Film Courage: How many pages is an animated script?
Andy Guerdat, Television Writer, Producer, Instructor, and Podcaster: Well it depends
because there animated scripts come in various lengths depending on whether they're a feature
whether they're half an hour which is normal in a television show or with little kids it's
very often or even not so little kids they very often package two episodes two stories within
one 30 minute episode so 11 starting with the beginning 11 minutes smallest is 11 minute script
is usually 15 to 16 pages a 22 minute script is usually in the high 20s 28 29 maybe 30 pages and
then a feature-length script animated features tend to be shorter for some reason than live
action scripts for one reason they're enormously expensive animation is hugely expensive so if you
don't need to go you know 2 hours if an hour and a half tells the story we don't we're not going
to spend the extra money it's much cheaper to shoot two hours of live action footage than it
is to do two hours of animation so an animated feature script will often be 60 pages maybe 80 .
Film Courage: How does writing animation differ from live action?
Andy: You know fundamentally it's it the fundamentals of story structure are the same
and the difference is the primary difference is we talking about dialogue dialogue is nowhere near as
important in animation as it is in live action you want to use as little as possible as little
dialogue as possible as someone explained to me when I was first starting out there's nothing more
boring than watching mouth flap an animation watching two characters do this that's not
interesting even the great animator even a great artist can only make an animated character's face
do so many things they're they're more limited than an actual human face even someone who's not
an actor if you look at a just an average person's face for you know watch them in
a restaurant or something they're going to make all kinds of subtle movements within their face
their eyebrows their their lips and so on that that animation simply cannot capture and so you
don't want to hinge your animated story on the faces of the characters you want it to be told
through movement action vision I was told when I first started writing animation I was taught
told by a veterans who said if I see a a screen script page and there's more than three lines of
dialogue before I see an action line it's already wrong I don't even have to read anymore because
two people two animated characters going blah blah blah blah blah blah blah it isn't like an
episode of Friends it's not going to work and so there are exceptions to those rules of course but
but mostly that's true you want to tell the story through action as much as possible and
even if there isn't something terribly exciting happening on screen find something in that scene
that's visual I always ask myself when I'm writing live action I try to ask myself what
are the actors doing I don't necessarily have to write it in but I I need to have some idea of what
are they doing well just standing there talking what are they doing and in animation I'm saying
what are they drawing what is my animator drawing because my script is going to go
to a board artist the episode director the supervising director and then all
the technicians involved and all those different decisions remember an animated script everything
has to be decided there is no set right so what color is the wall going to be what color are the
what kind of lamp are there going to be is there going to be a lamp what kind of they have to draw
everything so I have to think visually what are they drawing what what are we seeing what what the
animator not just going to have them stand there he's going to have to have something going on so
it's better that I think of it than just some guy who I probably will never meet is going to have to
make it up even if they don't use my suggestion it gives them an idea of what might be happening
visually my screenwriting training has been enormously helpful in animation because I have to
write visually yes I wrote a lot of sitcoms which were much more of a dialogue heavy medium but
being able to write visually is enormously helpful in animation can you give us a little more on the
process of writing an animated screenplay well usually you're writing a television show if
that's a very different process than doing it for a feature company the animated movies I've
written are really more TV movies so with Paw Patrol and things like that I've written that
were they call them movies anyway those are really more like an hour so those are those scripts were
probably yeah between probably 60 Pages so but but the the process in in animation as a general
R is much slower because they don't have the the pressure of usually the pressure we're trying to
fit an actor's schedule or something like that they can afford to slow things down and take
their time and that just can be good but it also can be annoying because it takes forever to get
something through the through the pipeline so it takes a long time a lot of executives are going to
weigh in in a perfect world you know the director and you can talk things through with the director
sometimes that's not the case uh so the the in animated features the things that people think
about they think about Pixar movies and that sort of thing that's a different animal because
Pixar and even Disney feature animation which is separate from Pixar they are isolated and separate
from the rest of the company I'm not allowed to even pitch to Disney Animation or Pixar and in
fact they don't even take pitches they develop almost everything in house they have writers on
staff who develop the work with the directors animation directors and they develop their
