved uncle is telling it, you probably like your jokes to get right to the point and pay off quickly. Knock-Knock. Who’s there? Nobel? Nobel who? No bell, that’s why I knocked. I sincerely apologize for exposing you to that corny joke, but it nicely illustrates the three-act structure. Here, a character has someone knocking on their door and they don’t know who it is (Problem, Act 1). They ask who it is twice (Attempt to Solve Problem, Act 2). Finally, they learn who is knocking: a horrible punster! (Resolution, Act 3).

Note for Motion Graphics Artists

Three-act structure works for information-oriented motion graphics, too. While you may not be working with “characters” that are aiming to “solve problems,” you will likely have a “question” that “needs to be answered.” For example in a PSA, a question might be: “Breast cancer is taking more and more lives. How do we raise money for research?” The Three-Act Story Structure graph maps out three-act structure for both animation and motion graphics.

Act 1: Setting up Character and Conflict

Your first row of cue cards, Act 1, should introduce your character(s), establish what they want, and also introduce a problem standing in the way of them getting what they want. Some examples are: A stork is very late to deliver his daily quota of babies, but he’s so easily distracted that he’s never going to make the deadline. A tree needs sunlight, but it’s locked in a dark closet. A boy comes home in the cold and realizes he has lost his key. By the end of Act 1 you should have established your character’s problem and what stands in the way of them solving it. There should be the sense that solving the problem is going to take some serious effort.

Act 2: Working Towards a Solution

The next row of cards, Act 2, is where the character attempts to overcome the problem. Here your character fully commits to solving their problem and comes up against all sorts of roadblocks that make solving it seem even less likely.

I cannot tell you how much easier this step will be if you take the time to flesh out your main character with specifics. In our story of the distracted stork, what else can we know about him? What if he is vain about his moustache…and he is always hoping to find his long lost sister? How about if our stork loves Latin jazz? Suddenly, your story has many possibilities for Act 2. We know from Act 1 that our stork has only a limited amount of time to deliver his babies and so is trying hard to ward off his proclivity towards distraction. But what will distract our stork? What will be the road blocks preventing him from accomplishing his goal? Well, now that we know him a bit better, wouldn’t it seem fitting if he’s continually distracted by waxing his moustache in mirrored buildings? Maybe he keeps thinking he sees his long lost sister in passing apartments, or perhaps he even closes his eyes to enjoy some Tito Puente and loses track of time? The more specific traits you give your character, the more opportunities you will have to create organic roadblocks for them in Act 2. So please take a moment and ask some specific questions of your main character: What are their distinguishing physical attributes? What do they love? Hate? What is their driving motivation in life? Their biggest fear, and so on?

Act 3: Attaining the Big Solve

Okay, so our distracted stork has committed to solving his problem (delivering those babies on time) and is working hard towards that goal, but he keeps coming up against roadblocks that make attaining his goal nearly impossible. By the last card in Act 2 you should have the feeling that there’s a good chance the problem will NOT be solved (your character has tried almost everything). But there is still that one in a million chance…

Your third row of cards, Act 3, is the resolution. This act usually has fewer cards than Acts 1 and 2 because the character should now be facing their problem head on, winding into an unexpected resolution. In our story about the distracted stork, the deadline is almost up. He has one baby left but has accidentally locked himself into an apartment where he thought he saw his long lost sister. He’s doomed! So what’s going to happen? What will be the satisfying ending to your story? Will he magically stumble upon the parents of the last baby and deliver it in time? Will he fail to meet the deadline and be fired from his job? Will a certain jazz song on the radio (his long lost sister’s favorite) remind him of the importance of uniting family, thereby infusing him with a sudden ability to hyper-focus? Will he pry open the apartment window and fly directly to the baby’s home just in time to make the delivery before midnight and discover his long lost sister playing jazz trumpet in the backyard?

The choice of best ending rests squarely on you establishing exactly what it is you’re trying to say with your story. Creating a satisfying ending requires more information than just the beats you’ve written down under Acts 1, 2, and 3. On the board from pre-production, you should have written what your story is “about,” which is the overall plot, the beats, the scenes. But in order to create a truly satisfying ending you also need to know what your story is “really about,” or the theme. We talked about this a bit in the first chapter, but I can’t stress enough how important it is for you to establish what deep down message you’re trying to explore with your story.

In our stork-y…sorry!…story about the stork, how we end the story depends on the message we want to give or point we want to make. For instance, if our theme is optimistic, like “love conquers all,” then, indeed, it’s the moment when our stork is focused on his love for his sister that he finally finds the strength to do his job. This uplifting theme drives towards a happy ending, so you expect him to be reunited. If, however, you decide that your story has a dark perspective on life, like “love causes pain,” then our stork would fail to reach his baby-delivering deadline, be fired from his job, end up alone listening to his jazz, and forever be longing for his sister. Not great for the babies but still a satisfying ending that is enriched by theme.

Richan Li, Babble Bubble story development

But don’t stop at a great ending. As I’ve said above, theme should enrich your entire narrative. You would be well served to go back to your cards and jot down some notes on how your message can enhance each beat in your story. If you have an optimistic theme, “love conquers all,” then the neighborhood might be sunlit and colorful, surrounded by lush parks where cats purr lovingly as the stork makes his deliveries to snappy jazz. If, however, you have a dark story and your theme is “love causes pain,” then the neighborhoods where the stork delivers might be mysterious with angry dogs in the windows; the lighting would be dramatic, with muted colors; and your piece might have sad jazz music.

In the following two examples of three-act structure, please take note of the subtle details that are communicated to support each story’s theme. These details are not there by chance but exist to clue in audience members that a well-thought-out theme is being explored here! Artfully placed thematic details can work like breadcrumbs in a story, leading viewers to the big “aha moment” where theme is unveiled in full.

Three-Act Structure, Example One

Phil Borst’s one-minute short film Color Blind (see images from the film on the next page) is a great example of simple Three-Act Story structure infused with theme. When asked what his story is about, Mr. Borst said, “The underlying theme of the story is kindness and how sometimes a person in need can easily be overlooked because they are a little different.”

Act 1. Blue Square, who lives in a world of happy, rolling circles, is unhappy because he’s a square and cannot roll. Act 2. Pink Circle stops next to Blue Square and for a moment appears to have a helpful idea. This gives Blue Square hope. But just as quickly Pink Circle rolls off, leaving Blue Square alone again and even more unhappy! Act 3. But Pink Circle returns…with a bicycle pump! She pumps Blue Square with air until he becomes a circle that can roll. Blue Square is delighted and thankful for Pink Circle’s kindness. They both roll away, happy.

The plot is easy to pin down, but notice how Borst’s theme, kindness, is clearly communicated in the piece. Take Pink Circle’s size, for instance. She’s not the smallest of the circles; if she was, we might think that she’s just a child motivated more by naiveté than kindness. She’s also not the biggest of circles, which might insinuate that she’s acting on a kind of Alpha generosity. Also notice that once Pink Circle blows up Blue Square, Blue Square is actually a bit bigger than Pink Circle, not the same size or smaller. If Blue Square ended up being exactly the same size, you might think that Pink Circle was motivated to create a perfect playmate for herself—that would be about friendship and not just kindness. That idea is reinforced by the fact that Pink Circle and Blue Square don’t roll off in the same direction. They go off happily in separate directions. Borst wanted to give the impression of selfless kindness, with no strings attached or expectations. Pink Circle simply sees Blue Square struggling and wants to be kind.

Phil Borst, Color Blind

Three-Act Structure, Example Two

Heart is a United Airlines commercial directed by the brilliant animation director Jamie Caliri (see images from the film on the next pages). A master of visual storytelling, Caliri’s stories always feel more inevitable than predictable. The audience is along for the ride, always rooting for the character to reach their goal.

Act 1. Two lovers say goodbye at the airport and the woman gives the man her heart to keep while she’s gone. Her problem is that she needs to get back to this man who has her heart (literally and figuratively). Act 2. The woman flies off to accomplish the work she needs to get done before she can return to the man. It’s hard work and she feels empty; after all, her heart is missing. Act 3. The woman returns to the man who gently hands her back her heart. She is whole again and they can be together.

There are many possible themes that can be attributed to this piece, but let’s take a swing at the bat: “When you love someone you are not whole without them.” Or maybe the inverse: “Togetherness makes you whole.” It’s a sweet message but does not have to be interpreted as happy-go-lucky. You can see by the way the female character gazes longingly out the window of the airplane that Caliri sees some sadness in the notion that people are not quite whole without being next to the one they love. Notice that in the end the female character does not run headlong into the arms of her lover, elated to have her heart back. She is simply happy to see him again—more comforted than ecstatic.

Jamie Caliri, United Airlines, Heart

Nonlinear Story Structure

“A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” — Jean-Luc Godard

A good portion of this book thus far has described clear storylines with plots and characters that “make sense” and follow a linear timeline as the key to a successfully animated story. Yet some of the most compelling and prize-winning animated films live outside of those rules. Nonlinear films are not sequential, chronological, or straightforward. They follow their own set of rules, very often seem whimsical, moody, or symbolic, and use pacing in unorthodox ways. Some nonlinear stories function without a clear character or plot and yet can achieve an emotional resonance rarely captured in linear stories. Nonlinear filmmakers aren’t doing it to go against the grain. They simply want to express their Big Idea in a more symbolic way that isn’t focused upon “what happens next.”

If the notion of shedding the rules of chronological structure sounds appealing, then nonlinear storytelling may be for you.

Good news is that nonlinear offers a path for seekers of more poetic and abstract narratives. It’s freeing (and fun) to explore a Big Idea as it may have appeared in a vision or moment of epiphany. Plus, there’s a very real financial incentive to becoming a proficient nonlinear storyteller: A nice chunk of commercial animation, including music videos, broadcast graphics, and title sequences for TV and film, all explore nonlinear structures. So, while it’s often considered a bit “out there” and “artistic,” nonlinear storytelling has major industry cred, and who doesn’t like a nice paycheck once in a while?

Be warned: Though nonlinear storytelling may appear whimsical, it actually requires just as much planning and attention to detail as linear storytelling. Your story’s Big Idea must be rock solid from the get-go, because audiences won’t have the comfort of following familiar story tropes, and you won’t have the luxury of leaning on three-act story structure. You’re completely without a net. Scary, but if your core idea is as interesting as you think it is, then potentially enthralling as well.

So, how do you go about making a nonlinear story?

Build Around an Inspiration

First, identify a point of departure (such as a sound, an image, or an idea) that you find so powerful that you’re inspired to build around it. It must be something that makes so much sense to you, provides you with such a spark, that even the wildest interpretation of it would prove compelling to you. Whether it’s a song that repeats in your head, a poem you once heard that blew your mind, an image from a dream you’ve stowed away since childhood, whatever your inspiration is, think of it as a piece of art so valuable that you must build a museum around it. “Better be some gorgeous museum,” you say? Therein lies the challenge. While your inspiration may be precious, it’s not enough on its own, so it’s up to you to increase its value with added elements that are just as priceless. If your inspiration is a song, then the accompanying images must be just as splendid; if you need words to match, they’d better be pure poetry. Do not let your inspirational element do the heavy lifting in your piece. Let it inspire you to create elements that you love just as much and make you love what first inspired you even more.

Now Build a Structure

I know, I know…all this ink spilled about the freedom of nonlinear and now I’m bringing up the structure again. Look, as long as you promise to build around your Big Idea with elements equal to or above its worth, I say go to town. But if you’re curious to peek at blueprints for some of the most successful nonlinear structures, then see the chart below. You’ll find five easy-to-follow story structures that allow a tremendous amount of freedom to the nonlinear storyteller, while still providing well-defined guidelines that I discuss below with examples. So with a clear point of departure in hand, you are ready for the next step. Build your own nonlinear structure, or use one of the classic nonlinear structures below.

Nonlinear Structure #1: Book Ending

This one is pretty fun. Imagine a story that must begin and end at the exact same place (or on the same image) but can go absolutely anywhere in between. The possibilities for that “middle” are limitless. But the key to a successfully book ended short is that the “middle” takes viewers on a journey, and when they return to that final repeated image there’s a deeper (or at least different) meaning to it.

For character-based films, a good book ending either leaves the subject changed in some indelible way or gives the audience a deep insight into the character or situation. A wonderful example of book ending is The Pearce Sisters, directed by Luis Cook for Aardman Animations. This beautifully ugly, dark comedy features two spinsters who spice up their bleak existence in the most gruesome and unexpected ways. At the beginning, two thick weathered hands release a fly on a desolate beach and watch it buzz away. The image begs the questions, “How was the fly caught and why was it released?” The ending shows the same two hands releasing a lucky fly. The book ending structure organizes a peak into their twisted world where smoked fish, death, and zombie tea parties are part of daily life. What is so effective about the book end structure here is that the viewer is forced to reexamine their initial reaction to the first image. What once was a kind person saving a fly is now a twisted monster engaged in a dark ritual.

If you are using the book end structure for motion graphics, featuring shapes and objects and no real “characters,” it is equally important that the middle journey supplies new information about the image that begins and then ends the piece. Think of the middle “journey” as a time to excite, inform, and surprise your viewer about the meaning of that beginning and ending image. The “middle” can happen in a split second or a thousand years and can go in infinite different directions. What’s most important is that the journey from one end of the “book” to the other is meaningful and emotionally transformative.

The iconic title sequence for HBO’s Game of Thrones is a wonderful example of this. It begins and ends on a floating (and fiery) astrological instrument on which a story of dragons and war seems to be carved. The camera then pans away to take viewers on a journey of seven “kingdoms” on a map, where presumably the story carved on the fiery astrological instrument takes place. This simple book end structure helps organize a lot of information about time and place, and successfully brands the Game of Thrones franchise as a mythical and dramatic story, engorged by magic and fire. You look at the astrological instrument differently when it returns to view at the end, and you are now aware that it holds narrative clues just waiting to be unpacked.

Nonlinear Structure #2: the Beaded Necklace

If you’re very lucky (and keep your ears peeled) you will discover an element of sound that is so inspiring and so potent that you’ll want to string it through your entire animation as the one guiding constant. That piece of music, sound, or voiceover can be the “string” in a necklace whose beads may be anything: misshapen, mismatched, or well…totally weird.

Louis Morton’s award-winning film Passer Passer is an example of the beaded necklace done just right. The film blew me away when I first encountered it, not that I could describe exactly what it was about. But what I could describe, quite effortlessly, was the soundtrack. It’s an urban soundscape of honking and shuffling and churning metal and concrete—a cacophony of people and rhythms with great emotional power. Notice when Morton describes his film how key his inspiration element was to its creation: “Passer is inspired by the city symphony documentary films of the 1920s. My goal was to capture the atmosphere of a city by recording its sounds and creating an imagined world inspired by those sounds. It’s a playful look at the relationship between people and their built environment.” And while the structure in his film does seem chaotic, listen to how intentional Morton is when he describes the structural aspects of the film: “I wanted the viewer to pass through one sound environment to the next until all the sounds return at the end. In many ways the film was based more on the structure of a song than on a traditional narrative film structure.”

Take a look at Passer Passer online. You may decide that your soundtrack is strong enough to provide a consistency through which your animation can run free. If that’s the case, the beaded necklace may just be your jam.

Louis Morton, Passer Passer

Nonlinear Structure #3: the Countdown

Throw a water balloon at your teacher and you know exactly what’s going to happen. Even as the balloon careens in slow motion through the air, it’s only a matter of time until the balloon meets its target and explodes, wetting the teacher’s outfit and causing them to send you straight to detention.

The countdown is all about establishing an inevitable climax up near the top, and then building rhythmically towards that climax. The constant build should become more intense as you arrive closer to the end, until when the end (finally) happens, seeing the thing you’ve been waiting for brings a wave of satisfaction. To achieve this requires intensifying all of the elements at your disposal (sound, color, movement, etc.) at a consistent pace, even if that pace is either very slow or very fast. What matters is that the audience is clued in to the countdown and can mentally follow the pacing to what will surely be a glorious end.

A perfect (and quite literal!) example is Celine Desrumaux’s short film Countdown. It becomes clear very early on that a spaceship is going to blast off but that a whole bunch of activity has to take place before that can happen. We start at night in an empty control room where computers are booting themselves up. Soon morning arrives, there is more action, we see the first astronaut arrive, then more astronauts who ride up an elevator and enter the spaceship. Music, imagery, and pacing intensifies as the computers get more active and call for liftoff, prompting the shuttle to blast off into the sky and then finally to outer space. From the start we know what’s going to happen, and yet the rising intensity makes the sight of that shuttle finally reaching space seem unexpectedly majestic.

Though the countdown structure might seem as “linear” as can be, I added it to this section because countdown films thrive with experimentation and abstraction. Anything goes in this structure, just so long as you can keep an intensifying build toward the mind-blowing climax.

Nonlinear Structure #4: the Puzzle

The puzzle is one of my favorite nonlinear story structures since it is so interactive. The audience gets to try to solve a riddle while watching a film, and there is “play along” as each new piece of information is revealed. When all becomes clear and the last puzzle piece is placed, there is often a big “a-ha” moment.

The Maker by Christopher Kezelos is truly one of my favorite films. It is the story of an adorable and lonely creature who (we believe) is trying to build a companion for himself before the time in an hourglass expires. Why there is an hourglass timing him, we don’t know. Why he seems baffled by the book of instructions in his hand, we can only imagine. But we watch as he works feverishly—sculpting, sewing, and then finally playing music for his lifeless creation—until she comes to life. They have a beautiful moment together where they hug, but as the hourglass expires he gives her the book of instructions and then—poof—he disintegrates into thin air. The female creature stands there alone and baffled for a moment until the hourglass magically flips, and it dawns on her that she has a job to do before the hourglass ends and her short and beautiful life expires along with it.

The ending made me gasp, and was hopeful and sad at the same time. The creature, the book, the hourglass, all finally made sense, but not until the last possible second of the film. Says Kezelos, “The Maker explores the preciousness of our moments on earth, the short time we have with loved ones and the enjoyment of one’s life’s work and purpose.” And incidentally, if after watching The Maker you scratch your head and think, “Isn’t this also a book end structure?” Why, yes it is! Many great films successfully implement multiple structures!

As with The Maker, puzzle films work well with characters who can contol how much information you get (and when) with their actions. But puzzle structure also works well with visually-driven motion graphics work, where a larger graphic element is not fully presented until all of the smaller pieces assemble. Logo animation and broadcast graphics often use the puzzle structure as a way to keep viewers’ eyes peeled and interacting with the “suspenseful” merging of images.

Christopher Kezelos, The Maker

One of my favorite examples of the puzzle structure in motion graphics is the PSA Water and Ink by BDDP Unlimited and Solidarités International. The ad was commissioned to build awareness about the number of deaths caused by undrinkable water. At first, we only see an artist’s hand carefully painting faint images using water on a page, but this is followed by drops of black ink which almost magically begin to form images in the water. A child’s face with sad eyes. Two blackbirds—possibly crows or ravens. And then a series of crosses that we come to understand is a graveyard. With super-close camera moves, the viewer becomes aware that the black ink on the page resembles dirty water—it flows ominously downwards and then puddles before revealing the final image: a human skull. The connection between the dirty water and death unwraps slowly but feels like a bludgeon of truth once the final image forms. By revealing information piece by piece like a puzzle, the message of Water and Ink hits so much harder than if the meaning of the images were revealed all at once.

Nonlinear Structure #5: High Concept

High concept films have a basic premise that is so unforgettably strong and clear that it drives all other elements of the film. Even as great characters, brilliant plot twists, and gorgeous sets are added, they serve that initial Big Idea that was so easy to explain in pitch form. High concept films are sometimes undervalued for their sheer simplicity in concept, but often achieve high-brow brilliance since filmmakers are so freed up to experiment within the safe bounds of a solid premise.

Oscar-nominated short film A Single Life by Job, Joris & Marieke has a nice, high concept premise: A mysterious vinyl record allows a woman to travel through time.

Its clear concept is only one of the things that makes A Single Life so special. Along with wonderful character design and world building, it is the way that A Single Life plays with time, practically thumbing its nose at the notion that there should exist any difference between linear and nonlinear structure. The film bounces around in time as the vinyl record skips, jumping from the main character’s current single life forward to her pregnancy, back to her childhood, and forward again to her dotage and death, in mere seconds. The time-travelling rules of the world are fully realized. And though it all seems a bit silly while it’s happening, the depth of the film’s high concept is revealed as anything but. It’s a film about a vinyl record that allows you to time travel…but it’s also about life and death!

Job, Joris & Marieke, A Single Life

If you’ve come up with an idea for animated film that is so succinct in its premise that people can already visualize it, then you may be working on a high concept film. While it may be tempting to rest on the laurels of that easy-to-pitch idea, consider it an opportunity to elevate your story through experimentation, forcing viewers to second guess just how “simple” your film is after all.

Storytelling Recap

Three-Act Structure

Create the beats.

Build the story’s arc.

Act 1: Problem

Act 2: Attempt to solve it

Act 3: Resolution

Nonlinear Structure

Build around an inspiration.

Build a structure.

Use a known structure.

Book Ending

The Beaded Necklace

The Countdown

The Puzzle

High Concept

Assignment

Linear and nonlinear storytelling

Grab your sketchbook and, using the steps we’ve learned in this chapter, tell two stories about a favorite mode of transportation, one using linear three-act storytelling and another using one of the five nonlinear structures outlined in this chapter. For both structures, please identify your theme first so that you can add details to your stories that support it.

Story Starters

Keep a Prolific Story Journal

When it comes to creating animated stories, generating lots of ideas is key. With a little practice, you’ll no longer be worried if your “perfect idea” isn’t working because you’ll have five more ready to go.

The first step is to get yourself a blank journal. Carry it with you and write and draw in it compulsively. Fill it with meandering thoughts, personal experiences, snippets you eavesdrop waiting for the train, and narrative threads. Jot down embarrassing questions, odd themes, fantasies, nonsense, and so on. Don’t worry if your notes are silly, crazy, or even cliché. Once a week, go through your journal and circle what catches your eye. Look for repetitive and provocative ideas that keep coming up and connections that spark new thoughts. Animated stories often come from mashing two concepts that don’t seem to fit together, so pair that question you wrote about caveman chefs with your haiku on Jell-O®—there just may be story gold there!

Once you’ve found something that interests you, close your eyes and think. Your mind loves to create narratives—to solve narrative puzzles—so if you commit to focusing on only your cave dwelling chef and Jell-O rhyme for long enough, I assure you that a story kernel will appear, no matter how disturbing that story kernel may be. Now type that morphing idea into a document titled Story Ideas, and move on to the next. After a few weeks, you’ll be surprised at the number of story kernels you have on your list. So many that you probably won’t care if a couple don’t work out.

Story Idea . . . Meet Classic Plot

Ideally, your list of story ideas is so groundbreaking that no stale, old structure could possibly contain them. Believe me, nothing would make me happier than if you discovered some new, brilliant way to tell stories! But in the meantime, experimenting with classic storytelling paradigms (the ones that human beings have been using since the dawn of time) never hurt anyone. You might even find it liberating.

3. Unlocking Your Story

Alternative Forms for free thinkers

We’ve reached a crucial red-alert stage of the story process. Next chapter you’ll begin storyboarding—so whether you’re creating a title sequence, an informational video, or a festival film, etc., it’s about time for you to finalize the basic elements of your story, including plot, characters, and storyline. If you’ve followed the steps of the previous chapters, you’re likely more than ready to move forward. If this is the case, then consider this chapter a way to make moving forward even easier. It will be kind of like doing yoga to prep for a football game—your muscles (and mind) will be primed for the big game in a different way than you’re used to, and that may make all the difference as you stride towards the end zone.

On the other hand, if your story still isn’t coming out to play, below are some of the best alternative narrative exercises I’ve encountered in my many years in animation. Follow them and you may discover that your conflict isn’t as prominent as it should be, or that your story begins in the wrong place, or that you really haven’t identified what makes your character tick. Give these exercises a spin and I assure you that at least one will provide the story epiphany you’ve been waiting for, gearing you up for the next step in animated storytelling.

Once you’ve completed the narrative exercises, read on because I go deep into describing one of my favorite kinds of animation: experimental. Whether or not you think your current film may be experimental, please read this section. The lessons here will deepen your understanding of the medium and will enrich your voice as a storyteller. I clarify what experimental animation is for animated storytelling and outline six different methods for you to consider. It just may be the language you’ve been wanting to speak all along…

So, let’s get rolling. Part 1 will shake up your narrative story and Part 2 will introduce the wonders of the experimental form in all its glory, replete with tools you’ll need to create your own form and examples of wonderful experimental films to inspire.

Part 1: The Narrative Form

Exercise #1 Clear Conflict, Reveal It Early

British espionage novelist John le Carré said it best: “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.”

Whether a conflict is external (That cat is stealing my mat!) or internal (That cat is stealing my heart!), conflict provokes action. What will the cat do that is being robbed of their mat? What about the cat who is being robbed of their heart (a.k.a., falling in love)? Already it’s intriguing. If your story feels overly complicated, ask yourself, “Is the conflict obvious enough here?” and also, “How might I reveal the conflict earlier in the story?”

You may protest: “But my film is about the beauty of Alaska. Where’s the conflict there?” Plenty, if you explore what might threaten that beauty. Over-fishing? Climate change? Merely establishing an antagonist to your precious subject will make it feel even more precious, and suddenly your story becomes dramatic as well: “A greedy fishing fleet threatens to alter the beauty of Alaska through over-fishing.” Conflict! High drama! Don’t worry, your film will still be sharply focused on the natural beauty of Alaska, but with a conflict at the top, your audience will have a narrative worth following.

Exercise #2 Start Later

One of the most prevalent mistakes I see in early story development is when a director wants to fit too much backstory and unnecessary scenes into a story. They introduce too many ideas before the real action or “interesting stuff” begins. By the time the good stuff starts, the audience is feeling like, “C’mon, TMI!” In this case, the director has spent endless hours fine-tuning the backstory and cannot possibly fathom losing any part of it. “How will audiences possibly understand my story about a little girl who is going on a journey to find her lost dog if they don’t see the day her grandmother died and left the dog to her in her will, or when the dog allowed the little girl to dress her up in doll clothes as they ate biscuits from tea cups?” In this case, the director’s storyboards might show the young girl crying at the grandmother’s funeral, then later in her room consoled receiving the puppy, and then playing dress-up at the doggy tea party.

But what if we skipped all the set up and just began the story at the moment the girl leaves her house with a flashlight, a big backpack on her shoulders, and a photo of her dog clutched tightly to her heart? This first image lets the audience know the dog is so meaningful to the little girl that she’s willing to spend many days searching until she finds her beloved companion. Suddenly we are right in the action and the conflict. The endearing grandma backstory can be filled in with flashbacks or dialogue later on, if necessary.

So be brutal. Rip the Band-Aid® off. Lay your story cards out on the floor and try losing as many of the early ones as you can bear. Could your real story begin in what is currently the middle? Even later than that? If so, lose everything that precedes that moment, and bring audiences in when conflict propels your story forward. And rest assured, all of the work you put into backstory is not lost—it will only enrich the fabric of your film, even if it all doesn’t show up on screen.

Exercise #3 Biggest Secret

The most fruitful writing exercise I’ve ever come across is when a teacher asked the class to follow a stranger around for an hour and try to figure out their secret. Creepy, right? I followed a man who was bundled up in snow pants, big boots, gloves, and a ski mask. Sure, it was a cold day, but he was definitely overdressed. I followed him for a few blocks until we reached a public library. The man entered and made a beeline for the info desk. He took off his mask but kept on his gloves as he waited for the librarian. When it was his turn, the man approached the librarian and rattled off a series of questions that he had written down on small scraps of paper. He seemed a bit stressed, and whatever was written on those scraps was clearly important to him. The librarian led the man along the aisles and helped him collect the four or five books on his list. The man kept his snow gloves on the entire time and didn’t even take them off when it was time to sign out the books.

When the man left the library (in a bit of a hurry) my hour was up, so I stopped my spying and got to the writing assignment. I decided that the man had a big problem: His hands had become magnetic! Metals now stuck to his fingers, and the problem was quickly spreading to his entire body. He tried to research what his condition might be online but the magnetization in his hands made his computer go haywire. His only choice was to head to the local library in search of answers!

I’m the first to admit that my imagination took a turn toward the fantastic, and this was probably just an overdressed dude with cold hands looking for some winter reading. But he had become my character, and I had discovered his secret, and therefore I could take my story anywhere I wanted. I’d already come up with a dozen different scenarios that might play out for my magnetic man. Some were dangerous, some hilarious, but all derived from this simple exercise.

So, follow your character around for a while. Spy on them. And ask this simple question: What is your character’s secret? And feel free to take the questioning a step further. What is your character’s biggest fear? What is the one thing they can’t live without? Who is their best friend? Worst enemy, etc.? Take these and other questions out for a spin as you spy on your character and try to gain a deeper understanding of their inner workings and motivations. This information will help you propel them forward into more interesting stories.

Exercise #4 Get Graph-y

While Kurt Vonnegut is best known for his satirical novels (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, etc.), his rejected anthropology master’s thesis on “The Shapes of Stories” may be his greatest gift to storytellers. Vonnegut’s thesis proposal was a series of graphs that illustrated the plots of what he claimed to be the most popular types of stories. He described these stories to fit into three archetypal categories: “Man in Hole” (but it doesn’t have to be a man or a hole, just a character who encounters trouble and then gets out of it); “Boy Meets Girl” (but it doesn’t have to be a boy meeting a girl, just a character who finds something they treasure, loses it, and then gets it back), and finally “Cinderella” (but it doesn’t have to be Cinderella meeting her Prince, but a character whose life is in the dumps, who is given a chance to experience happiness, must then retreat from that happiness, all before gaining it back at the last moment).

Maya Eilam, The Shapes of Stories, a Kurt Vonnegut Infographic

He drew up graphs (beautifully redesigned on the previous page by Maya Eilam) that expressed those stories on a horizontal “Beginning-to-End” axis and a vertical or “Ill Fortune-to-Great Fortune” axis. Said Vonnegut: “It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.”

These graphs may indeed seem over-simplistic, but if you’ve read any of Vonnegut’s work you know that he was anything but a clichéd writer. His stories seemed to have their own shape entirely, and yet he would probably argue that all fell into the shape of one of these simple graphs. His point was that stories must travel along a dramatic timeline, where conflict (either internal or external) triggers action and leads characters on emotional rollercoasters that may lead them on a wild journey, even if they end up in the very place they began.

Now that your story has clear and prominent conflicts, begins at the right place, and features characters with interesting secrets to motivate them (see Exercises #1–3), it should be easy to draw the arc of your story into one of Vonnegut’s graphs. Hopefully, just seeing that arc laid out visually will give you a better perspective on how your protagonist is reacting to their conflict. If your arc seems too flat, then you may want to adjust the structure of your story for increased drama. Perhaps nudging your story to match one of Vonnegut’s “classic story arcs” will guide you toward a stronger and more dramatic story. According to Vonnegut, these are shapes of stories that “people just can’t get enough of.” So why not give it a try?

Part 2: The Experimental Form

Okay, we’ve just completed a full body workout on narrative story. But what if the story that you want to tell isn’t really narrative at all. How can you know if you want to make an experimental film that lives outside the narrative or nonlinear structures you’ve been following so far in this book?

Let’s start by answering a few questions: When you think about the story you want to tell, do the images in your head veer toward dream-like, abstract, or surreal? Does your need to experiment with forms and materials seem to be ruling your storytelling process? Do you find the prospect of exploring new territory in terms of story structure especially exciting when it comes to your story?

If you said yes to any of these questions, then you may indeed be making an experimental film! This is exciting, as some of my favorite animated films are experimental and many of the big prize-winners at the festivals are, too.

Note for Motion Graphics

Historically, title sequences for film and television (in particular) have been a breeding ground for experimentation and nonlinear storytelling. Title designers are known to value a process-oriented approach, often sculpting the direction of their sequence as they try out new techniques and story structures. If you are interested in creating motion graphics for film and television, I encourage you to pay close attention to the tools in this chapter.

Realizing that you are (or might be at some point) making an experimental film is a big step. It gives you the freedom to shed many of the rules of traditional structure and focus on the powerful vision (or visions) that motivated you to make a film in the first place. As experimental animator and educator Mike Enright describes the experimental process: “Filmmakers may begin with a memory or vision that is so profound that it must manifest, and that’s where the process starts—before even laying out structure.” Enright puts materials and discovery of techniques at the forefront of his process, leaving behind much of the usual pre-production methodology. He gathers and edits scenes, plays with images and ideas, and lets himself dig around for inspiration and truth, even if it feels uncomfortable. Robert Lyons (another tremendously talented experimental filmmaker) identifies “discomfort” as a key part of his method: “It is a process of discovery, so you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable and willing to accept failure. Not everything is going to work, but magic happens when you are willing to accept the possibility of failure.” I particularly like Lyons’ quote because it is an encouragement baked into a warning: As an experimental filmmaker you are going on a road trip without a map, and while getting to your destination may be time-consuming and even frustrating at times, you will be forging your own path, and that will make all the difference.

Below, I’ve laid out six unique types of experimental animation to guide and inspire you. I’ve done my best to explain the concepts and how you might approach them with your own story, and I have curated a list of films that I urge you to watch online, since these films have achieved success in that specialized category of experimental film.

If you find that your film is experimental in nature, then I trust that one of the concepts here will provide you with the spark you’ve been waiting for and will set you on the road to making your experimental film. My only advice (whichever path you may choose) is to really give yourself to the process, kind of the way a scientist might obsess over his next big discovery. Says animation tastemaker and artistic director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival Chris Robinson: “Experimental animation implies experimentation, experimentation implies science. A scientist enters the lab with a question and when he leaves, he hopes to have an answer.”

Explore variables, search for your truth, and play around until it feels just right. If you commit to the hard work of experimentation, what will emerge may be like nothing anyone has seen, a discovery of sorts. What’s even better, it will be all yours, and that’s what will make it so magical.

Please Note

There are infinite ways to approach the experimental animated film. It will take time to explore your own process, so be prepared for a lot of gathering and editing. Part of the excitement lies in taking risks and setting out on a journey towards an unpredictable outcome. Embrace the process, be scientific, and your experimental film will flourish.

Experimental Form #1 Visual Music

If the inception of your story idea came while you were listening to a piece of music and you thought, “This song must be in my film,” then you may want to consider making that song the subject of your film. Visual music is a form of experimental animation that attempts to translate the sounds and rhythms of music into moving images, shapes, and colors. Although you may be tempted to watch lots of animated music videos to see how others have been inspired by music, the majority of those videos aim for a more literal representation of lyrics and are highly concerned with band image for popular consumption. Visual music, on the other hand, focuses on presenting images that bring the sound and rhythms of the song to life in your mind, literally, to create a visual rendition or interpretation of the music.

Fortunately, this type of experimental animation has a long history of brilliant, award-winning films such as Len Lye’s 1958 Free Radicals and Norman McLaren’s 1941 Boogie-Doodle, both great examples of this method. Boogie-Doodle tells a sublime visual story around a single song, the “Boogie” as played by Albert Ammons and the “Doodle” as drawn and animated by Norman McLaren. These films are unique because while watching, you get the sense that the music and its animated visualization are so perfectly in sync that they are actually one form. The music sounds exactly as the animation looks, and the animation looks exactly as the music sounds. The two forms are so fused that they become one cohesive and seamless new piece of art.

If music has been guiding your story idea all along, then focusing entirely upon bringing that piece of music to life may provide the direction and structure you’ve been looking for. You can interpret the sound however you choose; just be sure to make the imagery and movement in direct response to the mood and structure found in that piece of music.

Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata, Negative Space

Experimental Form #2 Pure Poetry

Paying homage to verse in animation has led to some of the medium’s most memorable animated shorts. Much like with visual music, creating animation from prose is really about your interpretation of the original piece of writing. You can treat the writing literally and illustrate the images mentioned directly in the work or set out to interpret an entirely new meaning of the words with your images. Whether a poem, haiku, limerick rhyme, or something you read or wrote, many directors find it extremely liberating to come to their film with a piece of writing to loosely call a “script.” Haikus, limericks, or even iambic pentameter can be especially helpful, as they also come with rules regarding structure and timing.

If you choose this experimental method, I must caution you not to fall back on the safety of someone else’s words. Whether using prose or more free form genres like poetry and short stories, use the writing as more of a point of departure, and take the time to select the portions that inspire you and then allow yourself license to interpret them visually. You should be “rewriting” or at least “editing” the words that first inspired you with how you construct your film. The writing itself will only be truly enhanced when you make it your own by personal interpretation.

Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata, Negative Space

Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata’s moving stop motion short Negative Space (2017) is adapted from a poem by Ron Koertge and is a wonderful example of how to adapt a poem for an animated short. Porter said of making the film, “Because Ron’s poem is so minimal—only 150 words—we felt that there was enough space to bring our personal experiences to the story with visual metaphor and subtext. We’re both skeptical of adaptations that feel too literal and wanted to make sure that we had strong reasons for transforming the poem into something else.”

Also check out some classics including Jan Švankmajer’s 1971 surrealist film, Jabberwocky, based loosely on the poem by Lewis Carroll, or UPA’s 1953 interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart, and Bruce Alcock’s 2005 take on Al Purdy’s poem, At the Quinte Hotel. There are so many wonderful and mind-blowing experimental films based on poetry because it is such a rich point of departure for the animated short.

Experimental Form #3 Repetition/Evolution

There’s something uniquely fulfilling about watching a sequence of images cycle over and over, evolve within that pattern, and then resolve in a quick and surprising way. This cycle in its longer animated form is referred to as repetition/evolution. Films using this form feature well-designed cycles that repeat over and over and then slowly change and evolve. It is within the evolution where the magic happens. Images can morph like a surrealist painting on a dime, you can introduce and destroy new characters in milliseconds, and you can pull audiences into a world of fairies only to reveal the fiery pit of hell within a fairy’s smile. Often repetition/evolution utilizes cutouts designed as outlandish characters so that the audience has something quirky to fixate on, but it is equally effective with shapes and abstract forms. The key to repetition/evolution lies in setting up a predictable repetition of movement for your primary figures so that viewers can follow the logic of your world even as things might evolve into lunacy.

Cyriak Harris, Cirrus by Bonobo, Music Video stills

Consider repetition/evolution guru UK animator Cyriak Harris, or simply “cyriak” as he is known to his million-plus YouTube followers. Cyriak explains his process as “improvisation on a glacial timescale.” For his 2011 film Welcome to Kitty City, which features an adorable cat blob gently bouncing along a suburban cityscape as all feline hell breaks loose around it, cyriak says, “I’m a big fan of mathematics and geometry, particularly when it is misused to warp our perception of reality. A lot of my videos are basically about creating chaos from order, or finding the order within chaos.”

What’s wild about cyriak’s films and is consistent in the best of repetition/evolution is that when you get past all the wonderful chaos and whimsy and reach the end, for some reason, it just all makes sense. Cyriak’s repetition/evolution creates a predictable percussion for the images to evolve within that creates a narrative feel. Match that with his knack for narrative type of climax and you’ve got what is both near-hallucinatory journey and deeply satisfying.

Experimental Form #4 Continuity/Diversity

If you’re digging the notion of repetition/evolution, you may also enjoy continuity/diversity, a similar form but different in one important way. Continuity/diversity establishes a single predictable element that never changes or evolves. A turbulent sea of change can swirl around it, but as long as that original element is kept steady and predictable, the audience will stick with the story. Check out Zbigniew Rybczynski’s classic film Tango (1981). Tango is comprised of a single static shot of a room with four entry (or exit) points. A character enters this empty room, performs an action, and then exits. This repeats as new characters enter and exit. In all, thirty-six characters move in and out of the space without any intersection. The continuity is clearly the one room, one shot, one perspective, straight ahead. The diversity is the many characters who enter and then vacate the space. It is a fascinating, chaotic, and hypnotic film, a parable of the human existence, a comment on impermanence, and a great use of the continuity/diversity experimental form.

Experimental Form #5 Anthology

Sometimes, you never figure out the single story you want to tell, but are positive, beyond any doubt, of the theme that you want to explore. That theme creates a geyser of ideas in your brain, but not only can you not choose just one idea to go with, you know that settling with only one story would be giving your big idea the short end of the stick. You’re in luck. The anthology form gives you ways to explore your theme, in as many tangents as you desire, so long as the thread holding it all together is exploring that theme.

As an example, think of it as a collection of short stories about first love: one story may be a sad tale about first love, the next an epic love story that spans centuries and continents, the next a comedic poem about being in “the friend zone.” Picking up a book, you wouldn’t expect the stories to be similar in tone, style, or even moral point of view, and your work doesn’t have to either. So long as it is trying to find some truth in its subject matter, you’re along for the ride. Jane Campion’s live action short Passionless Moments (1983) is a great example of an anthology short. The film opens with the narration: “There are one million passionless moments in your neighborhood; each has a fragile presence which fades as it forms.” Then, the visuals delicately explore a variety of “passionless moments,” from the banal to the tender to the tragic and everything in between.

Réka Bucsi’s 2014 prize-winning animated short Symphony No. 42 is another wonderful example of an anthology film. The short features forty-two loosely connected vignettes exploring the recurring theme of “irrational connections between humans and nature.” When asked how she came up with the story, Busci said, “I was writing little things down all the time and sat down at some point with this collection of ideas and emotions and started to build a cohesive system around them…in the course of the development a more concrete theme was unfolding, and the scenes started to get arranged around it.” Please find this one online if you are interested in trying your hand at an anthology film; it’s a masterpiece.

Réka Bucsi, Symphony No. 42

Linda Heller, INSTANTMOVIE

Experimental Form #6 Cut It Out & Play!

Cutout aficionado Terry Gilliam said, “The whole point of animation to me is to tell a story, make a joke, express an idea. The technique itself doesn’t really matter. Whatever works is the thing to use.”

Gilliam’s experimental technique, cutout animation, which was put to famous use in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, was to create paper cutouts of his characters (and objects), and then just literally play with them in front of a camera. The process allowed him to be wildly spontaneous and whimsical, and the cutout form he used added a comic feel to everything he created.

So as the final experimental form that we will explore, I give you: hands-on play! The muse loves it when you shove the computer aside and get messy. For many, story inspiration only comes once you start physically moving objects around. A simple exercise of “cut out and play” will get things going. Draw up the primary images of your story, the things that you can’t live without. Now cut them out and place all of those objects on a table before you. There’s a direct energy and intuition that only comes when you move things around with your hands in real time.

Perhaps the characters and elements that you’re already working with might benefit from this exercise. Relationships may emerge between the elements, as will new story ideas. As you move things around, shoot photos of different layouts for reference—you may capture gold and won’t want to lose it!

Check out Linda Heller’s terrific INSTANTMOVIE (1978) at left. Heller supplies all that you need to create an animated film, prepared and ready to cut out, color, and animate!

Unlocking Your Story Recap

Explore Narrative Exercises.

Clear Conflict, Reveal It Early

Start Later

Biggest Secret

Get Graph-y

Explore Experimental Forms.

Visual Music

Pure Poetry

Repetition/Evolution

Continuity/Diversity

Anthology

Cut It Out & Play

Assignment

Ten cards

The ten-card exercise is truly one of my favorites. I’ve seen it in action, helping every kind of storyteller work through problematic stories and find clarity. The steps may frustrate you a bit at first, but if you can push through and learn this process, you’ll use it for the rest of your career.

Step 1 Distill your story beats. Start with ten blank index cards. Write the ten most essential story beats on the front of them. Try your best to tell your story with only ten beats for now. On the back of each card, draw the scene that best illustrates the beat. The goal here: Distill your story down to ten beats and ten important images or moments.

Step 2 Ask yourself: Are the cards in the right order? I know this sounds like a crazy next step. Sometimes when a story is in this fetal stage, moving the cards around may reveal new insights. Take a moment to investigate if any scenes would work better in a different order. Or decide if you had it right to begin with.

Step 3 Add cards. If you are excited with your ten story beats and feel ready to continue adding story beats, go for it. Many artists see gaps in their story and realize what needs to be expanded. Add up to ten more cards to fill in what’s missing. After you add cards, lay them on the floor again and go back to Step 2 with your revised set of cards.