projects in house most of the time they don't take pitches from Outsiders even Outsiders like me who
work for Disney they don't take pitches so that's a that's a world I have not been allowed into I
will tell you an an interesting historical story though if you like which is when in 1988 there
was a major writer strike and my then partner and I got a call from our agent saying would you like
to write a Disney animated feature and I said but there's a writer strike and they explained well
animation is covered under a separate contract which is the animation Guild which I am also a
member of now I wasn't then so it had nothing to do with the writer Guild so you're allowed to do
it but I said but there are no Disney animated features well they're starting them up okay
well we had a meeting with a guy at Disney feature animation which was a very tiny operation in those
days and they and the guy explained to us we're going to release this movie called The Little
Mermaid really soon and we think it's going to be a hit and we have another movie coming up after in
the pipeline called Beauty and the Beast and the third one we want to be something called The Lion
King but we don't have a story for The Lion King could you go off and think of a story obviously
we weren't the only writers they had approached sure okay we got nothing else to do as a strike
on so we went off and we came up with a story for The Lion King but it had nothing to do with
the story they wound up using it was a very cute story but very different story and he said well
thank you very much but we're not going to use that okay and as we were walking out he said but
if you have anything else let us know and I said well we were kicking around an idea called pigmon
with a pig and it was a story of a of a little pig who was all the Barnyard animals were afraid
the little pig was going to get slaughtered like the other pigs do so they tried to find think of
a way to save him and they get they convince the stuffy English Bulldog who lives in The
Farmhouse can you convince the pig can you teach the pig how to be a dog and then he'll be spared
because nobody nobody nobody Slaughters dogs so okay so the English Bulldog takes him on and it
was very funny it was my fair lady with a pig and a dog and the guy bought it in the room just like
that and I said wow this is great this is easy and then they went to make a deal and we couldn't make
a deal because they're what they were offering was so little money that we couldn't justifiably
take it so we sold them the idea outright for like $10,000 or something and they still own
it somewhere Disney still owns Pygmalion if they ever want to make it but since those days
feature animation has changed a lot obviously Toy Story was the thing that changed it Pixar changed
it because now they they realized how enormously successful they could be animation is has a lot of
things going for it's evergreen you can show it to generation after generation after generation they
don't even know it's old my grandchildren watch Toy Story they don't they don't know it could
have been made last deer for all they know and it can you can sell it to other countries easily
because you don't even have to subtitle it you just changed the mouth flap if and a little bit
and it's suddenly It's Chinese so there's a lot of reasons why they do feature animation or animation
in general the downside of it is it's much more expensive than to shoot live action and uh it's
it takes forever to do the steps required to finish an animated feature take forever
so something that's commissioned now a script that's commissioned now and if it's a feature
it probably won't see the light of day for eight years and the material I write for television it
doesn't I probably from the time I conceive an idea for an episode to the time it's on the air
is probably two years so it takes forever you said things have changed drastically from when you were
pitching back at the last writer strike in the 80s what advice would you have for someone today
wanting to get into animation in the screenwriting side to get into screen animation screenwriting is
a tough thing to do because they it's because it's all generated in-house they're not going
to read they're not in the business of reading animated spec scripts that's not going to do you
any good there's nobody probably nobody at Pixar there's nobody at most of the feature animation
departments who's even bothering to do that what I would advise anybody interested in animation to do
if you're a writer and you're not an animator is to hook up with an animator there's many as many
young talented out of work animators as there are writers and so I would find one one to hook
up with and to make your own animated shorts the beauty part of animation is anybody can
do it and unless you're you know if if production values aren't don't have have to be sky high you
can do it fairly inexpensively depending on the programs you're using and to make some animated
shorts things that you can put on YouTube things you could put in festivals think you can get some
attention and if you get the attention of someone at Pixar the attention of someone at Disney or
Nickelodeon or wherever that's probably the best way in it's not like a traditional screenplay
though in the sense of or a live action screenplay there are lots of producers who would like to read
it that's not really often the case in animation there probably are some but it's not not as many
as there are in in live action so you don't wouldn't approach it the same way I would if
were I interested in that specifically I think I would be going down the road of finding something
I could write and produce myself or with a partner and that would probably be the best way in.