If you feel uneasy about your story and want to rethink it, or if you’re feeling pretty good but realize it might benefit from some editing, go on to Step 4. Otherwise you can move ahead to the next chapter.

Step 4 Cut cards. When a director is unsure of their story cards, I ask, “What cards do you find most interesting? Which do you want to keep?” They often say that there are only two or three beats worth saving! In other words, they were trying to tell too big of a story and now have an epiphany about the most interesting part of their story. So, remove the cards that aren’t working and replace them with blank ones. This is your chance to really edit and rework your story. I encourage you to throw away up to eight of your ten cards. The most exciting thing about this exercise? By boiling down those story beats, you can identify what you really love and take your story in a new direction. There’s no shame in reworking an idea and refocusing on the thing that sparked your interest in the first place!

Step 5 Repeat Steps 2–4 until you are happy with your story. Then move on to Chapter 4, “Storyboarding.”

4. Storyboarding

Build your visual script

“At our studio we don’t write our stories, we draw them.”

—Walt Disney

Walt Disney is known for many important innovations in the field of animation and motion graphics. But perhaps his most useful contribution came in the 1930s when he decided to pin up a series of his rough sketches in sequence to help explain a story idea to his team. Like many great innovations, the decision came out of necessity—animation is an expensive and time-consuming process in which a single misstep can be very costly. Being able to solidify story before animating could potentially save a fledgling animation studio like Disney’s more than a few bucks. Plus, the method suited Mr. Disney’s natural showmanship. He used the visual aid of his sketches to bring the full scope of his ideas to life, including his thoughts on timing, staging, framing, continuity, and transitions. He would use these sketches to get people excited—from his team of artists to potential investors. The process became essential at Disney, and within ten years live-action studios caught on as well, making storyboarding as ubiquitous as scripts in Hollywood backlots.

Storyboarding is your opportunity to work out the visual elements that best suit your story. It can help you determine most aspects of your animated piece before moving a single pixel. Boarding saves time and money and can help get people excited about your project before it’s made. Simply put, the better your storyboard, the more likely you are to achieve success with your project.

Please Note

There are just as many approaches to storyboarding as there are for storytelling. Some artists begin with a finished written script and “transcribe” it to pictures. Others start with only a rough outline and do the “writing” in the storyboard process. I encourage you to experiment and find what method works best for you!

I’ll cover the basics of storyboarding first and then continue on with some important concepts you’ll need to make your storyboard complete and ready for animatics. The entire process is organic; let your storyboarding evolve gradually from simple to more complex.

Build the Storyboard

As you begin the process of storyboarding, you’re creating individual frames of the action from your story beats. Start out rough and gradually add the needed details. This process ensures the story is first understandable and then allows you to add the nuances that make the story more complex and interesting.

Thumbnailing

Thumbnails are the first rough sketches of your storyboards. They help you work out the sequencing of your “shots” and provide an opportunity to establish important aspects of shot composition, framing, staging, and transitions. Your thumbnail drawings should be rough—stick figures are just fine. Use Post-it Notes as well—they’re re-positionable and purposefully limit the amount of detail you can add to your drawing. Approach thumbnailing as the experimentation phase of storyboarding and keep a wastebasket nearby—you’re going to be lobbing a lot of hook shots in that general direction.

Thumbnails don’t need a lot of detail to be effective. Good thumbnail drawings show only the most essential information.

Richard Borge, Storyboard art

Says professor and story artist Greg Araya, “A storyboard’s first job is to read quickly and clearly, not to be polished art. You’ll discard or rework panels all the time, so don’t invest too much into them. Don’t keep a panel if it isn’t working for your story, even if it’s the best drawing in your board.”

Thumbnail Revisions

Once you’ve drawn up your thumbnail sketches, slap them up on the wall in sequence and get ready for some brutal revisions. Do the shots make sense? Are there leaps in time or logic? Lags in story? Clunky flow from scene to scene? Pitch your thumbnails to yourself frame-by-frame and voice out any dialogue you’ve written, or even sing the music you intend to play over the finished piece. If something isn’t working, be ruthless. Stick a Post-it Note over problem areas and redraw until it feels right. Any fixes you make here will save you time and heartache down the road.

Storyboarding

Some storyboard artists take the time to create beautifully polished renditions of each frame, but the goal here is not high art, it’s clarity. If you are able to capture the action and emotion of your story with little more than scribbles, then go for it, but just make sure you’re able to capture all the detail. Reminder: This is now the place where you should be resolving your shot composition, framing, staging, and transitions. It is important to consider where all of your props and visual elements fit into the frame. So don’t come to me crying when you start animating and say, “Wait, I forgot his hat! My chef has no hat, but there’s no room in the frame to add it!”

Once you’ve completed your drawings, use the space beneath each frame to write either dialogue or brief explanatory notes (such as “hears bear” or “comes to life”). Once you’re done, a casual observer should be able to understand what’s going on in each frame and even follow the overall story.

Storyboard Revisions

Time to test out your storyboards by presenting them to a small audience or, at very least, in front of one person who isn’t afraid to ask you hard questions. Pitching your storyboard to an audience will force you to clarify your beats and the decisions you’ve made about staging and flow. Plus, an authentic human reaction offers a great sounding board. Watch your audience’s body language as you pitch—it’s as important as (and often more honest than) their verbal feedback.

Once you’ve made changes based on feedback, revise your boards and clean them up for public consumption. Many clients will react better to clean, elegantly rendered storyboards. If a client needs to be sold on an idea from boards alone, they better sparkle! If a crew of animators and designers are using your boards to generate their shot list, then the boards should be detailed enough so that no element is left up to interpretation.

Note on Style Frames

In Chapter 1, we discussed the importance of creating style frames to communicate the mood, color palette, and texture of your project. As you are working on your storyboards, it may be helpful (and is customary when working with a client) to insert a few style frames into your storyboarding sequence. The style frames act as a reminder of the “look and feel” of your film and will support the clarity of your storyboards.

Storyboarding Hints

Okay, now that you know the steps to set up the basic structure of your storyboards, what are the best methods for creating effective storyboards? Or in other words, what do you need to consider throughout the storyboard process to help bring the full scope of your story to life visually? It has a lot to do with putting on your director’s hat. You have to compose your “shots” as in a movie, not only for clarity (which is the most important thing) but also for maximum emotional impact. That means learning a thing or two about shot composition, framing, staging, and transitions. These are the details that you add frame by frame making each a perfect unit as they allow the complete story to unfold.

Job, Joris & Marieke, A Single Life storyboards

Shot Composition

Want to give your audience the feel of a majestic location—say, a mountain peak at sunset? A slow, panning extreme wide shot will evoke the mountain’s beauty and sheer size. What about the lone climber who finally reaches the summit of that mountain? How best to capture their joy? A close-up will best reveal the expression on their face (and tears in their eyes) with maximum intimacy. Your audience is hungry for information, and shot composition is all about revealing information to your audience. You can get as close to, or as far away from, a subject as you want (as director you have the power of X-ray vision, flight, and invisibility all at once), so take the initiative to bring your audience right up to the action.

But composing different sized shots isn’t only about providing information for your audience. It can also be used to withhold information for maximum effect. Take our mountain climber who has reached the peak. Let’s say we choose a medium close-up to give the impression that she has finally reached the peak. We show our climber weeping in triumph, jumping up and down in victory—she has defeated the great mountain. But then we pull back to a wide shot to reveal that in fact our climber has only hiked a tiny foothill at the base of the great mountain and is nowhere near the summit! With one quick change in shot size, our climber went from skilled and heroic climbing veteran to hopeless amateur. One size change to comedy gold.

Shot composition grants you the power to reveal information how you wish to your audience, so use your power with great care.

Framing

If sizing your shots is all about giving your audience the pertinent visual information they need, then framing is all about keeping that eye interested. Framing is the artistry of your shots, the “cinematography,” and, in a way, the poetry. Sure, you could just plop your subject in the middle of each frame, hell, you could plop a tornado in the middle of your storyboard frame and, yes, it will still be a tornado. But you want people to feel the wind, the chaos, and the movement of the tornado. Dynamic framing is one of the keys to enhancing the visual drama in your story.

The famed “rule of thirds” provides an easy-to-follow tool for keeping your framing dynamic. Simply break down your single frame into nine equally sized quadrants by dividing it both horizontally and vertically into thirds. Now, instead of placing your subject squat in the middle (which is considered a “static” location), place it in another box—the top, bottom, left, or right third of the frame. Try laying the focal point of your subject on one of the four “intersection points” where your quadrant lines meet.

Why do this, right? Seems random? Well, think of it as entertaining a child on Easter Sunday. If you want them to find an Easter egg, you wouldn’t just put it on the table in front of them. Since the child will naturally roam around for the Easter egg, they will likely be more excited by the egg once they find it under the park bench. It’s interactive. Same with the subject in your shot. The eye wants to roam and will feel more gratified if it goes searching to find your subject. Place your subject in the middle and there’s nowhere to go—it’s a boring game. Put your subject closer to the edges and there’s room to roam. Play the game by the rules (of thirds) and your shots will feel more pleasurable for the eye and will give your story a sense of excitement and suspense.

Staging

While thoughtful framing helps you compose shots around a subject in a way that keeps the viewer’s eye interested, staging is all about where you put that subject in space (and the other objects in the shot) in the scene in relation to the camera. Staging should create a visual and conceptual hierarchy for the objects and characters in your frame, placing them in a way that reinforces your overall story.

First thing to consider (as always) is clarity. You want your audience’s eye to clearly see what’s going on with your subject. So that means avoid crowding it with unnecessary visual information. Let’s say your project is about an animator who’s been up all night working on storyboards. Though their studio may have a big bookshelf or a stereo or heavily framed photos that are organic to the location, adding them to your shot means that your audience’s eye will roam to story dead zones—where visual information does not enhance your story. You want to stage only the visual elements that will enhance your story. In the case of our animator pulling an all-nighter, you may want to stage a waste bin filled to the brim with crumpled pages next to her desk, some empty cans, and/or an alarm clock that says 6:00 a.m. in big red letters to the side. Staging items around your subject should help to emphasize the idea that you’re trying to convey, while not detracting from the importance of your primary subject.

But staging has advantages beyond enhancing your subject. It can also provide depth to your shots. In the tangible sense, staging your subject gives a sense of physical depth to the environment. Let’s look at another example for this one. One character is handing car keys to another character. Placing the characters’ hands and keys large in the foreground and the car small in the background will immediately create depth and interest. This staging allows the audience’s eye to roam from the larger main subject to the background where it can discover the car. As mentioned earlier with the rule of thirds, discovery is a lot more pleasurable for the eye than instant gratification. Giving the eye some physical depth to explore for new information makes for a more interesting visual composition.

Kino Jin, The Gate storyboards

But there is another way that staging adds depth to your shots: in the story sense. By staging your subject along with important visual information, you offer your audience a deeper read of what’s happening in your story. In the case of the animator, the crumpled papers in the waste bin, of course, represent the animator’s trial and error, but a deeper analysis could interpret that the overflowed waste bin represents her indomitable spirit. You must earn this leap through consistent storytelling, but once your audience gets to interpreting visual information, you may be surprised at some of the connections they make. This is generally why people call a good story “deep.”

Transitions and Continuity

Bold statement alert: Animation’s most powerful advantage over other forms of filmmaking is the animated transition. There, I said it, caution to the wind! Anything can happen in between two frames of animation. You can transform the black pupil of an eye into the black text on a girl’s report card, a fire-breathing dragon into a baby’s bath toy, or the door to your boss’s office into the gates of hell. As with animation as a whole, the possibilities for animated transitions are endless, which is exactly why you must practice great discipline and make those transitions work with your story. The most dependable way to ace your transitions is to pay close attention to continuity.

Continuity is the natural flow of visual information from one shot to another employed to support your story. At its most basic you must ensure that the story is flowing from shot to shot. If a character is blasted with wind in one shot, make sure that their hair is messy in the next shot and that it stays messy until they comb it. If a character is on the second floor of a building, they can’t run out of the front door and into the street without walking down some stairs. You’d be surprised how many films let this stuff slip through the cracks. The simplest way to guard against continuity errors is to always follow the logic of the world you’ve created (spatial continuity), the story you’re telling (temporal continuity), and the physical direction it’s headed in (directional continuity).

Observe Spatial Continuity

Making sure that the rules you’ve established in your world are consistent from shot to shot is called spatial continuity. If you establish early on in your story that there is forest behind a boy’s house, when he runs out of his house and into the backyard, you know where he’s headed—into the woods. If you have established the size of his bedroom, when he lies on his bed throwing a ball against the wall, even if it’s “off-screen,” the audience should know roughly how far that ball should travel before it bounces back. Or not! Because using the wonders of animation, let’s say you want to transport the boy from his bedroom directly into outer space. A great way to achieve that: A boy throws the ball against the wall and it never returns. Thanks to laws of spatial continuity, the audience will know that the ball should return within a second or so—when it doesn’t, they can guess that either something intercepted it or (suddenly) the wall is gone! When you cut to the boy’s bed surrounded by outer space, it will actually make sense as a transition since it follows the law of spatial continuity. You’d be surprised how many professional films mess this up as well, so take the time to do a dummy check to ensure that all of your shots follow the physical world that you’ve created.

Observe Temporal Continuity

The consistency of logic in your story is known as temporal continuity. Animation audiences will go along with dramatic visual change from shot to shot so long as it’s loyal to the story they’re being told. Temporal continuity can occur chronologically, or even with flashbacks or flashforwards, but it must make sense and be earned based on the work you’ve done to set up a solid story. If you’ve established a love-struck teenager searching at a party for the object of their affections, when they finally find the person, temporal continuity will allow a variety of plausible options. You may see the teen’s eyeballs transform into hearts; you may see a flashback as the teen’s entire life flashes before their eyes; a flashforward fantasy may occur that takes you years into the future as the teen stands blushing at the alter finally marrying his crush. Transitions can take wild leaps and will be easy for your audience to stomach so long as they’re consistent with the story you’ve been telling. If your transition doesn’t make sense to the audience, then you haven’t earned that leap—so head back to the storyboard.

Observe Directional Continuity

This final rule is pretty simple with directional continuity: Maintain the direction of any action for an object or character in a sequence from shot to shot. If a car is driving from the left side of a panel to the right, you must continue that same movement into your next shot. Switching directions of vehicles, characters, or any object that is headed in a particular direction is disorienting to the viewer and a big no-no in storyboarding. Do a second dummy check here, because directional continuity errors happen all of the time.

Is It Really Working? Timing and Animatics

The notion of timing may seem a bit abstract at this point. I mean, how can you nail timing on a bunch of static cards? Allow me to explain and emphasize that timing is one of the most important details you’ll need to solidify in your storyboarding process. Imagine the horror of the following situation: You are pitching a final board to a client of a 30-second motion graphics advertisement to discover when you test out the dialogue it is timing out to two minutes long! There is no amount of charm that can ease you out of that pickle. To avoid such a conundrum, you must work to establish the timing of your project during your storyboarding process.

First step in doing this is to determine how long your whole piece must run, or the Total Running Time (TRT). Now, break your story into three to five chunks and establish how many seconds each one must be. Finally, time each scene using the dialogue and/or stage direction as a realistic guide. You may find that you have some trimming to do. You might even have to cut some beats that you love very much. Time to get brutal because you must hit those marks! Once you feel that the timing is worked out, pitch your storyboards again to an audience, this time with a stopwatch in hand.

The Magic Ingredients: Time and Sound

Still don’t trust your timing? Then take a step into the realm of computer animation by creating an animatic. An animatic is a video version of your storyboards laid out in sequence on an animation timeline with a soundtrack aligned. It allows you to see your storyboards (these static shots) come to life and get a true sense of how your story will time out.

To create an animatic, you’ll need to use a video-editing program. Many are affordable, some even free if you look around: iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro X, and Toon Boom all work well for creating an animatic. Plus, there’s a wealth of YouTube videos that can teach you how to make animatics with any of these programs.

Once you’ve downloaded one of these programs, scan and import your storyboards into it and lay them out on a timeline. If you have recorded dialogue, music, voiceover, or sound effects, import those as well and add them to your sequence. It’s going to take some tinkering to get this right, and it will always feel a bit awkward (after all, remember you are “animating” static shots), but do your best to create an honest timeline of your entire story.

Warning: You may be tempted to add new panels to your animatic, to give it more of an “animated feeling.” But if you are posing out walks, blinks, or camera fly-throughs, you’ve drifted into animating. We’re not ready for that yet, so pull back!

You’ll need (again) to bring out your most brutal internal editor. If a beat is too long, shorten it. If a beat seems expendable and you need the time, get rid of it. You might even find that you have too much time and be forced to create a new visual beat. Get to work on that immediately and realign your animatic with the new beat. Timing is the truth, and the truth will become crystal clear when you sequence it out on your animatic. This is where surprises and excuses vanish, because the animatic is your last and final chance to get your story right before taking the big leap into animation.

If you feel ready—I mean really ready—then let’s go forth!

Sterling Sheehy, Wakefield storyboards

Storyboarding Recap

Vary Your Shots Responsibly: Utilize different-sized shots to enhance narrative logic and drama.

Framing & The Rule of Thirds: Keep shots interesting by placing subject off-center.

Staging: Block elements to create visual and conceptual hierarchy.

Spatial Continuity: Make sure frames are consistent with the physical world you’ve created.

Temporal Continuity: Make sure frames are consistent with the story you’ve been telling.

Directional Continuity: Make sure things are moving in a consistent direction from frame to frame.

Timing: Break out a stopwatch and make sure that your story works in the time you’ve been allotted.

Animatics: Develop the rhythm and flow of your shot sequences by laying out your storyboard panels on a timeline, along with temp dialogue and other sound.

Assignment

Storyboard a simple premise

Using the method outlined above, create thumbnails, thumbnail revisions, storyboards, and storyboard revisions for the following simple premise: A character in a bind discovers a magic carpet. Where do they find it? Where do they go? That’s all I’m telling you, except that it must be 30 seconds long, exactly. Once you’ve completed your storyboard, pitch it to a group or a person. Time it out as best you can, and if you can access an editing program, go ahead and lay it into an animatic for final timing.

5. Color Sense

Enhance your story with the right palette

Color has tremendous power to communicate the mood of your story. It can express emotion, clarify motivation, and enhance the entire meaning of your piece. A farmer’s lush green field means something totally different if instead it’s yellow-brown; a hero’s ride off into the sunset becomes a ride into the depths of hell with a tweak in hue; a young boy’s first kiss has a different connotation if the recipient of the kiss turns green instead of blushing red.

Louis Morton, Nose Hair storyboards

So what are the best color choices for your story? What is just the right amount of color to use, if any at all? How can you use color to enhance the emotional impact of your piece? This chapter will answer those questions and give you some simple guidelines for how to plan your palette and enrich your story with well-informed color choices.

Color Vocab

Warning: When people talk about color, they tend to use words that have multiple meanings to multiple people. Language is tricky when talking about color because everyone assumes that others see exactly what they see and describe it as such. After all, the color is right there in plain sight! Needless to say, miscommunication around color can cause big problems when, for example, a client refers to the “tone” they want but they really mean “hue.”

So, let’s go over some basic color vocabulary, if only to make sure that we are using a common language, and that there will be no misinterpretations.

Hue, Saturation, and Value

As you may know, there are three standard characteristics of color: hue, saturation, and value. When we ask, “What color is that?” we’re asking for the hue. Hue refers to the common color name in the spectrum like red, blue, green, blue-green, and so on. Saturation is the intensity or purity of a color. Highly saturated colors look vibrant and bright while low-saturated colors look dull, almost grayish. Value is the relative lightness or darkness of a color—basically how much light the color is exposed to determines its value. High value means the color is closer to white, and low value means a color is closer to black. I’ll use these terms throughout the chapter, so please refer to the hue, saturation, value chart here if you need a refresher.

Tone

Unlike with value (which refers to the brightness or darkness of a specific color), tone instead reflects the overall brightness or darkness of an entire shot or scene, regardless of the colors used. In addition, tone refers to how much contrast there is between elements within the scene. The easiest way to remember this is to think of your film as if shot in black and white. However close to blackness or whiteness your scene is and how much contrast there is, we will refer to as tone. So while it doesn’t seem to be specifically connected to color (the subject of this chapter), tone is a key element in color consideration and can heavily influence both the emotional tenor and meaning of a scene.

Create a Color Script

Now that we’ve got the vocab out of the way, let’s take a look at those storyboards again, since it’s time to begin the process of creating a color script for your film’s most important scenes.

A color script is a sequential visual outline of how you intend to use color in your animated film. The process can be highly experimental, and, as usual, I encourage you to find a process that works best for you. The trick is to balance what you think looks right in your individual scenes with what helps to enrich your whole story. Story is always first, so you may need to replace colors that you absolutely love (aesthetically) if they don’t serve the big picture of your story.

In addition, you should consider how many colors you are using and if there are simply too many to benefit your story. Some of the most exciting animated films out there have worked with a monochromatic or extremely limited color palette, and yet they were able to express a wide range of emotions. Explore if a more minimalist approach might work best for your project.

If you were able to limit your color palette, that’s good because the first step in creating a color script is to choose what color your entire story would be if it had to be only one single color. I know, it’s a Sophie’s choice! But this step is akin to (and as important as) figuring out the biggest theme of your story, since it should influence your creative choices moving forward. We’ll discuss color symbolism soon, but I encourage you to go with your gut in answering the following questions to help you determine your project’s single most important color: What does your film look like when you close your eyes? How does your film feel? Is it a pink film? A gray one? What is the overarching central mood of your film, and is it strong enough to base your film’s palette around? Figuring out the dominant, thematic color of your film will help establish the palette of your other colors and will make your life a heck of a lot easier moving forward.

Once you have that one color selected, the next step is to create what I call a pre-color script (PCS). This is your storyboard represented by a series of rectangular color bars that match your most essential story beats. You can limit yourself to one color per bar or organize them with a few dominant colors. Think of your pre-color script as a game of charades—you have to tell your entire story start to finish but you can use only one dominant color or limited palette per frame to do so. The best way to start this process is by identifying the key moments in your story that will require color for emphasis. These are the moments that have to pop in your story. The color choices you make in the rest of your film should act to support those moments as best they can.

See Amica, Shuhei Matsuyama’s example of a pre-color script with story beats and an intensity chart below. The brief scene descriptions reflect how blues and greens become the primary colors of the story as a frog takes the main character (Amica) on a journey into the forest.

Here’s another example you can visualize for yourself: the story of a bear cub lost in the woods. Say the cub faces off against some dangerous predator during the night and by dawn finally makes her way back home to her family of bears. The moments where color is important (the biggest scenes) seem straightforward: the first, when the bear cub gets lost in the woods, the second, when the cub fights off a dangerous predator, and finally, when the cub arrives safely back home. If these key moments are to be represented by solid hues, which would they be?

In answering that question I encourage you to go with your gut, break some rules, and be creative. However, if the ideas aren’t flooding in, it doesn’t hurt to start your color thinking with popular color symbolism that permeates Western culture. Red is said to represent menace, anger, or danger, like Darth Vader’s red lightsaber or Captain Hook’s red hat and jacket. For instance, you may think to use a splash of dramatic red when the bear cub is fighting against the violent predator.

Symbolism, however, may not always best serve the scene. Sometimes what is necessary is contrast. You may realize you need to first set the cub in a higher contrast situation to set it apart. You may also find that using a surprising color that is outside the film’s palette will spark the drama in that fight scene.

What about when our bear cub gets lost in the first place? For the fear and disorientation that the cub may be experiencing, consider changing the value of the existing primary color so that the whole forest goes a bit darker when the cub realizes that she’s lost. The result of this value shift from green to dark green will be a shift in tone. The whole feel of the scene will be spookier, lonelier, and more ominous.

Finally, for the cub’s return home, it may be neither hue nor value that best enhances the moment. Perhaps a change in saturation will work best. Through the cub’s travels, the forest may have become desaturated to imply the sadness of the lost bear cub, but when the cub finally discovers home the forest could return to a saturated green. It will infuse your shot with sudden optimism and joy as the cub runs back towards her family.

Choosing the right hue, saturation, and/or value for the key moments in your story will help to amplify the emotion that you’re going for and will also clarify intent. You can assign to a color any meaning you’ve chosen—you simply have to define and establish it and be consistent with how you use it in your film. Whether you choose Western culture’s symbolism or you assign your own meanings, it’s important to consider saturation and value as well as hue—and most importantly…go with your gut!

Supporting Colors

Once you’ve identified the hue, saturation, and value for the key moments in your story, go ahead and fill in the rest of your scenes with a boiled down palette in the same way. Treat your key moments as the stars and choose colors that act as supporting characters. You may wish to avoid hue, saturation, and value levels that compete for attention with your stars’ key scenes.

Color Me Awesome

Now that you’ve completed your pre-color script, it’s time to move on to the big time and complete your color script. With your PCS as your guide, pull up your original storyboard sequence and begin to work out the colors for each board. The principal color that you have already selected will help keep you focused on the look you’re going for in each scene. Take the colors that you identified in your PCS and integrate them into the board.

Once you do that it’s time to select colors for the supporting cast of characters, backgrounds, and props in each shot. Again, I urge you to go with your gut and always consider story above visual awesomeness.

Kim Dulaney, Eno. Lead art direction and design. Directed by Lauren Indovina. Produced at Psyop.

Please Note

Print uses the subtractive color system known as CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) and colors are created by mixing pigments on paper. Mix too many pigments and you’ll get black. Motion uses the additive color system called RGB (Red, Green, Blue) where light is used to mix color. Mix too many colored lights and you’ll get white. Long story short, if you notice a weird change in your colors when transitioning from print to motion, your files may have changed from RGB to CMYK. Most programs will compensate for this shift, but if things look odd, you may want to go back and change your source ﬁles from CMYK to RGB.

Color Simplified

Below are some of the most important and simple tips I’ve received about using color to enhance story in an animated film. While these tools derive from a more commercially driven mindset, they are great guide rails for how not to overuse color. They come from motion graphics, filmmaking, graphic design, and fine art and represent the wisdom of experienced art directors and production designers whose heart-wrenching trial and error led them to see the light. Take heed of their tips, or else their endless suffering will have been all for naught.

Design for Movement

In each of your boards, identify what will be moving and what will remain still. When choosing color, make sure the colors in your backgrounds and still objects do not compete with the colors in your moving subjects. The goal is to draw the eye towards your subject and to not let less important still objects distract from the action. Think about desaturating the colors in your backgrounds or still objects, and let your star have the spotlight.

Kim Dulaney, Airbnb. Lead art direction and design. Character design by Lauren Indovina. Directed by Marco Spier and Marie Hyon. Produced at Psyop.

Limit Your Palette

I know that I’ve mentioned this, but it’s huge! In still artwork, the eye has time to explore color and investigate composition. With animation (and all film), movement and the passage of time create the need for a continuous and clear focal point. You want your story to read quickly and consistently from scene to scene. Distracting the viewer’s eye with unimportant objects that are colorful is the first way to lose the attention of an audience.

Simply put, in choosing color, less is more. Too much color variety in a shot confuses the eye, just as too many flavors on a plate of food will confuse the palate. It’s best to take a minimalist approach to color and start with as few colors as possible. It will be far easier to add colors later in the process than to take them away. Limiting your palette will allow the viewer’s eye to quickly process the moving images and focus on what is most important in your story.

Denyse Mitterhofer, Tiny Tales

Use Saturation Mindfully

Saturated colors are the purest and most intense version of a color. In a film, fully saturated colors can be so energetic that they can steal the spotlight if used in the wrong place. By saturating a color, you are telling the audience, ‘look here, it’s important!’ So it’s crucial not to overload your viewer with too much saturated color. Use it either for your characters or backgrounds, in important places and moments that you really need to pop. Rely on saturation too often and the eye will tire out, and color as a storytelling tool will become meaningless. For reference, Google “Wes Anderson color.” Not only will you find some truly fabulous color palettes to inspire you, but you’ll see how often Anderson dresses his primary characters in saturated colors as they move through desaturated environments.

Kim Dulaney, Eno. Lead art direction and design. Directed by Lauren Indovina. Produced at Psyop.

Support (Don’t Upstage) Your Subject

Be careful with adding too much color to backgrounds and props when you have a colorful moving subject. Moving subjects are your stars and need space to breathe—they should be supported by their surrounding colors, not upstaged.

One way to please your attention-craving star is by designating an open area around it. This area is called a white space (though it’s not necessarily white). Your subject will thank you for the wide-open stage where they can best be seen, and even if your audience’s eye does wander, it will be thankful for a little rest in your white space.

Another way to limit the visual competition around your subject is by using high-contrast or complementary colors. This will help to solidify figure/ground relationships around your subject and will make your subject pop. High contrast is especially important for kinetic type, logos, and broadcast graphics, since words take more time to comprehend than singular objects and therefore require clear figure ground relationships.

Use Surprise Color for Punctuation

A surprise or unexpected color is one that differs so greatly from your overall palette that it jars the eye. When placed at a key moment in your story, a surprise color can enliven your motion work, tie together a key idea, and even trigger the climax of the story. Many successful motion graphic title sequences rely on the formula of a mostly black and white sequence, with one surprise color for punctuation. Warning: Much like saturation, surprise colors are very powerful, so use with great restraint.

Select One Thematic and One Accent Color

We went over this during our pre-color script discussion, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to choose a dominant thematic color to unify your entire piece. This is especially important when creating motion graphics for advertising. Brands often give strict guidelines in their creative brief with precise direction about color. Choosing your film’s primary color gives you a basis on which to establish your palette and offers viewers a theme through which they can experience your piece. Once you’ve established your thematic color, you should focus on selecting an accent color. There are many ways to pick color pairs. Try complementary colors, analogous colors, colors next to each other on the color wheel, whatever. From this dominant and accent color all other color decisions are derived—so choose carefully and choose early.

Ariel Costa, Pixel Show

Make Your Own Rules

As you’ve figured out by now, color is complex. Steadfast rules to using color in motion can be counterproductive to finding the right combination for your film. When it comes to color, uncomfortable combinations and new kinds of usage may make for interesting design. When using color, feel free to make your own rules for a project—just be consistent with them so that your piece is unified.

Assignment

Subvert a nursery rhyme, make a color script

Subvert a simple nursery rhyme by translating it into a film genre, such as horror, comedy, musical, action, sci-fi, or Western. First, write a three-act structure—one sentence per act. Next, select a dominant color for your piece. Then, make a simple pre-color script and a few full color style frames of your story.

Kim Dulaney, Linda Loves. Lead art direction and design. Directed by Jordan Bruner. Produced at Passion Pictures.

Color Recap

Color Vocab: Hue, Saturation, and Value.

Make Color Scripts to Emphasize Key Moments.

Design for Movement.

Limit Your Palette.

Use Saturation Mindfully.

Support (Don’t Upstage) Your Subject.

Use Surprise Color for Punctuation.

Select One Thematic and One Accent Color.

Make Your Own Rules.

6. Weird Science

Experiment with animation

“I call my process Weird Science. It’s a mixture of creative rituals and experimentation. We fail a lot and sometimes we’re lucky. But if you’re doing it right and you’re paying attention you begin to learn your own weird science.”

—Rama Allen, Creative Director, Title Designer

Perhaps more than any other film medium, animation provides a breeding ground for experimentation. Not only are your image-making options infinite, but the process allows for wild swings at the bat that perhaps no other medium provides. Experimentation is an essential step in getting the most out of the animated process and may even help you to discover the defining moment in your story. Sometimes stories are even born from the process of animation itself. Still, some skeptics fear the word experimentation—they feel it implies whimsy, which they believe is synonymous with wasting time. If that’s how you feel, then please go ahead and replace the word with the more scientific phrase “Research and Development.” Because that’s what experimentation is. Even the oldest and most sacred techniques and methods can benefit from a fresh round of experimentation.

Take the United States national anthem written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key. The melody was considered sacrosanct when Jimi Hendrix got on stage in 1969 and unleashed a screeching guitar solo before a stunned (if slightly stoned) crowd. It was blasphemy…and yet it was innovative genius. Jimi had taken a tried and true formula for water (H₂O) and come up with liquid gold, and “The Star Spangled Banner” would never be the same.

Find Your Weird Science

Like Rama Allen (quoted previously), Jimi Hendrix made his own weird science to create something new; now it’s time for you to find your weird science. So steel up your courage, muster up some Hendrix-like chutzpah, and go there—mess around, test limits, learn something new that’s difficult—or risk leaving behind a crucial element in your animated story. The experimentation of this chapter is designed as a hiatus between the transition from the nitty-gritty of preliminary work of earlier chapters and the technical detail that comes later. What kind of animation magic can you imbue into your project?

Illustrator (and wizard of invention) Ian Wright took a familiar photographic portrait of Jimi Hendrix and through experimentation reinvented it with rolling beads (at right). You may ask yourself why an artist would use a medium as temporary as rolling beads, and with no glue. Says Wright, “Playfulness is important to me; I’m motivated by trying to push my work somewhere new. Somewhere else. Really, I’m interested in what could be. I sometimes reach that point by making mistakes and I often arrive at solutions by accident. I prefer to let the materials I use influence the outcome.”

The Importance of Creating “Bad” Art

First step is to create some truly bad art. And since no else will do it, I (The Author) hereby give you (The Artist) permission to make bad art. In fact, I assign you the task of taking at least one scene from your project and making it as bad as you possibly can. Here’s what I mean by bad art. Forget about careful color choices; go against your instincts with design and technique; get in there and make a mess. Have rain fall upward, layer on effects like icing, turn the grass neon pink. Have fun and commit to trying so many things that you end up with the wildest version of your scene possible. Permit yourself to work on an idea that is meant for no critical eyes ever to see and I guarantee that you’ll learn a ton. You may even decide to incorporate some of your “bad ideas” into the final project. If you do, you may be stunned to discover that audiences react to those bad ideas as some of your best.

The reason is simple: When you relax and stop worrying about what people are going to think, you’re at your most creative and inventive. When you’re at your most inventive, you make the most unexpected creative decisions. And nothing helps enhance a story more than inventive creative decisions. Those moments are the points in your story that people call surprising and magical. And…you never have to let on that those surprisingly magical moments came out of an experimentation with bad art.

Work on the Edge of Your Skill Set

It was Samuel Beckett who coined the phrase “fail better,” and I’m thinking of getting a tattoo that says just that. Trying to improve at things you genuinely stink at, and not judging yourself for stinking, may be the secret to a fulfilling artistic life. Beckett wasn’t being irrational. He didn’t want you to flap your arms in an effort to fly or skydive without a parachute. He was talking about working within your area of expertise but just at the edge of your skill set where you get uncomfortable; where from either lack of experience or lack of ability in an area, you stink. Squarely in that zone of that discomfort, right where your stinking is maximus, is where your creative genius will happen. So in your continued effort to create weird science, try going beyond your current comfort zone.

Jordan Bruner, Battista and Federico

Scores of great artists and directors have become great because they had the courage to be honest about what skills were needed to get to the next level. They didn’t wander around trying everything for the sake of it; instead, they were systematic about looking their shortcomings in the eye, turning their backs on the embarrassment and fear of being seen as a fraud, and focusing on expanding their skills. So I ask: Where are the gaps in your skill set? What areas of your craft do you feel the need to investigate?

Now, set forth and fill those gaps. Might learning to shoot and edit video sharpen your timing? Need to brush up on character animation? Fascinated but perhaps terrified by motion capture? Take the time to experiment with them—all of them. Ask favors of friends who can show you the basics, take on the persona of a child learning a language who is unafraid of butchering it, and get to work. Caveat: I’m not asking you to perfect what’s on that list, just to try it, and lean into the discomfort of not yet being proficient. It’s in this uncomfortable process that you may find the key to your artistic greatness and perhaps even crack the secret to failing better.

Personal Experimentation Heaven

Up to this point you’ve permitted yourself to experiment like Jimi Hendrix, make horribly bad art, and learn new skills with the goal of expanding your set. But don’t give all that magic to your boss! It’s often the unpaid personal projects that will further your craft, keep the creative fires burning, and if you’re lucky lead to even bigger things in your career.

Make the Work You Want to Be Hired to Do

Gregory Herman, multi-disciplinary director and designer who has worked on such blockbusters as Thor: Ragnarok, The Amazing Spider-Man, and HBO’s Westworld (but also an array of independent film projects), knows a thing or two about getting pigeonholed in Hollywood. When a designer or animator gets known for doing something well, clients come running for specifically that thing. It’s easy to get pigeonholed into working on the same kinds of projects over and over. For Herman that thing was broadcast graphics—he composes them brilliantly but isn’t totally satisfied doing only one thing. He wants to spend his days expanding his skills and working on a variety of projects that inspire him. Simply put, he wants to be paid to do the work that excites him.

Common sense told Herman that if his reel was filled with broadcast graphics, then he’d end up getting hired to do just that. So he made a strategic choice. He displayed his broadcast graphics work and personal/experimental work side by side on his website and reel. The message to prospective employers was clear: Herman was a multi-faceted artist, able to do more than just one thing really well.

Macro Studies 1-20 (v003a at right) is an example of the personal work that Herman spotlighted. Macro Study features filmic title sequences with dark, suspenseful soundtracks and close-up images of everyday objects shot with a macro lens. It was the work Herman wanted to do: transforming the seemingly mundane (broken tools, insects, plants, Hot Wheels® cars) into mysterious and exciting worlds that tell a new story.

Gregory Herman, Director, Macro Study v003a

It took some time, but eventually Herman found himself being offered work to create film title sequences just like the ones featured on his site. Not that the graphics work offers dried up; quite the opposite. But now he was allowed to do both and also choose between the work that he had once been pigeonholed to do and the work that really inspired him. The results can be viewed on his stunning website.

Personal Projects Pay Off in Unexpected Ways

John Morena was a busy guy. He worked as a director and animator on commissioned projects including music videos, commercials, network promos, and visual effects. Despite his commercial success, John didn’t feel as though he was growing as an artist, and worried that he might become complacent, creating work that paid him well but didn’t challenge him. So, he came up with a crazy idea for how to turn his life upside down: to create one experimental animated short film per week, every week for an entire year.

“Originally, it was to be fifty-two experimental tests…that I could use as a testing ground to discover new techniques that would then inform my regular client work.” But as Morena began to experiment, pushing himself to use unfamiliar techniques and story structures, the investigation began to take on new meanings. And the more he stretched his skill base (using everything from flashlights to Polaroids to sound collage to left-handed drawings, etc.) the more interesting his films became. “It allowed me to work in a way that wasn’t safe. I had to challenge myself to move forward, forward, forward all the time.”

The rewards of Morena’s year-long experiment, titled AREA 52, surpassed any expectations he had, creatively, professionally, or personally. Out of the fifty-two films, six screened at the hugely prestigious Annecy International Animated Film Festival, ten at Anima Mundi, three at Hiroshima International Animation Festival, and five at Ottawa International Animation Festival. In the year after he completed AREA 52, his experiment accrued over seventy festival selections!

John Morena, AREA 52 film stills

What Morena learned from the year of work: “If your project has no limits, make them. Limit everything if you can. Set challenges. These limits are where the magic happens.”

Your Film’s Experimentation List

Time to grab a piece of paper and get down to business applying your weird science to your current project. Within each frame of your completed storyboard exists areas that could benefit from experimentation. Draw up a table with each scene’s number on the left side and a series of columns at top, listing areas where you might experiment with those scenes. Technique, Design, Movement, Transitions, Sources, and Sound are good examples of areas where you might experiment, but you should add your own columns to best fit the possibilities available for your specific film.

Now that your table is made, consider how your project as a whole might benefit from each area of experimentation. You may decide that there are many possibilities or just a few. Go through each of your storyboards one by one and consider how you might experiment with each of the topics listed in the column. If you think there’s something there, take your best, wildest shot—I assure you it’ll be worthwhile.

For inspiration, please remember that sometimes the best way to experiment is not to invent new ways of doing things but to be influenced by something you’ve seen before and love. Head onto Vimeo, Motionographer, or YouTube and find something that nails the look you’re going for in your own project. Take careful notes of what elements you’re responding to and then add these experiments to your list.

Transitions, A Case Study

Your experimentation list should most certainly include transitions. Animation allows for the most marvelous things to happen in between two frames. Hsinping Pan’s film USOC Henry Cejudo illustrates how simple design choices can achieve beautiful animated transitions, removing all clunky cuts. Notice in particular how she orchestrates a seamless story transition from the wrestler to his adoring mother by morphing the background of the wrestling stage into his mother’s brown eye. We know that the mother is thinking about her son as soon as we see her face, without any additional information. The transition became the story.

Hsinping Pan, USOC Henry Cejudo

Movement, A Case Study

The word animation is derived from the Latin word “anima,” which means soul. How you animate the elements in your piece reveals its soul, so now it’s time to sprinkle a little Aretha Franklin on your project. Do you want certain movement to be smooth and elegant, quirky and comic, or jagged and edgy? Whatever tone you choose and whatever medium you’re working in, it’s essential to do animation experiments with key characters, assets, and camera moves to feel out which tools work best to get them moving the way you want.

As discussed in Chapter 2, Louis Morton’s Passer Passer is a masterpiece of experimental character movement. His movement studies (below) are the result of extensive and committed experimentation.

Louis Morton, Passer Passer, Character Movement Studies

Ed Fernandez, Yolked

Weird Science Recap

Free yourself to make “bad art.”

Work on the edge of your skill set.

Make the work you want to be hired to do.

Keep working on your personal projects.

Make a Project Experimentation List.

Experiment with transitions.

Experiment with movement.

Tara Mercedes Wood, Things used to be hidden

Assignment

Experiment with nondigital sources

Animation has the ability to take audiences to completely fabricated worlds, but for some content there is a point at which these worlds can feel a bit airless. Your audience may need something to ground them, without necessarily leaving the world you created for them. Adding nondigital visual elements and textures from the natural world can help make your film more visually accessible and infuse it with a kind of gritty relatability. And, let’s face it, it doesn’t hurt to step away from the computer and reconnect with the real world for a minute.

Experiment: Begin a new project or explore one you’re already working on for opportunities that might be enhanced by the analog beauty of gritty nature. Gather some visual elements from the real world and integrate them into your animated film. Shoot video; scan paper, textures, or fabrics; take photographs. Be playful with your tools: Whip your camera around to capture weird lights; scan your freckles or a rind of lemon; shoot origami on green screen. Bringing “real-world” warmth and familiarity into your digital environments can infuse your imagined world with a more relatable feeling that can bring a whole new interpretation to your story.

The images at left are stills from the film Things used to be hidden by Tara Mercedes Wood. Tara describes her film as a “mockumentary about the aftermath of a disaster which caused everyone to lose their perception filters.” She explains her technique as “2D animation with digital and paper-based elements, as well as altered live action footage shot on a mobile phone.”

Though Wood’s film is pure fantasy, the live action footage and tactile elements infuse an odd familiarity into the visuals. As a viewer, I’m instinctively prone to “believing” that her world exists because I recognize parts of my own within. The mixture of hand drawn 2D, 2D CGI, and photographic elements brings me closer to the world she has built, and by proxy, the story she is trying to tell. Give it a shot in your film and you may experience similar positive results.

7. Sound Ideas

Get your audio and story in sync

Let’s begin with a game of Fill-in-the-Blanks. Lightning strikes and you’ll soon hear the sound of ________________. A baby drops his pacifier; plug your ears because here comes ________________. Jay-Z struts onstage in Brooklyn and it’s the deafening sound of ________________. The very notion of sound is that it’s reactive, almost obedient, to action. Indeed, all sounds are the result of objects vibrating, and so it follows that when creating your animated film, sound should be the result of action and emerge out of existing story. But that conventional wisdom seriously underestimates the enormous power of sound not only to affect current story but also to propel it forward on its own. You have only to catch an episode of Looney Tunes with Bugs Bunny to witness the indelible power of sound. Bugs is chased into a dark bear cave by Yosemite Sam and the screen goes completely black. You hear scuffling, punches, and groans. Then in the next frame Bugs strolls out of the cave, carrot in mouth, unscathed, and grinning smugly—but the fighting sounds persist. We viewers all know that Yosemite Sam is still in that cave, very likely fistfighting with an angry bear, and it ain’t gonna end well…

It’s a nice example of how sound alone can paint a vivid picture of action and can propel story forward on a blank screen. But that’s just a warm-up. Consider the figure below. A man’s terrified face—eyes wide like saucers. Let’s add the eerie sound of screeching violins, heavy footsteps, then the creaking of a door and cocking of a handgun—a murderer has clearly arrived and death is only seconds away. Same image; add mushy romantic music, the sound of young ladies giggling, and high-heeled footsteps followed by the voice of a shy young woman, “Hello, Harold, you look soooo handsome in your bow tie and suspenders.” Suddenly, our man is far from being murdered but is instead totally love-struck, on the verge of a blushing meltdown. Finally, change the soundtrack again to a buzzing alarm clock, the distant sound of morning traffic, and a dog whining and wagging his tail against a bedside (ready for his morning walk). Suddenly our almost-murdered love-struck man is none of those things—he has simply overslept and is late for work!

Let Sound Lead Story

In production, sound can be an afterthought, but waiting until the middle of (or after) animation to determine your soundtrack is kind of like waiting until there’s a minute left in the fourth quarter of a pick-up game to sub in LeBron James. Talk about a missed opportunity! I challenge you to not only consider your soundtrack at the same time as writing and design in your production timeline but to lead with sound, using it as the primary compass for your storytelling. You may be surprised at its Zeus-like story power (as lightening follows the sound of thunder!), and your project will glow from that uniquely ear-forward approach.

Diegetic and Non-diegetic Sound

Karin Fong, award-winning founder of Imaginary Forces and acclaimed title designer, is fond of saying that music and audio “does 80 percent of the work.” I’m not going to promise that this chapter will help you complete 80 percent of your project, but if you follow the strategies laid out in this chapter I can guarantee that your story will be stronger as a result.

First we need to clarify the concept of “diegetic” and “non-diegetic” sound (pronounced daya-jet-ic). Put simply, diegetic sound comes from sources that are visible on-screen (or implied by action off-screen) and that come from the physical world: a dog’s bark, a creaking door, most dialogue (that is not in the head of a character), and music whose source you can see in the scene—such as from a musician or a radio.

Sounds described as non-diegetic are sounds whose source neither is visible on the screen nor has been implied to be present in the action: sound effects that are not natural to objects in the scene (a sad trombone playing “wah-wah-wah” when a character realizes they’ve been tricked), the music score (that is not coming from a musician or a radio in the scene), and any off-camera narration or dialogue that’s going on in the mind of a character. Non-diegetic sound is surreal to the action and yet aims to enrich what is happening on-screen.

Animation offers a host of opportunities to use both diegetic and non-diegetic sound and it also provides many occasions where one can morph into the other. For instance, a baby is crying loudly. Those cries are diegetic—you can see the baby and know that they’re upset, even as the crying grows loud enough to break a glass. What if you add a surreal emphasis to that baby’s cry and make it grow louder and more ferocious and morph it into the mighty roar of a lion or the howl of an ambulance siren? Now you’ve augmented the story; the baby’s cry is so loud and ferocious it sounds like a lion to those around it, and it only took a simple swap from diegetic to non-diegetic sound.

Below we’ll explore the three elements of sound in animation and motion graphics—sound effects, music, and dialogue—with an ear for both diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The chart at left reminds you of the choices you have when creating a soundtrack for your film: from totally naturalistic diegetic (baby’s cry/band playing/dialogue) to surreal non-diegetic (lion’s roar from a baby’s mouth/music soundtrack/narration and internal monologue) to everything in between. The medium of animation celebrates creative flexibility when it comes to sound, so take advantage!

Sound Effects

Adding sound effects to your project can be a blast. Who can resist the howl of a werewolf when a terrified character is walking alone in the woods at night? What good is a brilliant idea without a “ding!” for emphasis? What editor hasn’t toyed with the plethora of burping cues available at a keystroke to enhance a post-soda drinking scene? With so many delicious possibilities at your fingertips, restraint is key. Indeed, the first step in adding sound effects to your film is to make a list of places where you’d like to add them and slash that list in half (at the very least!). While well-placed sound effects enhance your story, their overuse will leave a film suffering from the law of diminishing returns. Take the much-loved cymbal used to heighten dramatic moments in-scene. A verbal sparring between two slugs can be clattered with cymbals in an effort to elevate the drama, and it might work nicely for a while. But what happens when one slug gets so angry that it pulls out a deadly salt shaker? Adding another heightened cymbal will have lost its emphasis and will come off as limp, white noise. Be careful not to overuse sound effects, or the deadly salt shaker of your film will earn a yawn from audiences instead of a gasp.

But restraint is not the only rule to sound effects use. A proficient user of sound effects must be guided by their inner poet: self-discipline is required, but also a knack for metaphor and a love of the surreal. After all, what are sound effects but lyrical dips into the universe of the fantastic? The sight of children playing in the street touches a grumpy old man, and the sound of a “cracking iceberg” may represent the melting of his frozen heart. A corrupt politician is caught red-handed committing evil in full public view, while the sound of sirens and helicopters circling may embody the feeling that there is no escape. A woman is struck by cupid’s arrow and chirping birds may best represent her feelings of romantic affection—or maybe her heart literally sings ABBA? AC/DC? Pavarotti? Whatever the scenario or your take on that metaphor, when you are tempted to use a naturalistic (diegetic) sound, first search your poet’s soul for a surreal sound that might embody what you’re trying to express. It may just capture the emotion you’re reaching for in a more expressive way, and your audience will appreciate that poetic reach.

Note on Foley Sound

You can access scores of online sound effects libraries for free or for a small purchase, and the choices may seem overwhelming. But I implore you: Do not depend on someone else’s sound to express your story ideas. You can make your own sounds that are more specific to your vision with a simple microphone setup. Recording your own Foley sound effects allows you to create the exact sounds that you hear in your head and not settle for a near-match. Foley sound is your sound, so why leave such an important aspect of your project in the hands of someone else?

Music as Sound Effects

So you’ve got your trimmed list of sound effects and the perfect metaphors for those opportunities—you are, in fact, ready to receive your Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. But before you deliver your acceptance speech, consider that some of your sound effects might not have to be “effects” at all. They could in some cases be more effective as music, especially music derived from the soundtrack that you’ve created for your film (which we discuss next). Classic examples of using sound effects derived from soundtrack are the famous screeching violin in Hitchcock’s Psycho shower scene; the ominous piano dun-dun from Spielberg’s Jaws when the mega-shark approaches; the playful sound of a piccolo in the classic cartoon Tom & Jerry when the mouse evades the cat with his quick little footsteps. Borrowing sound effects from your music score is a great move since it can give your effects an organic feel, while also giving your entire soundtrack the feeling of synthesis—not an easy task when selecting sounds for an entire animated film.

Music

We all know how important a well-thought-out music score is to the success of your project. More than any other aspect of film, music can determine the emotional tenor of story, set rhythm for scenes, and guide an audience’s journey. Luckily, music is malleable. You can orchestrate it so elegantly with your story that audiences may barely even notice it’s there. Or you can put it front and center to announce the mood changes and express the overall attitude of your piece. What would Shaft be without Isaac Hayes’ funky anthem? Where would Fantasia’s dancing brooms be without Tchaikovsky’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”? Who is Darth Vader without the famously ominous soundtrack that accompanies him into every room?

So let’s get down to brass tacks and establish some tools for using music to enhance story in your animated project. Warning: Follow these tools and you may need a ten-piece funk band to blast your theme song whenever you walk into a screening of your film…

Score to “Theme”

Head way back to Chapter 1 of this book (Pre-Production) where you identified the theme and emotional tenor of your project. Now, if you could choose one song that encompasses that theme and emotion, what would it sound like? A triumphant rock song? Lonely blues number? Chaotic free jazz jam a la Ornette Coleman? Find that song (or create it) to style the thematic basis of your music soundtrack. This stage is called building a temp (temporary) track. Be warned, don’t get married to music you can’t get the rights to, and don’t fall in love with a popular song that everyone already has an emotional relationship with. This is your piece of art—you can tell your story without relying on The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”. The purpose here is to establish the feeling you’re looking for. Use that track as a guide to dig in for other songs that might represent the emotion of various scenes in your project. If you chose lonely blues as your theme, also find a happy guitar riff for when your character is finally cured of his/her loneliness. Next, look for tracks that best represent your main characters, as well as for situations that may be repeated in your storyline. These songs will help you define the theme and tone you set out to achieve, and they should inspire you to create or acquire final songs that you can get rights to.

Consider the Music of “Silence”

I’m not just talking about eliminating music altogether. Certainly, you should always ask yourself if a scene needs music and then leave it bare if the answer is no. Less is more when it comes to music. But there is a kind of music soundtrack that can feel like no music at all to the audience while still providing a powerful emotional push to a scene. Atmospheric music, sometimes represented by a stripped-down hum from your soundtrack or a subtle rhythmic drone, can give a scene added personality that the audience may not even perceive. The primary advantage of using this quiet music is that it feels like a breather for the audience, a time during which they can experience your story on their own, while still giving them the slightest nudge into your intended direction. Good sound design is said to be undetectable, and silent music provides the perfect opportunity to integrate your soundtrack seamlessly while still elevating your emotional environment.

Score Against

Perhaps the most horrific scene I have ever witnessed is in Quentin Tarantino’s classic film Reservoir Dogs. A hit man is about to cut off the ear of a man he believes to be a police informant. It’s a brutally violent moment, and any other filmmaker would have thrown in a gruesome soundtrack to match. But Tarantino, in an intentional stroke of genius that epitomizes scoring against the action in a scene, has the hit man flip on the radio from where the whimsical 70s pop song “Stuck in the Middle with You” blasts out. The hit man joyfully skips around the informant he plans to disfigure to the upbeat tune, which makes the whole experience so much more disturbing. This kind of contrasting music choice places the audience in an uncomfortable spot and alerts them that something totally off-kilter is happening, so keep your eyes wide open. Just make sure, like Tarantino did, that you pay off that promise when you signal its arrival. Though, there’s no need to lose an ear over it…

Dialogue

Time to summon story guru Robert McKee with this little gem from his seminal work Story: “The best advice for writing film dialogue is don’t.” As an animator, you’re creating a project in the most visually dexterous art form in existence; if you can’t find a way to express a thought visually, then you haven’t tried hard enough. However, if you have exhausted all else and must use dialogue (admittedly, I’m a sucker for some good dialogue), here are a few steps you can take to make sure it’s awesome.

First step is to match every line of dialogue to the personality of the character you have speaking it. Each line should aim to further reinforce the traits you’ve given them and clarify those traits for your audience. If a super-egotistical wizard is asked her profession, “I am a wizard” seems like a missed opportunity. How about: “Google me,” or “I’ve already sewed the answer to that question onto the inside of your trousers.” Once your script is complete, you should be able to cover up the character headings and read through knowing exactly which character is saying which line since only they could possibly say something so very “them.”

Second consideration when writing dialogue is to make your characters speak in as naturalistic a way as possible. In real life people interrupt, veer off into odd directions, use slang and malapropisms constantly. Rarely when a man comes home after a hard day’s work is “Hi, Honey, I’m home” his first utterance. Nor does his spouse (in the real world) say “Welcome home, Darling, let me take your coat.” More likely he sighs loudly as he kicks off his shoes, muttering bitterly about a late train, after which his annoyed spouse says, “Leftover pizza in the fridge. We couldn’t wait. Oh, and your mother called again. She wants to visit.”

One surefire way to keep dialogue naturalistic is to indulge in the fine art of subtext in your dialogue—text with a suggested, subtle meaning. People use it all the time, it can be very funny if used right, and more importantly dialogue with subtext forces the audience to follow your story more attentively. In a scene where one space alien (Zork) is jealously competitive with a neighbor, you don’t want him to say, “My X-5 space cruiser is far larger and more impressive than yours!” Better that Zork leans over the hedges, eyes the other alien’s (Gaxx) smaller vehicle and grins, “Cute space cruiser.” Gaxx, who is equally competitive, may reply, “Almost bought the X-5, but it’s known as the cruiser divorced men buy to over-compensate for size.” Subtext is delicious to use, it tends to loosen up dialogue that feels too on the nose, and it gives the audience fun play-along where they have to figure out what’s really being said. It’s a more interactive and clever way to write.

Finally, use dialogue to set the mood of your scenes. In a tense moment, people tend to speak in shorter, clipped sentences. Says the bouncer to a couple of thugs, “Out. Both of you. Now.” In more lighthearted moments, people tend to speak in an almost musical way, often going overboard with details. “We were out all night, and you know Henry, he’s so loud, screaming, ‘It’s my birthday, It’s my birthday,’ the neighbors were pounding on the wall and he kept yelling at the top of his lungs, none of us could stop him, so I just gave in to the chaos. Mitch laughed so hard he spit out his birthday cake!”

FYI, if you’re writing internal monologue, these guidelines are just as important. The inside of your character’s brain is a character, too, and it needs all the personality-driven naturalistic traits that all characters do.

Narration/Voiceover for Motion Graphics

While in character-based animation you can choose whether or not to lock your sound script before animating, in motion graphics, where a client often has a specific TRT (Total Running Time) for you to hit, there is no choice: You must lock script and lay down audio before animation begins. It’s for that reason that when writing a motion graphics script your best friends are clarity and brevity. Your script must be so simple that there is no room for misinterpretation, and brief enough (given the time limit) that there should exist no words except those absolutely necessary to getting your point across.

That may sound relatively easy, but there’s an additional juggling act to pull off: While crafting your written message you must be simultaneously conceptualizing the images and the sequences that you think will best match your words. This mental storyboarding is the key to writing narration that will work in the final edit of your piece. So write brief and write clear, but also write visual.

After you’ve written your final-locked draft, it should be performed and edited multiple times to get a sense of how it’s timing out and where the natural rhythm of the piece is going. You may find that it needs to be slowed down, and lines need to be modified and removed to stay within your time length. Testing it out will also provide clues to where effects and music naturally fall.

Once your script is recorded (tight as a bear trap and clear as the bluest sky), you should move on to determine what music might be playing before, during, and after the narration. Per the music section of this chapter, you know how important music is to tone and rhythm, and the music should complement not compete with the narrator’s voice. At a recent Motionographer F5 conference, director and designer Patrick Clair said about informational motion graphics, “The pace of the voice drives things, type sits at the center, and design is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down…”

Ready, Set, Go

Finally, it’s time to move on to design and animation. There are infinite ways to go about designing your animation to support your copy. Ask yourself how typography, icons, characters, photographs, and video may fit to best tell your story. TED-Ed has created over 120,000 beautiful, fascinating, educational short animated films this way. The TED-Ed animated lesson on the next page shows how important it is to keep images clean and simple to support scientific content. As always, the big idea and message will determine the media you choose and how it will look. For more inspiration, check them out online at ed.ted.com.

A Final Word on Timing

As they say in comedy, “Timing is everything,” and it’s just as true in animation. None of what you’ve just learned—whether it be about effects, music, or dialogue—will work without a keen eye on timing. You will quickly learn that placing a sound effect or music cue a few frames off could be the difference between an emotionally satisfying sound and one that distracts or works against what you were going for. With each cue, sound effect, or bit of dialogue, carefully consider if its placement packs the maximum emotional punch. Often a nudge in one direction or another can provide that beautiful rush of dopamine to the brain that really means, wow, nice use of sound!

Richard E. Cytowic, TED-Ed Lessons Worth Sharing, What percent of your brain do you use?

Sound Ideas Recap

Let sound lead story.

Diegetic and non-diegetic sound.

Sound effects.

Music as sound effects.

Music.

Dialogue.

Narration/Voiceover.

Timing is everything.

Assignment

Experiment with sound

Select a significant moment from a sequence in one of your stories, or find a scene to download. Storyboard it out in detail and import your frames to a video-editing program. Experiment with at least five different music cues that emphasize distinctive emotional tones for the story beat. Don’t forget to try scoring against story with unexpected music. Now do the same with sound effects, looking for different ways to make the moment in your scene resonate. Next, consider how each music cue is working with your scene. On the following page jot down your responses and be critical about what is and isn’t working.

8. Design Wonderland

World building and environmental design

“World building is about understanding the world deeply enough in all of its aspects that stories spring almost effortlessly from that base world.”

—Alex McDowell, Narrative and production designer, Minority Report, Fight Club, etc.

Improv comedy has a golden rule that can be summed up in the same two simple words we discussed in Chapter 1 “Storytelling”: “Yes, and…” Yes, and means that no matter how ridiculous an idea one player introduces into a comedic scene, the others must accept it as fact and even expand on its authenticity. So if a spastic improv player points to the sky and says, “Look, a giant carrot!” the other players on stage must immediately react. The giant carrot simply exists in this world the moment it’s introduced, and unless someone else introduces the idea that gravity works differently, then the giant carrot in the sky is very likely careening down towards them. If a player doesn’t jump out of the way they’ll be crushed. If they’re crushed the surviving players should look down at their dead friend and mourn; or run away worried that another giant falling carrot may be on its way; or feel peckish and decide to dine on a delicious carrot snack.

Nowhere is the “Yes, and…” rule more important than in world building. Animation allows you to create any crazy chaos you want (including giant falling carrots), and, as you’ve seen in previous chapters, that’s just part of the medium’s magic. Audiences will be eager to explore whatever bizarre, new environments you create. But once you introduce your world (and all of its strange rules), you must commit to them fully or risk losing that audience forever. Your human character has lost her glasses in a world of Cyclops? Make sure it’s very difficult for her to find a new pair since the opticians sell only monocles. Created an environment that is completely upside down? Sleeping bats should stand upright. Families live in marshmallow houses? There should be a slight bounce in their steps on the way to the kitchen.

Committing the sin of going against the wild logic of your world means “continuity issues,” and that is the quickest road to having your story lose credibility. Says award-winning filmmaker and educator Brooke Keesling, “Continuity issues are a major pitfall of creating new environments in animation, so artists have to be extra careful to stick to the rules they have created. This is especially important in big story moments—it’s critical that story agree with the rules you’ve set up.”

The audience will follow whatever wackiness you throw at them, and they’ll take it very seriously so long as they feel that you’re doing the same. But one slip, one tiny continuity oops…and it’s over; your audience will lose interest and vamoose. So when your giant falling carrot appears, jump!

Jake Zhang, World Building USB

Jorge R. Gutierrez, The Book of Life

But First (Again): Be Influenced!

Before we get into how to design the rules of your new world, I’d like to remind you of how important it is to have influences that inspire your story. Jorge R. Gutierrez, writer and director of one my favorite features, The Book of Life (2014), creates worlds so magnificent and unique that they may appear to be completely without influence. But Gutierrez is proud to point out that the world building in The Book of Life was informed by two separate mythologies and from one of his favorite movies of all time, Nightmare Before Christmas: “To me that’s one of those movies where the environment is a character…just as stylized as the characters. That was the mandate [for The Book of Life] from the beginning: I want to be able to take all of the characters out of the movie and this world is a character.” And with that simple mandate, Gutierrez focused on two of his favorite mythological tales: Mexico’s Day of the Dead and ancient Greece’s story of Orpheus (and his visit to Hades’ Underworld). Gutierrez’s main character, a guitar-playing bullfighter named Manolo, had to travel from The Land of the Living (a village in Mexico, early 1900s) to the Land of the Remembered (a kind of heaven for those whose families remember them) and The Land of the Forgotten (a kind of hell for those whose families don’t) in order to win the heart of his beloved Maria. Each world that Manolo steps into is flush with symbols from the Mexican and Greek myths that he was inspired by, and the result is spellbinding.

Jorge R. Gutierrez, The Book of Life

So, be like Gutierrez. Borrow ideas and inspiration from the stories that you love most. Rewatch old movies, reread passages from a favorite book, explore a mythological tale that once sparked your imagination and transported you. Write yourself a list of everything about the worlds in those stories that excite you to this day, and think about how those traits (like character traits) might help your story grow.

Fun (and inspiring) fact: The Book of the Dead was actually born from Gutierrez’s CalArts experimental animation thesis film, Carmelo! Please watch Carmelo on Vimeo. It’s an opportunity to marvel at what a single filmmaker’s raw vision looks like…before it gets picked up as a multi-million-dollar feature with world-building giants like Guillermo del Toro attached!

Designing the Rules

So how do you create an interesting, consistent, and believable animated world? What is the best method for making it feel authentic even as you’re turning logic upside down?

First, establish time and place, and then do the work to define the physical, social, and visual laws that exist there. These “laws” will provide a consistent foundation for whatever far-flung chaos you envision and will help give your world a sense of authenticity and verisimilitude.

Your World’s Time and Place

Animated environments can range from real-world settings to a mixture of reality and fantasy to full-on fantasy. Whatever direction you choose, you’ll need to give your audience a clear sense of time and place.

When considering time, ask yourself whether the past, present, or future (and their unique technologies and characteristics) would be best for your story. If for instance you are telling the story of an orphaned puppy trying to catch the attention of a nice family to foster her, placing the puppy in a future world where everyone is wearing goggle headsets (making the puppy literally invisible) might help to enhance the suspense. Have a child who adores the sophisticated culture of fine cuisine and French poetry? Put them in the Neanderthal period where anything but hunting and gathering is frowned upon. The details of time can help elevate your story’s main conflict and add intrigue—so choose a time that provides barriers to your character getting what they want, and lean into the organic conflict presented by that time period.

When considering place, follow a similar rule as with time period. The setting of your story should provide lots of obstacles for your character in reaching their goal. Telling the story of a clumsy little space creature who simply yearns to stay out of trouble? Have him work at his parents’ rare intergalactic antique shop! Have a protagonist who simply yearns for peaceful silence? Make sure they live in Times Square, NYC, where the honking traffic and obnoxious billboards blare night and day. Find the place that will bring the most organic roadblocks to your character getting what they want and let your characters try to defeat it. The bigger the roadblock, the more interesting and dramatic the journey to surmount it will be!

Time and place are the first important decisions you’ll make in creating your story wonderland. Choose well. Those decisions provide the backbone of the world where your important physical, social, and visual laws will be established.

Your World’s Physical Order

On Earth there are certain indisputable physical laws that are so much a part of our daily lives that we take them for granted. A brick and a penny will reach the ground at the same time when dropped from the same height; a pot of water will boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit; the sun will always rise from the east; and so on. I encourage you to study these physical laws—they will not only help you understand how things work in our environment but they’ll provide you with a reference to turn Earth’s physical laws directly on their head when your time comes to do so. Sure, water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit on this boring planet, but what if your world exists between the hair follicles of a mystical beast; or floats in a distant galaxy; or is wedged between the crusts of a tuna sandwich eaten by ancient gods? At what temperature would you have water freeze in those scenarios? And (just as importantly) is it even worth you considering a change in that particular physical law at all? The answer to that question rests on whether or not creating a new physical law will enhance or detract from your story. Put plainly: Don’t just do it because it seems cool. Do it because it’s meaningful to the telling of your story.

Warns Brooke Keesling, “Be careful with overly busy or overly described environments unless they are contributing to the story. Sometimes an environment is the star, or kind of the key character, and sometimes it is just distracting. Even the most amazingly inventive environments can ruin a story if they compete with the main characters and diffuse the key ideas of the story.”

Sterling Sheehy, Dragon concept art

Your World’s Social Order

On Earth, mostly a bunch of men (and sometimes women) got together and made up rules for civilized society to follow. A lot of the laws are based on religious values and are aimed at helping the rich rather than the poor (…but, that’s just one animator’s opinion!). So why not create a new set of social laws and norms for your world? Why not shake things up so long as it aids in the telling of your story? Maybe babies have all the political power; perhaps instead of jail time all criminals must bake giant cupcakes; school is now recess and kids run inside at break excited to study math; dogs walk obedient humans before heading off to work.

Cody Walzel, Breadheads concept art

Much like with Earth’s physical laws, I encourage you to dig into world history—a bunch of mind-bending social norms have existed in various places in the world that may provide you with inspiration for your invented world. Barring the existence of those norms you’d like to keep, the sky’s the limit! Make life better or worse, or stranger even, for its inhabitants, and take advantage of how those new social norms can enhance your story.

Your World’s Visual Order

As discussed in previous chapters, the success of your animated story depends heavily on the tone set by your visual world. Space, line, shape, color, contrast, and texture are all visual aspects you can create laws for as a means to enhance your narrative and distinguish your story from others.

Creating a futuristic world run by evil police? You might decide to use desaturated colors, limit the use of any organic forms, and use mostly hard edges and geometric shapes to reinforce a militia-controlled environment. Doing a mysterious detective story? Limit your palette to black, white, and grays with small pops of color when clues are revealed. Maybe the shots in the detective’s office are composed of only right angles to show the detective is in control, while out in the field the shots are composed of only diagonal lines to communicate that he has lost control. Consistent and mindful visual choices made when designing your environment will strengthen your story. So make a list of ground rules and stick with your vision. Audiences will appreciate the fresh take and may even laud this unique style. Feel free to tell them that you were inspired by the poetry of Baudelaire and not that you nerdily taped your visual law list to your computer. Up to you!

Sterling Sheehy, Concept art

Jordan Bruner, Birdmen

Look Around! Our World Is Inspiring

And if you require further inspiration for creating your world’s unique order, look no further than our super-freaky natural world. Did you know that octopuses have three hearts? That there’s a bird called the red-capped manakin whose mating ritual includes the male having to perform a backwards dance (much like the moonwalk) before the female accepts him? That after mating, the female praying mantis generally begins consuming the male alive! The world we live in is plenty odd when it comes to social, physical, and visual norms. So whether your characters are human, animal, or totally imagined creatures, studying our crazy nature may give you the wild inspiration you’re looking for to make your world other-worldly cool.

On Motion Graphics & Branding

Since most motion graphics use uniquely branded products, identities, or logos in place of easily identifiable human or animal characters, it’s even more important to create distinct visual laws to capture an audience’s attention. Brands, after all, are organic, breathing entities, whether they are products or services. Once you’ve studied the core values of the brand you are seeking to promote, begin to design a world around it.

Kim Dulaney’s award-winning opening title sequences (next page) for the OFFF International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture is a rich and elegant world built around a very interesting brand and some thought-provoking ideas. The OFFF brand hosts conferences and workshops that explore the merging of technology and human creativity. Dulaney explains, “The concept [of the animation] was to find a balance between nature and machine, along with forms in nature that symbolized strength.” The video features hybrid animals that appear natural, but upon closer inspection have a colorful tangle of wires inside them. In the end, the audience is unable to discern what is animal or machine, natural or synthetic. But all is wrapped in a beauty that can only come from an artist’s pen. This sequence expresses the values and ideas of the OFFF organization, and all because Dulaney committed to world building as core to her design.

Kim Dulaney, Lead art director, designer, and illustrator. OFFF Online Flash Film Festival title. Creative direction by Jeff Stevens. Produced at The Mill.

Design Wonderland Recap

Be Influenced.

Design consistent rules.

Define time and place.

Consider physical laws.

Consider social laws.

Define visual laws.

Let our crazy world inspire.

Motion graphics—explore brand values.

Motion graphics—establish visual rules.

Assignment

Design and test your new world

Following the items listed in the Fictional World Building chart (earlier in the chapter), establish the rules of a fictional world. Once you’ve designed your world, I encourage you to throw in some conflict that will act as a stress test for the rules of your world.

Unleash a flying baby or a giant spider; make everyone billionaires; throw in a lunatic with a gun that shoots bubblegum and everyone is covered in mounds of chewing gum! Throw yourself multiple curve balls to test the laws of your own creation. If the laws still hold up after that, you’re good!

Note: As you’re establishing rules for your world, you may want to do some sketches. This is where storytelling, scriptwriting, and design should come together seamlessly. Since the magic and rules of the physical world are often where interesting conflicts come from, you may need to go back and forth between design and writing to get your world feeling right.

9. Technique

Marry style and story

Here we are at the final stop before animation begins! I’ll bet you can almost feel those pixels dancing as your baby finally comes to life. Far be it from me to slow a moving train, but it’s my duty to ask one last question here, one that I urge you to consider very carefully: Have you chosen the best animation technique to tell your story?

I know, you love 3D; you’re a whiz at After Effects (and have a shelf full of awards to prove it); your hand-drawn animation is unparalleled; and so on. It can be difficult to deviate from your best-known and loved technique, and it’s easy to convince yourself that your most-practiced technique is the only way to tell your story. Animators tend to get especially defensive when the notion of using a technique they don’t already know rears its ugly head. “After all that work, you want me to learn WHAT?!”

Not exactly what I’m asking. I simply don’t want you to overlook an essential decision regarding a crucial element of visual storytelling because you don’t know some silly computer program. Selecting the right animation technique can be the key to expressing your big idea, can amplify the very soul of your story, and if used inventively can set your project apart from the rest.

I’ll be first to admit that there are many successful animators and storytellers who spend their career mastering and expressing themselves with one technique. However, one of the reasons they are successful is because they choose to tell the kinds of stories that are best suited for that specific technique. Consider what Apple’s iPod commercials (early to mid 2000s) would have been without pared down 2D motion graphics and Chipotle’s films-turned-advertisements Back to the Start (2011) without the innocent and charming use of stop motion or their Scarecrow (2013) and A Love Story (2016) without the exquisitely rendered 3D CGI? Is it even possible to imagine Hayao Miyazaki’s masterful films articulated in a different technique than hand drawn?

What I’m really suggesting here is that you take a moment to consider whether the first chosen technique is really the best one for your story. Successful directors belabor over which techniques they use in each project, and so should you. Choose wrong and your film may feel like you’re driving with square wheels; choose right and you’re gliding down the freeway.

Finding a Perfect Match

Later in the chapter we’ll explore how to adapt your favorite animation technique to capture the essence of the technique that best suits your story. But for now let’s tackle the big question by reexploring your narrative and also taking a look at how content is viewed today.

Consider Format

First thing to consider when choosing an animation technique is how it will be viewed. This used to be pretty simple—a film was enjoyed in theaters or commercials were watched on TV. But, as we all know, technology is changing by the minute, making scale a critical and evolving consideration. Certainly, more and more content is being viewed on small computer screens, tablets, phones, and even (gasp!) watches. You should be ready for the very real possibility that your big-screen masterpiece will be enjoyed on a smartphone, so you’d better choose a technique that is legible on that format.

At the same time, some formats are getting much bigger. Film festivals and advertisers are video-mapping on the sides of buildings, screens are beginning to cover billboards and complexes in urban areas everywhere, and “sky screens” as big as 1,500 feet are popping up in shopping malls from Vegas to Beijing. On these super-sized formats you’ll see far more texture and detail, so your technique had better stand up to a magnifying glass.

In the end, you must choose your technique to suit the format you believe it will be viewed on by most people. Choose poorly and risk audiences missing important elements of your story, or even spotting flaws in your work. Pay heed to format and your project will be seen the way you intended: as an expression of your hard work and talent.

Please Note

For smaller formats, “vector” graphics and 2D animation with higher contrast read well. They are clean and clear and excellent for communicating information. For extra-large formats, you can choose from a variety of techniques, but keep in mind that your design will be blown up exponentially (an eyelash could end up being several stories high!). So use lots of detail and texture to keep all that screen space interesting.

Translate Your Story

The most important consideration when choosing an animation technique for your film is all about story. You want to find the tools that strike at your story’s metaphoric core by staying true to the message and the tone. You may want to head back to your creative brief (see Chapter 1 “Pre-Production”) to remind yourself of how you want audiences to describe your project when all is said and done. For example, if you’re going for something comedic with the feel of a parody, you want to choose a technique that has built-in irony. 2D stop motion along with its digital counterpart After Effects work well for offbeat comedy. Both lend themselves to the quirky DIY look of cutout animation (see Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python’s Flying Circus). If you are doing comedy or parody, you may want to avoid techniques that can come off as moody or too naturalistic, like hand-drawn or 3D CGI (computer-generated imagery).

Please Note

If you are in a situation where you “must” use a particular technique, adapting your chosen technique to best accommodate the story you are telling is the smartest way to go in a pinch. In other words, I encourage you to first deeply consider which technique is actually the best for telling that story. Then try to emulate the characteristics of that “ideal” technique as you mimic its design and movement characteristics in your already chosen technique.

The now iconic Mad Men (2007) opening titles used a mixture of techniques that so nailed its tone and message that it seems almost inevitable. The creators wanted to express the complex, desolate world of New York City advertising, both glamorous and isolating. Using flat 2D silhouettes of a falling man, they achieved an ominous, noir mood. The falling man appears against shiny buildings covered in perfect plastic advertising photos from the 60s and captures the dichotomy of Don Draper’s world: idealized appearances versus stark emotional despair. The design is minimalist and sparse, short on detail so that the eye focuses on the falling man. Certainly, the sequence would have felt too far removed from reality had they used a hand-drawn technique, and the world would have been too singularly slick with only 3D CGI. The creators picked just the right techniques to fit their story, and so can you.

Animation/Motion Graphic Techniques + Styles

Below is a list of techniques and styles you may consider for your project and a description of how they can enhance your storytelling. Feel free to choose more than one, since a partnership (like in Mad Men) may be the best choice.

Hand Drawn

Hand-drawn animation can be executed with a variety of materials (such as pencil, paint, ink, and charcoal), with styles ranging from Disney’s traditional cel animation to rotoscoping (tracing live-action) to the more gritty, heavy-handed treatment we see in a lot of festival films. These purposefully looser, hand-drawn styles are frequently seen in independent films (see Don Hertzfeldt, Frédéric Back, Julia Pott), and lend themselves to more expressive, emotionally driven stories. Classic cel animation is beloved for its clean, often commercial feel that works especially well for televison shows and children’s entertainment.

Stop Motion

Stop motion animation has both 2D and 3D versions—similar in technique but different in how they’re shot. Both are captured with a camera, shooting frame-by-frame, while objects are moved incrementally in between the frames. The limited motion that results gives stop motion films a quirky and magical quality that is still very popular today despite the availability of more advanced technology.

2D stop motion is shot frame by frame with a camera held over a flat surface (light boxes are often used for sand, oil, paint, or paper silhouettes). This technique gives a flat, handmade quality to films that is emotionally expressive and very adaptable. 2D animation with paper cutouts can feel quirky and comedic (again, see Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python!) but also elegant and dream-like (see Lotte Reiniger’s work with silhouette puppets). 2D stop motion with sand or paint is often lush, moody, and atmospheric (see Caroline Leaf’s The Street). 2D stop motion technique tends to have a lot of personality and works well if you want your film to have a flat, handmade quality.

3D stop motion is shot frame by frame with a tripod to shoot objects on a “set.” You can animate an enormous variety of objects in this technique, including puppets, models, clay, found materials, and pixilation of human puppets. 3D stop motion can feel as naturalistic as CGI (see Laika’s films like Henry Selick’s Coraline) but can also maintain a quirky, handmade quality depending on the material used. “Found objects” have an especially poetic sensibility when you use them in 3D stop motion and tend to have a humorous or metaphoric affect (see the works of Jan Švankmajer and PES).

Please note: The principles and practices of 2D and 3D stop motion naturally translate to those found in 2D and 3D CGI environments. As you will be working with the same tools and concepts, you can achieve some similiar sensibilities with their digital counterparts.

2D CGI

2D CGI is animation that is created in a flat or two-dimensional software environment. Depending on the design direction, this technique can range from flat and super-clean to modeled and highly textured. Many choose 2D CGI because it is scalable and reads well for type, which is why most broadcast graphics (print, Web, and TV) are done with 2D CGI animation. For narrative films, 2D CGI tends to feel warmer and more innocent than 3D, and its long history of use in children’s programming has an emotionally “relatable” feel. 2D CGI can be made in many software programs that use both bitmap and vector images. Réka Bucsi’s experimental film Symphony No. 42 (2013) is a beautiful example of 2D CGI used to lighten the tone of a heavy subject. Check that one out for inspiration.

3D CGI

3D CGI is animation that is made in a three-dimensional software environment. Elements are modeled, rigged, textured, puppeted, and animated in a virtual space. The process is similar to stop motion, with the key difference being that in 3D CGI there is no gravity and virtually no limitations. Because there are so many options, it can be the hardest technique to master and yet has some of the greatest rewards. 3D CGI allows you to create environments and characters that are almost indecipherable from real life. The immense power of 3D CGI to create hyper-realistic worlds makes it the technique of choice for feature films, special effects, video games, and many commercials. If you are a fan of the animated films currently being made by Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, and the like, you are probably a fan of 3D CGI. There are so many wonderful 3D shorts created by students and independent artists, it’s hard to pick just a few. Check out Jacob Frey’s charming short The Present (2014) and Academy Award winner Bear Story (2014) by Gabriel Osorio for a couple of 3D CGI gems.

Conform or Adapt

Ideally the chart shown earlier helped you choose the right techniques and styles for your story, and you’re off to the races. Once you’ve chosen, head to the Web and research examples of that technique/style in action. Seek inspiration in what others have done well, and decide if there is guidance you can glean from…WAIT, what? You don’t know that technique? And you’ve got no time to learn it?? No worries! You simply need to do the Darwinian thing: Adapt.

Say that after some soul-searching you recognize that a hand-drawn technique, specifically the ancient art of Chinese calligraphy, will work best for your project. That fluid, black brushstroke will sell your idea beautifully and nail your tone. And yet you have zero experience in hand-lettering and can barely find Asia on the map! Don’t panic, you’re simply on the road to finding an adaptation.

Amanda Bonaiuto, No Reason by TŌTH, Music Video

First thing to do is identify the defining characteristics of your desired technique. In the case of Chinese calligraphy, this is black brush strokes with a “liquid” quality. Now head back to the medium you’re most comfortable with. Research tools, plug-ins, and tutorials to see if there’s any way to achieve the desired effect within your favorite medium. Many programs will offer some kind of workaround that captures (at very least) some crucial element of your desired technique. With some luck, you’ll find a near match. If you get very lucky (and stay flexible), you may even find a hybrid that both embodies what you’re looking for and also aligns with your unique artistic point of view.

Karin Fong’s God of War III title sequence is a great example of an elegantly married story and technique (next page). Fong and her amazing team at Imaginary Forces adapted 3D CGI animation to look and feel like flat illustrations on ancient Greek pottery. No small task, so let’s take a look at her process.

Karin Fong, Director, Title Sequence, God of War III. Produced by Imaginary Forces and Sony PlayStation

Case Study: Adapt 3D to Feel Like 2D

Sony PlayStation’s God of War III is a popular computer game that followed the lead of feature films by creating a stunning and complex main title sequence. The opening sequence brands the game as a dramatic epic informed by ancient history. The challenge for Karin Fong (director, designer, and founding member of Imaginary Forces) was in finding a balance between the game’s modern 3D world and its ancient backstory. Says Fong, “The design of the titles and the sequences were meant to stand as flashbacks, through the lens of memory, and not be at all confused with the ‘real-time’ happenings of the current (3D) game.”

Fong took inspiration from ancient Greek pottery as a way to relate to the story’s roots in Greek mythology. She used Greek motifs in the borders, patterns, and ornaments, allowing for some strikingly graphic moments.

But her technique was even more striking. Through a long production pipeline, 2D and 3D animators worked together to find the right balance between the two techniques. They adapted the original 3D CGI models from the GOW III game, rendering and adding texture to achieve the graphic silhouettes that were more organic to Greek friezes. Says Fong, “We were very deliberate in finding a flat and graphic 2D influence to contrast with the look of the 3D game. It became a play between this extremely flat language and dimensional elements, with the hope that the tension between the two made for compelling imagery.”

The result: animation and transitions that are startlingly elegant and classic but also modern and immediate. The sequence has a strange mix of dimensionality and flatness, a perfect mesh of 2D and 3D. Fong’s adaptation came about by stretching the limits of the chosen technique to create the feel that was embodied in the message of the title sequence. Fong’s thoughts guide and confirm how important it is to select the technique that best works for your story and not the one you are most enamored with: “You need to know what message and emotion you want to convey first. Then you make sure the look is answering those questions. Don’t be seduced by the technique, because it can really take away from the message of your project.”

Felix Sockwell, process

Workarounds

If you did not find a satisfactory hybrid method within your program, then it’s time to seek a workaround. This means getting a little DIY. Still images, live-action footage, and (gasp) hiring help are all good moves. None of these options should feel daunting, and certainly should not feel like cheating. Instead, finding a good workaround is a sign of flexibility—successful industry professionals do it all the time, and Darwin would be proud.

Workaround 1: Import Still Images

Perhaps the most common workaround in animation and motion graphics is to simply import still images and work with them inside your program. By using editing tools like masking (hiding and revealing parts of the image) and camera panning, you can get a still image “moving” in a way that almost feels like full-on animation. In the instance of our Chinese calligraphy, “unmasking” the lettering could even simulate the human quality of a real brushstroke executed by a human hand.

Workaround 2: Shoot Live-Action Footage

If still photos aren’t cutting it, then live-action footage shot with a video camera is your next best alternative. Need to animate fire? Light a match and capture the images. Moving clouds? Tilt your lens up to the sky and get what you need. In the case of our Chinese calligraphy, you’ll need to find someone to help out who can actually paint the brushstrokes. (FYI, you’d be surprised how far a social media post can take you in procuring that kind of talent.) Once you have your talent, set up your camera under good lighting and shoot close-up footage of the artist’s brush as it creates the calligraphy. Once you’ve captured that footage, import it into your chosen program and composite it into your project. The sky is the limit for how you process and edit that footage once it’s in, but the goal is to integrate your live action footage into the world of animated storytelling in a seamless way.

Workaround 3: Staff Up

Like it or not, you are the producer of your film, and being a producer means that if you can’t get something done by yourself, outsource it. If you don’t have the money to hire someone (which is often the case), favors, barter, and cajoling might get you what you need. Once you’ve secured the right talent, direct them closely, but leave some room for them to be creative, too. Oh, and coffee—you’ll need to know their coffee order and have it ready when their energy drops. You’ll be surprised at how much good work a simple nonfat latte and cinnamon scone will get you in a pinch!

Miguel Jiron, Sensory Overload: Interacting with Autism. Produced and directed by Mark Jonathan Harris, Marsha Kinder, and Scott Mahoy

Case Study: Live Action and Hand Drawn

Sensory Overload, directed by Miguel Jiron, is an animated documentary created as part of an online media research project entitled “Interacting with Autism.” The film is about a boy who struggles with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and has a hard time processing a lot of sensory stimulation at once. It begins with simple documentary footage of a crowded city street. The color live-action footage cross dissolves into naturalistically drawn black-and-white animation of the boy on the street. With the switch from one technique to the other, the audience is cued that they’re experiencing the film from the autistic boy’s point of view. As the boy begins to struggle, the black-and-white drawing becomes layered with rings of vibrating watercolor. Realistic sounds of the city builds layer-by-layer into a cacophony of piercing agitated noises. The audience is taken to the uncomfortable place of experiencing the pain, confusion, and disorientation of sensory overload (at left).

The hand-drawn animation works to separate us from the boy as an individual person, but joins us with him as a character, and therefore is incredibly effective in creating empathy for the film’s message. The splashes of watercolor are emotional and fluid and also metaphoric (the boy’s emotions are being “flooded” by watercolors) and open the door for audiences to live in the intensity of the boy’s perception. Sensory Overload’s elegant combination of documentary footage and drawn animation takes the audience on an unexpected journey of understanding and compassion.

Case Study: 3D CGI

Director Maciek Janicki’s masterfully animated short Paper City captures the rise and fall of a glorious city made completely of 3D CGI paper. As the artist describes on his website: “The narrative unfolds through winding roads, erupting forests and emerging mountains. In one fluid take, with skyscrapers rising from the page—only to crumble, wrinkle and gently crease back into the ground.” While the story may sound simple, Paper City is packed with metaphors. While watching, audiences may ponder the impermanence of life, the transience of human civilization, and also the birth and death of paper as a medium since the advent of digital media (next page).

Inspired by traditional origami, Janicki used 3D CGI to model monochromatic paper to feel like a realistic yet magical world. Because the camera movement, lighting, and shadow are so organic and familiar, the audience is able to experience the film as a kind of recognizable space. Paper City takes advantage of 3D CGI’s unique ability to morph reality with fantasy and gives us a front row seat to the birth and death of a city. Technique and story are in perfect sync, a match made in heaven. We experience the film for its story first, enjoying the layered meaning while savoring every frame of elegant animation.

Maciek Janicki, Paper City

Technique Recap

Consider the Format.

Translate Your Story.

Consider Many Techniques.

Consider Many Visual Styles.

Adapt Your Technique.

Workaround Using a New Technique.

Import Still Images.

Shoot Live-Action Footage.

Staff Up.

Assignment

Design a title sequence

Design a one-minute title sequence inspired by an ancient myth, favorite book, or piece of music using the following process: 1. Write a creative brief that includes the title, target audience, and genre. 2. List six words that describe the “feeling” you would like your piece to have. 3. Jot down a list of images to trigger the key ideas that will define your sequence. 4. From the chart provided, choose the technique(s) that best fit the words and images you’ve listed. 5. Storyboard your sequence, select sound and/or music, and test two to three techniques that you think will best capture the feeling of your story. 6. Animate the title sequence.

10. Animate!

Big-picture thinking, frame by frame

Congrats! You now have all the tools you could possibly need to create a masterfully animated story. You’ve constructed your storyboards, color script, and soundtrack—you’ve designed your world and selected a technique that expresses your big idea. You’re off to the races, and animation should be easy breezy. And yet, in my experience, animation is exactly the step when all hell can break loose. The reason is simple: Each of your carefully constructed elements—magical on their own—can be stubborn when united and put into motion. Though you may have envisioned yourself in an elegant concert hall conducting a disciplined symphony orchestra, you may instead find yourself in a dank basement filled with feral cats, and you’re in charge of trimming their nails. It can feel overwhelming…

Never fear! Your project will work just as planned. You only need to follow a few insider tips that will keep you centered and moving forward towards your goal. The following wisdom was born of generations of tough-as-nails animators who experienced failure, heartbreak, and humiliation, only to rise up like the Phoenix and live to tell their tale. So pay your respects, and pay close attention.

Before you Start…

Create a Production Calendar

“Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want—that just kills creativity.”

—Jack White

Prolific musician and guitar hero Jack White has learned to create great art on a deadline. His rock n’ roll exterior might give the impression that he just strolls into the studio, sits down, and magically improvises a new hit. While this may be true on occasion, in fact, White is very organized about his to-do list, and like many successful artists, abides by a carefully thought out production calendar.

Best way to create a production calendar is to print a blank calendar and then fill it in backwards—from the final delivery date, and then back through post-production, production, and pre-production. Shift the dates around on paper to make sure that you have enough time for each step and that it all feels realistic. Then create a digital calendar that can be easily emailed to creative partners and clients who will want to take a look.

That production calendar should work as a linear list of attainable deadlines. I’m a big fan of creating incentives if those deadlines are reached (and even punishments if they aren’t!). I remain a bit superstitious, and so my deadlines are always paired with an imagined real-life punishment. If I don’t stay on my schedule I would be fired from my job, evicted from my apartment, or (worse) lose my favorite pair of jeans (gasp!). Whatever punishment or incentive motivates you, your production calendar is the Gospel, and you must follow it or risk derailing your entire project.

Ariel Costa, Welcome to the Aescripts + Aeplugins Playground

Protect Ya’ Tech

Now that you’ve set your calendar, save yourself a world of heartbreak and make sure that the technology you are using is up to date and working. This is a book about storytelling, but there will be no stories told if you lose it all to a crash or technical error. Save versions early and often. When you’re naming things, think best practices: Create simple filenames and folders that are logical and organized. You’re never going to find that version you called “need_sleep_finalfinal.pdf” no matter how hard you look. Disorganization has derailed more productions than computer crashes, so heed this advice. Finally, get yourself the biggest blank hard drive you can afford and back up your work at the end of every day. Hell, triple-back it up. Don’t be the fool who has to learn this lesson the hard way when so many others have already learned it for you.

Get Started

The obvious way to go about animating your project is to start at the beginning, but that’s not necessarily the best way to go. After all the planning, starting from the top can be intimating, as if you are at the base of a giant mountain! To build up your confidence, get used to uniting your elements and become accustomed to the unique (and sometimes infuriating) eccentricities of the medium. Here’s how:

Start Easy, Gain Confidence

Start by animating your project’s “lowest-hanging fruit,” that is, the most fun, short, and easy-to-animate scene you’ve got. Approaching your easiest sequences first will get you moving forward, and most importantly will help build your confidence at a time when you may be feeling uneasy. Once you’re done animating that first “easy” scene, head to the next one that you think is especially doable, even if it’s not the next one in your sequence. Done with that? Start on the next. After completing a few of those simpler sequences, you’ll be far better equipped to tackle the tough ones…and by then you’ll have no choice!

Break Up the Tough Ones

When you do arrive at your more challenging scenes, don’t try to tackle them in one go. You’re not David battling Goliath, and this ain’t Biblical times. Your best bet in animating a tough sequence is to break it up into smaller pieces that are easier to handle, and then work on those pieces one by one. Not only will breaking it up make the tough scene less intimidating, it will also reinforce the important notion that animated sequences are often mini-story arcs with distinct beginnings, middles, and ends. Let’s take a car crash. It is far from just a simple car “crashing;” it may include an ill-fated lane change, a swerve to avoid another car, the moment of impact with a tree, and perhaps smoke and fire coming from the damaged engine. The big crash, like many of your animated sequences, is its own story arc, and working on it in parts not only will make it less daunting but will strengthen your storytelling as well.

Maciek Janicki, Horses

No Shot Left Behind

It doesn’t take an industry veteran to tell you that animation takes a long time. The process is so labor intensive that a 12-hour day could pass with little more completed than a 3-second shot. The snail’s pace can be enough to make you pull your hair out. To avoid putting yourself through the torture of animating what is not absolutely necessary, you must become a brutal editor. I’m talking Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun brutal. Even though you should have addressed (and re-addressed) all of the shots in your storyboarding before commencing work on a sequence of animation, ask yourself again if the shot is absolutely worth it story-wise, and if so, if it really has to be so long? If not, guillotine time. And if you’re reluctant to edit the sequence because it’s your “coolest part,” then definitely consider cutting it. Because it’s usually the look-what-I-can-do! shots that hold back your story and add unnecessary time to your production schedule. Wanna show off? Tell your friends that you finished your project early and you’re headed to the beach!

Strategic Movement

Sure, we spent a whole chapter on storyboards and yours are good enough to hang in a museum. But when animating, things change, so roughing out your sequences in a more elaborate way will be a great help as you begin to animate your scenes.

Be a Poser

Nailing your characters’ “key poses” is essential in this regard. It’s kind of like giving the actors in your play their blocking instruction before you work out the intricacy of their performance. Take a moment to analyze each shot you plan to animate, and sketch out the basic choreography of your characters’ positions and movements. It’s ideal to include all of your elements in this sketch—backgrounds, props, and even text and logos that you intend to have occupy the screen. But focus it on your main characters and their actions.

Now address: Do the poses best reflect the story moment you are trying to convey? Can you enhance the poses to enrich your story idea in any way? And of equal importance: Are all of your planned movements even possible, and do they conform to the world you’ve created? You’d be surprised how many experienced animators have painstakingly walked a character across a room only to realize later that they’ve walked them through a table!

Anticipate and Follow Through

Friendly reminder: Don’t forget to pay homage to the Patron Saints of animation: Anticipation and Follow Through. These “before and after” movements help illustrate the physics of gravity on weight and movement. Anticipation and follow through are as important as your “main” movements and are responsible for making your animation feel natural. A woman running to catch a bus doesn’t simply start pumping her arms and legs. Her body first leans back to gather momentum for the run. And then when she stops at the bus, her hair and dress swing forward as a result of the gathered force of motion. Everything that moves in your film, whether it be a character, shape, logo, or piece of text, requires anticipation and follow though. Without it, your movement will feel robotic and flat, and your audience will sense that the same is true of your story.

Compose Directional Movement

Unlike in the real world, objects on a screen are two-dimensional. Even though it may seem as though they have depth, the track of on-screen movement is always flat. As a result, all animated objects move along an invisible directional path that falls into four simple categories: horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and circular. It’s important to be mindful of the directional movement of all objects in your sequences as it can enhance (or detract from) the emotional experience of your piece. Movement that is directionally consistent (all vertical and horizontal, for instance) will feel calmer and so is best used for scenes meant to give the audience a sense of ease. But if you want to adjust the emotional environment (say a villain enters), then adding a movement that contrasts to the predominant direction can clue the audience into a big story moment.

Two baby mice walk peacefully in the forest and move only along vertical and horizontal linear paths—but when an evil fox enters, he moves on a diagonal or even circular path. In a scene meant to be intense and jarring (say the fox pounces on the mice), using multiple directions from shot to shot will intensify the visual drama and unsettle the audience, alerting them to menace.

Before animating, chart the path of your film’s directional movement by printing out your storyboards (or key pose sketches) and drawing simple lines on each to show the general path that your objects are following. Consider how you can enhance the story you’re telling with the directions you compose.

Decentralize and Mix It Up

Since you’ve already got your storyboards out, I want you to double-check that your shots are as interesting as they can be by conceding to a few of the fundamentals of visual storytelling:

Fundamental #1: Get Out Of The Center

Don’t plop your subject in the center of your frame (too often). I know, we talked about this in Chapter 4, but this is your last chance to make good on this fundamental. Take the time to check that there aren’t too many compositions with the subject, logo, or type in the center of the frame, or that there aren’t too many center-focused compositions, shot after shot. Mix it up or risk having visually sleep-inducing sequences in your film. Here’s a really useful tip: If you absolutely need your subject dead center, consider starting with it somewhere else first and then moving it towards the center. Decentralizing your subject will keep your shots active and exciting.

Fundamental #2: Mix Up Shot Length

And don’t forget to mix up your shot lengths. Much like with centering, too many shots with similar shot lengths will bore your viewer. Notice when you’re watching well-directed films how in one sequence the frame cuts from long shots to medium shots and then to close ups? The eye likes to experience a variety of focal lengths and to follow the visual cues set by the amount of information in the frame.

Mixing up the scale of your subject inside the frame and the amount of information you include in the frame enhances the experience of your story. A beetle is having an anxiety attack but manages to calm herself before walking on-stage to deliver a speech. A medium-wide shot for the whole sequence would not only be a snoozer but a missed opportunity. You need to use the visual story to squeeze out all of the emotion you can get from the scene. A moment of great anxiety (or claustrophobia) can be enriched with a close-up, even an extreme close-up. But you don’t want to stay close too long. Once the beetle gathers her composure, you might shift to a medium shot. Then your frame might widen, continuing so until finally widening to a long shot when the beetle walks on-stage completely self-assured. Mixing up your shot lengths not only will keep your sequences visually varied and interesting but most importantly will help communicate the big ideas in your story.

Fundamental #3: Mix Up Shot Timing

In addition to varying the size of your shots, vary the timing of your shots so that your sequences move at different paces. Some shots may work at a full 15 seconds before cutting, while others need cutting down to just a few seconds. Varying your timing will offer a less predictable visual experience for your audience. Many filmmakers use quicker shots for more frantic scenes and longer ones for calmer scenes—some filmmakers do the opposite. But successful filmmakers are always intentional about how long they hold their shots for and use a good mix of shot timings for best effect.

Consider the Blur

When shooting film or video, the camera’s lens has a limited ability to focus on objects at different focal lengths. The optics of lenses create lovely images that are both sharp in some areas and blurry in others. Light traveling through the lens creates uneven exposures resulting in a vignette or darkening around the edges. When animating in computer software, however, everything is in focus all the time and the “exposure” is uniform.

Ariel Costa, Feed Your Creative Brain, State Design

This “super-clean” sharpness can be harsh and lack focal points. It’s up to you to add some variation by considering where to add a little blur and other such shot-enhancing devices as grain, grunge, or vignette. These can help add realistic depth and physicality to shots that might otherwise feel flat and uninteresting. It can also help de-emphasize areas of your composition that aren’t important to the emotion of the scene. Whether you seek something realistic or more stylized, a slight blur or darkening of the corners (or addition of the effects listed above) will help bring your visuals to the next level.

Sound it Out

You’ve probably figured out by now that story can evolve as your production moves towards completion. Luckily, everything is malleable in animated production, and sound is no exception.

Be Flexible with Soundtrack

So while you may believe that your soundtrack is locked, or that months ago you found the perfect opening song for your film, a mere tweak in story may require a new sound treatment throughout.

Modifying sound after you thought you had it right may make you uneasy, especially once you’ve become accustomed to the sound you’ve painstakingly chosen—but the result will be worth it. Indeed, nothing will help you see your film with fresher eyes than swapping tracks. So if your soundtrack suddenly isn’t feeling exactly right, use it as an opportunity to dig deeper. Sometimes this process will affirm that your original sound was the right choice all along, and sometimes it will help elevate your film with a fresh tone or tempo that you didn’t even know you were missing!

The process of tweaking your sound during production will also train you to work on sound and image simultaneously. It will force you (again) to consider the great power of sound as it affects the emotional flow of your story. So stay flexible and don’t stop tweaking until sound fits the story you want to tell. The extra time it takes will be more than worth it.

Hit Your Sound Marks

Now that you’ve chosen your “temp” music (I call it temp because music can always change!) and you have your effects and dialogue, it’s essential that you animate to your soundtrack. Animators often refer to the choreography of a sequence. This is because animation is a kind of dance, a back and forth between sound and image that is rhythmically paced and elegantly timed. Allow your soundtrack to influence your sequences and augment storytelling opportunities.

Mute Your Soundtrack

On the other hand, be careful that your sound isn’t doing all the work! Sound effects, music, and dialogue (your soundtrack) can be so powerful that an animator can unintentionally rely on it too heavily and not give a strong enough animated performance. Press mute now and again to see how your shots are playing with no sound at all. If your visuals lack the expressiveness to be compelling on their own, you may be depending too much on your soundtrack. This is especially important for character animation with dialogue. A great voice track can make you think that a great performance is coming from the animation. Turn off the sound and see if your character’s face and body are doing the acting or if it’s just the voice.

Animate! Recap

Make a production calendar.

Back up your digital files.

Easy shots first to gain confidence.

Break up tough shots into pieces.

Plan well so no animation is cut.

Pose your shots before animating.

Movement tip: Always anticipate and follow through.

Compose directional movement for whole film.

Compose shots so subject isn’t always in the center.

Mix up shot length throughout film.

Mix up shot timing throughout film.

Add blur and vignettes.

Be flexible with soundtrack.

Listen to sound while animating to hit sound marks.

Mute your soundtrack to check movement.

Sirirat Yoom Thawilvejakul, Into Mister Sharky's Mouth

Assignment

Create a short with a message

Animate a 60-second (or less) short with a message that is important to you. Your subject can have a social, political, or moral meaning or can simply express an opinion that you feel would make an interesting film. Try using voiceover or text to communicate your idea. Go through the recaps in this book to remind yourself of the steps you need to create a meaningful animated story. You are an animated storyteller now, with the tools to create something magical, so get cracking!

&. Show and Tell

Create, share, and network

“The not-so-secret formula: do good work and share it with people.”

—Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

More than any other time in history, you now have the opportunity to get your work seen. Film festivals have proliferated, the Internet has opened countless forums to celebrate new work, and sharing content has become so embedded in our culture that your little animated project could go from your laptop to being a global sensation in minutes. Quite suddenly, every animated story has the potential to become a hit, viewed not only by the masses but by important industry folks looking for fresh talent. At the same time, however, the market is flooded with content. Cable networks are battling digital players such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, not to mention a million monetized YouTube channels. Sure, there are more film festivals now, but the high-profile ones are more competitive than ever. The Ottawa International Animation Festival gets over 2,000 submissions for just 150 spots, and Sundance accepts less than 1 percent of their festival submissions.

Max Friedman, Work

Get it Out There

So how does an animated storyteller with a completed project (like you) find an audience? How can your work distinguish itself from the crowd? It’s all in these final steps of Animated Storytelling, aimed at getting your project seen not only by the most eyeballs but the right eyeballs. You’ve told a powerful story in your film; now it’s time for you to tell the story of your film.

Step 1: Package Your Project

The first step in getting your film out there is to package it in a way that exudes professionalism. In this case that’s about design, clear communication, and following directions. The key here is making sure that the people you submit your film to have absolutely everything they need to move forward with considering your work for a screening or an award.

Upload Password Protected Film Online

The first thing, of course, is providing easy access to the film itself. Until pretty recently filmmakers created a stack of DVDs and headed to the post office. Today most films are submitted online, so you’ll need to create a working link to your film (password protected for festivals) that’s ready to share. The current favorite service for uploading video that has password protection is Vimeo. As what’s available (and works best) changes by the minute, I’m going to encourage you to do that research yourself. Just make sure that the link works for everyone, so please dummy test it by opening your link on different computers, devices, and Web browsers. In addition, you’ll want to make a profile on the handy site FilmFreeway where you can upload your film and the important info about your film directly and submit to many festivals. Between your Vimeo link and a FilmFreeway account, you are ready to roll.

Festival Submission Assets

Next, you’ll need to create the following assets:

Title Logo and Still: Design a clean, quickly legible logo for the title of your project, paired with a still “photo” from your film that embodies the story. The title logo and still photo are necessary for promotional materials and can be displayed on your website or on posters for film festivals. It goes without saying that you should choose a font for your logo that matches the tone of your film, and the still you pick should entice viewers without giving away a surprise twist in your plot.

Synopsis with a Hook: Write a tight, clear description of your project, one to two sentences tops. This description will be quoted (likely verbatim) on websites and other publications well into the future, so you’d better like it. To help you with this task, head back to the elevator pitch that you wrote back in Chapter 1. Now that your film is done, perfect that pitch, and pressure test it by telling random people that you’ve completed a film. No doubt they’ll ask: “What’s it about?” Your answer should leave them intrigued, but without them having to ask many follow-up questions. And if your film is the most indescribably weird piece of filmmaking anyone’s ever made, then it’s helpful to phrase your hook as a question that you then answer, or at least partially answer: “Ever wonder what would happen if a two-headed Albert Einstein and a ninja raccoon fought for the lint in your dad’s belly button? Well, my film finally answers that question!” People may say: “That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard!” But as long as they are left intrigued, but without too many additional questions, then you’ve done your job.

The Tag: In addition to your synopsis, it helps to create a memorable tagline that will make your film stand out. Be advised, many festivals print the tag in the program, not the synopsis. Refer back to the six-word story you created in Chapter 1 and revise to reflect your finished product. Here’s a little inspiration, and see if you can guess the film from the tag: They Came. They Thawed. They Conquered. If you guessed Ice Age (2002), then you’re right. Think of it as text to further intrigue audiences at the bottom of your movie poster.

Director’s Bio: All submissions will come with a request for a biographical statement. The best advice here is keep it short and sweet. Start your bio with what you want to be known as professionally (such as animation director or screenwriter, etc.) and then follow it up with your accomplishments that support that role. While I like bios that are simple and to the point, some animators like to write quirky bios, and if you go that route just make sure it pertains directly to the content of your project. For example, if you’ve made a film about bats, you might say, “Kelly Dunn is an animator from Texas. At night she sleeps hanging upside down from the ceiling.” Oh, and you’ll likely need a headshot to go with your bio. No need for your headshot to be formal or corporate, but make sure you select one that is recognizable and that clearly focuses on your face. You’ll likely see this on your festival badge, website, and program. It’s essential that people can find you if they’d like to say hi.

Story of the Film: Finally, you’ll need to jot down the story of your film’s creation. Festivals don’t usually require this upfront, but upon acceptance you may be interviewed for an article and possibly onstage at a Q&A, and that’s a question they always ask. Your story should begin with why you wanted to make your film in the first place, and why you felt there was a need to tell this story. This can be highly personal or related to a broad issue that you wanted to explore. For example, my animated documentary film Backseat Bingo explored the romantic lives of seniors. I was inspired by watching my grandfather Sid fall in love again at 84 years old, and I wanted to portray seniors in a way that I felt the media was missing: as smart, funny, and still surprisingly virile…just like my grandpa Sid. Even if your film is about the battle between two-headed Einstein and the ninja raccoon (as mentioned earlier) and you just wanted to make people laugh, telling the story of what inspired your film is a great place to start. Next, dissect your actual process in making the film. And don’t leave out your mistakes or missteps. Audiences will love you even more if you admit that you wasted weeks modeling a character only to find out from friends that it looked exactly like Genie from Aladdin.

Max Friedman, Forest

Step 2: Determine Where to Show Your Film

Now that you’ve organized your link and assets, how do you decide where to submit your film? This is going to sound a little obvious, but you’ve got to find your people and try and run with that crowd. Submitting a seven-minute film to a shorts festival that has a time limit of five minutes or posting a sci-fi film in a group that is centered around animated documentary is not only a waste of time, but it might irritate the people you are submitting to. In addition, these folks may assume that you didn’t read their guidelines and it may hurt your chances of submitting a film in the future. Head back to your creative brief and remind yourself what your film is and who it’s for. Once you have that information handy, the Internet is a fabulous resource to find your people. Simply type in “list of animated sci-fi film festivals” and you’ll quickly find a long list of options. As I mentioned earlier, the FilmFreeway site is an easy and organized way to submit your film to festivals and a wonderful resource for the whole festival journey.

Once you find the festivals that feel like a good fit, (please!) read and follow the submission guidelines. Be warned, festival staffers may disregard submissions that are less than professional or that don’t follow guidelines even if the submission itself is strong.

And a final tip here: If this is your first film, I highly recommend starting with smaller festivals first, where “getting in” and even winning awards is much easier. So many young animators obsess over top-tier festivals like Sundance, SXSW, or Annecy where they shoot for that “premiere screening.” As a result, filmmakers who could be sharing their films with the world and even moving onto their next project hold their film back for months, waiting nervously both to submit and get a response from a festival where ninety-nine percent of submitters are rejected. Opinions vary on this, but my experience suggests that if your film is great it will rise to the top, Sundance or no Sundance.

Step 3: Consider Skipping the Festival Route

It’s very possible that the film festival route is not for you at all. Many directors forgo the long festival journey and directly release on platforms like Vimeo. One reason is that many festivals are so specific about what they are looking for that your project simply may not fit the bill. Another (more likely) reason is that quick feedback and immediate attention to your work is simply more valuable to you than the esteem of a festival billing. The long festival submission process can create paralysis for some filmmakers. Releasing online may give you the response you need and inspire you to get going on the next project. Plus, if your film manages to find an audience online, it could be shared with as many eyeballs as would have seen it on the festival circuit, and could even catch the eye of festival programmers who will request your film directly, thereby allowing you to skip the whole submission process and subsequent waiting game that dissuaded you in the first place!

Step 4: Create Your Network

Whether you decide to release online or not, having a healthy and engaged brand on the Internet has become crucial for filmmakers looking to get their work seen. Follow the steps below and get a much-needed jump on that process. If you don’t, you may risk missing a wide range of important opportunities and connections.

Connect With Your Peers

If you aren’t already an active participant in the plethora of online communities for designers, filmmakers, and artists sharing their work and ideas online, then get on it. The Internet provides the chance to connect with amazing people all over the world. Real relationships can form and lead to big opportunities so long as you cultivate those contacts with professionalism and respect. Between Facebook and Vimeo groups, AWN, Animation Magazine, Motionographer, Cartoon Brew, ASIFA, AIGA, and, of course, Tumblr, Behance, and Instagram (and whatever new container is invented by the time this book is printed), go get active. Find your peers and make friends. Seek out groups of like-minded artists and also groups that share a common thread with the story of your film. For Backseat Bingo, that meant animators and documentarians but also senior citizen groups that I thought would be interested in my work.

Be A Good Audience

The best way to make friends on the Internet? Be supportive. Once you join an online community, be present and engaged. Comment on other people’s work. Be thoughtful and generous. Tell them you are a fan, “like” posts that you enjoy, and give the kind of constructive feedback that you would appreciate. Remember the old adage: What goes around comes around.

Once you’ve established yourself as an engaged member of an online community, go ahead and blog, post, and share links that you find interesting. Make your own brand known, but be selective. Don’t overdo it. Self-promotion is okay, but space it out amongst other kinds of posts and engagement with others. And please, the majority of your self-promotional posting should go on your personal page, whether it be on Instagram, Facebook, or wherever your peers communicate with you. As for groups, you’ll really have to learn the culture of each online platform that you engage with—some groups celebrate self-promotion while others strictly forbid it. Make sure you are hip to the rules, or risk being ignored or even dropped from the group.

Julia Pott, Triangle

Tease Out Your Work

And once you are ready to share your film, don’t give your project away in one post. Tease it out over time with character designs, sketches, articles of interest that connect to your film’s theme. Pique your online network’s interest (meaning on your Instagram account, not in a group) so that they come asking to see your work instead of you having to give all away. And then when you’ve done all of the teasing you can, let ’em have it with a request to share and also to hear their feedback. You respect their opinions and would love the opportunity to grow as an artist if they would take the time to guide you.

Network In Person

Let me guess, you find socializing at industry events to be a special kind of torture, and the idea of “networking” makes you want to stick your head in a hole? Guess what? You’re not alone. I’m a bit of a goof and get insecure at conferences and festivals. However, when I agreed to write this book I realized that I’d better get over it, especially since I knew I needed to meet some awesome people who would agree to contribute illustrations. As mentioned, I’m kinda quirky, but instead of trying to become someone I’m not, I leaned into my inner goof and it’s worked wonders…

Exhibit A: I attended a conference in NYC and there standing 10 feet away, engaged in a conversation, was my hero, director/animator/illustrator Julia Pott. As she had just presented, it was no wonder that others were waiting to talk to her, too. There wasn’t much time before the break was over, so I did something straight-up rid-onk-ulous. I stood behind the person Ms. Pott was conversing with, put my hands into a heart shape, and danced around, hoping that she would embrace my silly gesture of admiration. Her face lit up. She said, “Hello!” I said, “I love you.” She said, “How about a hug?” I told her that her work was incredibly inspiring and mentioned that I was writing this book. I followed up with a short email and asked Julia to contribute an illustration to my book. The result is to the left, a drawing of her friends called Triangle. I adore it, especially since in my own wacky way, I did just that: I entered one of my hero’s Triangles. And so can you.

Step 5: Share and Repeat

The time has come. You’ve fully packaged your completed film and are ready to share it. Who you send it to depends solely on the dream in your heart. Only advice here (again) is to be as professional as humanly possible. If you want your project seen by film festival audiences worldwide, learn about which festivals are the best fit for your film, read the submission guidelines, and get everything in on time.

If you’re trying to get hired, craft your correspondences in a way that reflects your capacity as a professional. Employers appreciate artistic talent, but even more they want to hire someone who is dependable and articulate—they want someone who can get the work done easier and faster. At the very least, spell-check and proofread everything.

And one more thing: Never stop. Being an artist is a constant itch. After completing this project you may need a day’s rest, but as soon as you feel that itch to create again, yield to it. Sketch, storyboard, write, animate, dream, and experiment your way to new, amazing stories. And stay in touch. Ask me questions or share your work on my Facebook group Animated Storytelling. You can count me in as part of your network, and I’ll be rooting for your stories to come alive.

Unlocking Your Story Recap

Package Your Project.

Upload Password

Protected Film Online

Title Logo and Still

Synopsis with a Hook

The Tag

Director’s Bio

Story of the Film

Determine Where to Show It.

Consider Skipping the Festival Route.

Create Your Network.

Connect with Your Peers

Be a Good Audience

Tease Out Your Work

Network in Person

Start Your Next Project!

Index

Numbers

2D animation, 161

2D CGI, 164–166

2D stop motion, 163–165

2D/vector style, 165

3D, adapting to feel like 2D, 169–170

3D CGI, 165–166, 173–174

3D stop motion, 163–165

3D style, 165

A

active movement, 183

Acts 1-3. See three-act structure

adapt or conform, 166–174

additive color system, 103

advertisement for place, creating, 20–21

Airbnb, 104

airplane ad, 8–9

Aladdin, 49

Alcock, Bruce, 65

Allen, Rama, 111

The Amazing Spider-Man, 116

Amica, 100

Anderson, Wes, 105

“anima,” meaning, 122

animatic, defined, 90

animation recap, 188

anthology experimental form, 68–70

anticipation and follow through, 182–183

Araya, Greg, 79

AREA 52, 118–119

Arsenic and Old Lace, 57

ASD (autism spectrum disorder), 173

Asset Building, 18–20

At the Quinte Hotel, 65

audience

being good member of, 199

determining, 5

engaging, 144

B

Babble Bubble story development, 30

Back to the Start, 160

Backseat Bingo, 195, 198–199

“bad art,” creating, 114

Bad to Worse, 57

Battista and Federico, 115

beaded necklace nonlinear structure, 38, 40–41

Bear Story, 166

beats

distilling, 72

explained, 24–25

Beauty and the Beast, 49

Big Idea, 6–9

Birdmen, 155–156

blur, considering, 185–186

Bonaiuto, Amanda, 167

Boogie-Doodle, 63

book ending nonlinear structure, 38–40

The Book of Life, 146–147

The Book of the Dead, 147

Borge, Richard, 78

Borst, Phil, 31–33

“Boy Meets Girl,” 56–57

brain, percent used, 139

branding

making known, 199

and motion graphics, 155

Breadheads concept art, 152

breaking up sequences, 180

Bruner, Jordan, 109, 115, 155–156

Bucsi, Réka, 68–69, 166

buddy stories, 49

C

calendar, creating, 6, 178–179

Caliri, Jamie, 33–35

Campion, Jane, 68

Caramelo, 147

Carroll, Lewis, 65

center of frame, getting out of, 184

challenging scenes, managing, 180

character and conflict, 28

character-based animation, 26

characters, nailing poses, 182

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 49

Cinderella, 49, 57–58

circular movement, 183

Cirrus by Bonobo, Music Video stills, 66–67

Clair, Patrick, 138

clarity, importance of, 4, 11–14

climax in story structure, 26

close-up shot, 82

CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black), 103

collage style, 165

color

design for movement, 103

high-contrast, 106

making rules, 108

recap, 109

and saturation, 105

supporting subjects, 106

surprise for punctuation, 107

symbolism, 101–102

thematic and accent, 107

white space, 106

Color Blind, three-act structure, 31–33

color palette, limiting, 104–105

color script

creating, 98–102

nursery rhyme, 108

color vocab, 97–98

colors, supporting, 102

comfort zone, going beyond, 114

coming of age plot, 49

concept development, creative brief, 4–5

confidence, gaining, 180

conflict in story structure, 26, 28, 49, 53, 149

conform or adapt, 166–174

connecting with peers, 198–199

continuity/diversity experimental form, 67. See also transitions and continuity

Cook, Luis, 39

Coraline, 164

Costa, Ariel

Feed Your Creative Brain, 186

Pixel Show, 107

R&D Los Angeles, 60–61

Welcome to the Aescripts + Aeplugins Playground, 179

countdown nonlinear structure, 38, 42

Creation Story, 57

creative brief, 4, 5, 14, 20, 162, 196

The Croods, 49

cue cards, writing beats on, 25

cutout animation, 71

Cytowic, Richard E., 139

D

Day of the Dead, 146

day-to-day life, designing rules for, 149

dead zones, 84

deadline for piece, determining, 6

design, experimenting with, 16–18. See also world building

Desrumaux, Celine, 42

diagonal movement, 183

dialogue, 135–137

diegetic and non-diegetic sound, 129–131

directional continuity, 89

directional movement, composing, 183–184

director’s bio, including, 195

Disney, Walt, 75–76

distribution, determining, 5

“Don’t go in the water,” 13–14

Dragon concept art, 151

Draper, Don, 163

Dulaney, Kim

Airbnb, 104

Eno, 102, 106

Linda Loves, 109

OFFF Online Flash Film Festival title, 155–156

E

editing, 181

Eilam, Maya, 58

elevator pitch, 11–12

ending, choosing, 29–30

Eno, 102, 106

Enright, Mike, 61

environments. See world building

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 57

experimental forms. See also personal experimentation

anthology, 68–70

continuity/diversity, 67

cutout animation, 71

overview, 59–62

pure poetry, 64–65

repetition/evolution, 66–67

visual music, 63

experimentation list, 120–124

experimenting

with design, 16–18

with nondigital sources, 125

F

“fail better,” 114

family & community, designing rules for, 149

Feed Your Creative Brain, 186

Fernandez, Ed, 123

files and folders, organizing, 179

film & type style, 165

film festivals

competitiveness, 192–193

determining for submissions, 196–197

networks, 198–201

skipping, 198

submission assets, 194–196

FilmFreeway, 193, 196

Finding Nemo, 49

first draft, 10

first love, story about, 7–8

fluid transitions, 165

Foley sound, 131–133

Fong, Karin, 129, 167–169

Forest, 196–197

format, determining, 5, 161

framing shots, 83–84

Free Radicals, 63

Frey, Jacob, 166

Friedman, Max

Forest, 196–197

Work, 192

From Bad to Worse, 57

Frozen, 49

G

Game of Thrones, 39–40

The Gate storyboards, 86

Gilliam, Terry, 71, 162, 164

God of War III, 167–169

Godard, Jean-Luc, 36

good versus evil plot, 49

graphs, using in narrative form, 56–58

Gutierrez, Jorge R., 146–147

H

Hamlet, 57

hand-drawn animation, 163

hand-drawn technique, 165

handmade style, 165

Happy Feet, 49

Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, 57

Harris, Cyriak, 66–67

Harris, Mark Jonathan, 172

Heart, three-act structure, 33–35

Heller, Linda, 70–71

Hemingway, Ernest, 10, 12

Hendrix, Jimi, 111–113

Herman, Gregory, 116–118

high concept nonlinear structure, 38, 45–46

Hitchcock, Alfred, 133

hook, writing for synopsis, 194

horizontal movement, 183

Horses, 181

How long must it be? 5

hue, saturation, and value, 97–98, 101–102

I

Ice Age, 49, 194

ideas. See Big Idea

Imaginary Forces, 129

imagination, stretching, 24

importing still images, 170–171

The Incredibles, 49

Indovina, Lauren, 102, 106

influence

allowing, 15–16

and world building, 146–147

information/motion graphics, 26–27

inspiration

building around, 37, 153–155

sources, 120

INSTANTMOVIE, 70–71

Into Mister Sharky’s Mouth, 189

J

Jabberwocky, 65

Jane Eyre, 57

Janicki, Maciek, 173–174, 181

Jaws

pitching, 11

plot, theme, and elevator pitch, 12

sound effects, 133

tagline, 13

Jin, Kino, 86

Jiron, Miguel, 172–173

Job, Joris & Marieke, 45–46, 81

journey plot, 49

“Just Do It,” 14

K

Keesling, Brooke, 144, 150

Kezelos, Christopher, 43–45

Kinder, Marsha, 172

Kleon, Austin, 191

Koertge, Ron, 65

Kuwahata, Ru, 64–65

L

Leaf, Caroline, 164

length of piece, determining, 5

Li, Richan, 30

linear movement, 183

linear storytelling, 25, 47

The Lion King, 49

The Little Mermaid, 49

live action and hand drawn, 173

live-action footage, shooting, 171

logo, designing for title, 194

look and feel, 15

love stories, 49

A Love Story, 160

Lye, Len, 63

Lyons, Robert, 61

M

Macro Studies 1-20, 116–117

Mad Men, 162–163

Mahoy, Scott, 172

Make Work You Want to Be Hired to Do, 116

The Maker, 43–45

“Man in Hole,” 56–57

managing challenging scenes, 180

Matsuyama, Shuhei, 100

McDowell, Alex, 143

McKee, Robert, 135

McLaren, Norman, 63

medium close-up, 82

message, exploring, 29. See also short with message

The Metamorphosis, 57

middle journey, 39

Mitterhofer, Denyse, 105

Miyazaki, Hayao, 160

Moana, 49

Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 71, 162, 164

Morena, John, 118–119

Morton, Louis

Nose Hair storyboards, 96

Passer Passer, 40–41, 122

motion graphics

and branding, 155–156

narration/voiceover, 137–138

three-act structure, 26–27

title sequences, 59

movement case study, 122. See also strategic movement

Mulan, 49

muse, summoning, 6–10

music

score to “theme,” 133–134

scoring against, 134–135

of “silence,” 134

as sound effects, 132–133

muting soundtrack, 187–188

N

narration/voiceover for motion graphics, 137–138

narrative form

character’s biggest secret, 55–56

conflict, 53

graphs, 56–58

start later, 54

natural order, designing rules for, 149

Negative Space, 64–65

networking, 198–201

Nightmare Before Christmas, 146

No Reason by TŌTH, 167

nonlinear storytelling

beaded necklace, 40–41

book ending, 39–40

countdown, 42

high concept, 45–46

puzzle, 43–45

recap, 47

Nose Hair storyboards, 96

nursery rhyme, subverting, 107

O

objective of piece, determining, 6

OFFF brand, 155–156

online communities, participating in, 199

Orpheus, 146

Osorio, Gabriel, 166

outsourcing, 171

overcoming the “monster” plot, 49

P

packaging projects, 193–195

Pan, Hsinping, 120–121

panning extreme wide shot, 82

Paper City, 173–174

Passer Passer, 40–41, 122

Passionless Moments, 68

password protected films, uploading, 193–194

PCS (pre-color script), 99–100, 102

The Pearce Sisters, 39

peers, connecting with, 198–199

personal experimentation, 116–120. See also experimental forms

physical order, designing rules for, 150

Pixel Show, 107

plots of stories

classic examples, 48–49

writing down, 12

Poe, Edgar Allen, 65

Porter, Max, 64–65

poses, nailing for characters, 182

Pott, Julia, 200–201

premise, storyboarding, 93

pre-production

Asset Building, 18–20

Big Idea, 7–9

concept development, 4–14

creative brief, 4–5

experimenting with design, 17

planning, 4

Previsualization (previs), 14–18

recap, 20

The Present, 166

Previsualization (previs), 14–18

Princess Mononoke, 49

problem in story structure, 26–27

production calendar creating, 6, 178–179

projects

packaging, 193–195

sharing and repeating, 202

starting, 180–181

teasing out, 201

PSAs (public service announcements)

creative briefs, 4

Water and Ink, 45

Psycho, 133

Purdy, Al, 65

pure poetry, 64–65

puzzle nonlinear structure, 38, 43–45

Q

quest plot, 49

question in story structure, 26

R

R&D Los Angeles, 60–61

rags to riches plot, 49

rebel/life against the grain plot, 49

rebirth and redemption plot, 49

red, symbolism of, 101

“References” file, creating, 16

repetition/evolution experimental form, 66–67

Reservoir Dogs, 134

resolution in story structure, 26–27

RGB (Red, Green, Blue), 103

rising action in story structure, 26

Robinson, Chris, 62

role reversal plots, 49

rule of thirds, 83

rules for world building, time and place, 148–150

running time, determining, 89

Rybczynski, Zbigniew, 67

S

saturation, hue and value, 97–98

using mindfully, 105

saving versions, 179

Scarecrow, 160

Selick, Henry, 164

Sensory Overload: Interacting with Autism, 172–173

sequences, breaking up, 180

sharing and repeating projects, 202

Sheehy, Sterling

concept art, 153

Dragon concept art, 151

Wakefield storyboards, 92

ship of fools plot, 49

shooting live-action footage, 171

short with message, creating, 189. See also message

shot composition. See storyboards

shot intentions, 85

shot length, mixing up, 184–185

shot timing, mixing up, 185. See also timing and animatics

A Single Life, 45–46, 81

six-word story, 12–13

skill set, working on edge of, 114–115

Slaughterhouse Five, 56

Sleeping Beauty, 49

social order, designing rules for, 149, 151

Sockwell, Felix, 170

solution in story structure, 26–29

The Sopranos, 57

sound. See also time and sound

analysis, 141

diegetic and non-diegetic, 129–131

effects, 131–133

experimenting with, 140–141

leading story, 129–136

overview, 127–129

recap, 140

and time, 90–92

sound marks, hitting, 187

soundtrack, flexibility and muting, 187–188

spatial continuity, 88

Spielberg, Steven, 133

staging items around subjects, 84–87

Star Wars, 49

starting projects, 180–181

Stevens, Jeff, 156

still images, importing, 170–171

stop motion animation, 163–164

stories, moving forward, 24–25

story

finding, 7–9

translating, 162–163

unlocking, 202

Story, 135

story and tone objectives, clarifying, 11–14

Story Ideas document, keeping, 48

story journal, keeping, 48

story structure. See also style and story

beats, 24–25

including for film festivals, 195

nonlinear, 36–47

three-act structure, 25–35

storyboards. See also visual storytelling

best methods, 80–82

creating, 79

framing, 83–84

premises, 93

recap, 93

revising, 79–80

rule of thirds, 83

shot composition, 82

staging, 84–87

style frames, 80

thumbnailing, 77–79

strategic movement, 182–186. See also movement case study

The Street, 164

structure, building from inspiration, 37–46

“Stuck in the Middle with You,” 134

Studio Head, pitching to, 11–12

style and story. See also story structure

2D CGI, 164–166

2D stop motion, 165

2D/vector, 165

3D CGI, 165

3D stop motion, 165

collage, 165

conform or adapt, 166–168

film & type, 165

fluid transitions, 165

format, 161

hand-drawn animation, 163, 165

handmade, 165

matching, 160–163

stop motion animation, 163–164

techniques + styles, 165

translating story, 162–163

style frame

roughing out, 18–20

and storyboards, 80

subtractive color system, 103

Sundance film festival, 197

Švankmajer, Jan, 65

Symphony No. 42, 68–69, 166

synopsis, writing hook for, 194

T

tagline, creating, 13–14, 194

Tango, 67

Tarantino, Quentin, 134

technique

adapting, 162

overview, 159–160

recap, 175

technology

designing rules for, 149

protecting, 179

TED-Ed, 138–139

Tell-Tale Heart, 65

temporal continuity, 88–89

ten-card exercise, 72–73

theme of story, identifying, 12, 29, 31

Things used to be hidden, 124–125

“Think Different,” 14

Thor: Ragnarok, 116

three-act structure

character and conflict, 28

Color Blind, 31–33

diagram, 26

Heart, 33–35

overview, 25–27

recap, 47

solution, 28

thumbnailing storyboards, 77–79

time and sound, 90–93, 148–150. See also sound

timing and animatics, 89–93, 138. See also shot timing

Tiny Tales, 105

title, logo design, 194

title sequences, designing, 175

Tom & Jerry, 133

tone, brightness, and darkness, 98

tone and story objectives, clarifying, 11–14

Toy Story, 49

transitions and continuity, 87–89. See also continuity/diversity

transitions case study, 120–122

Triangle, 200–201

TRT (Total Running Time), determining, 89, 137

The Twilight Zone, 57

U

unlocking stories

anthology experimental form, 68–70

continuity/diversity, 67

cutout animation, 71

experimental forms, 59–62

narrative form, 53–58

pure poetry, 64–65

recap, 72, 202

repetition/evolution, 66–67

visual music, 63

Up, 49

uploading password protected films, 193–194

USOC Henry Cejudo, 120–121

V

value, hue, and saturation, 97–98

“vector” graphics, 161

versions, saving, 179

vertical movement, 183

video-editing programs, 91

Vimeo, 193, 198

visual competition, limiting, 106

visual music, 63

visual order, designing rules for, 152–153

visual storytelling, fundamentals, 184–185. See also storyboards

Vonnegut, Kurt, 56, 58

voyage and return plot, 49

W

Wakefield storyboards, 92

Walzel, Cody, 15, 152

Water and Ink PSA, 45

weird science

creating “bad” art, 114

edge of skill set, 114–115

explained, 111

finding, 112–115

recap, 123

Welcome to Kitty City, 67

Welcome to the Aescripts + Aeplugins Playground, 179

Westworld, 116

What is your objective with the piece? 6

What must it be? 5

What percent of your brain do you use? 139

When is it due? 6

Which Way Is Up? 57

White, Jack, 178

white space, 106

Who is it for? 5

wide shot, 82

Wizard of Oz, 49

Wood, Tara Mercedes, 124–125

Work, 192

workarounds, 170–172

world building. See also design

conflicts, 149

day-to-day life, 149

designing and testing, 157

designing rules, 148

diagram, 149

environments, 144, 148, 150

family & community, 149

getting inspiration, 153–155

natural order, 149

overview, 144–145

physical order, 150

recap, 157

social order, 149, 151–152

technology, 149

time and place, 148–150

visual order, 152–153

Wright, Ian, 112–113

Y

“Yes, and…” rule, 9–10, 143–144

Yolked, 123

Yoom Thawilvejakul, Sirirat, 189

Z

Zhang, Jake, 144–145

Zootopia, 49