Posts Tagged ‘insights into making a show’
John Rogers has a post today in his continuing series about making a TV pilot. It makes me happy that in a lot of ways, live-action TV is very similar to animated TV (they’re both maddening). Of particular interest is this bit:
That said, there are some interesting bits in the process. I had the usual thrill with clearances. This is when the legal department checks out your script and sees where it may cross with actionable coincidences in the real world. For example , in my script a children’s toy named “Mr. Flopsy” is brandished by a drunk dad. Nothing more than a funny name. The Legal Department informs me, in all seriousness, that there is indeed a Mr. Flopsy-brand bunny rabbit doll, and we need to change the name.
This sounds remarkably similar to my coverage of the same issue. So at least I know that, after years of experience, clearances still make no sense at all.
I will return to my regular schedule of posting about making a TV show sometime next week, when I’m not quite so close to some of my topics, and can mock them more effectively.
Continuing my silly attempt to document how productions evolve, which began two weeks ago and will go on until someone on the production notices what I’m doing and has me killed.
We’ve touched on the issue of assets before, but it bears some extra scrutiny, because your asset count largely defines what kind of an episode and series you’re going to make.
What is an asset? In a 3D series, an asset is a character, prop, location of effect that you have spent time and money creating, that you expect you can use again at some point. In this way, animation assets are similar to financial assets, which you see when reviewing your bank statements (YMMV). However, you will find in the course of creating your show that the fact that you have these things around means you feel obligated to use them repeatedly, which actually makes them more like liabilities. Headaches ensue.
On the one hand, having a fully-functioning model of your main character is a great thing to have around. It means you don’t have to re-create your principal cast every scene (which undoubtedly speeds up production over time). In terms of principal cast and locations, you want to have as much re-usable material as you can. These core elements are often called the MMP, or Main Model Pack.
(You will often, in the mid-part of a production, find yourself tempted to claim: “this character that I just made up on the spot right now was ALWAYS part of the MMP, don’t you remember?” Saying such things to the Line Producer will cause momentary confusion as he reviews his notes on the matter, but usually results in letter bombs and voodoo dolls. The MMP is for the most core of elements only, and may not be added to willy-nilly. At least not obviously.)
Anything beyond the MMP is considered episodic. The phrase: “He rushes past a man wearing a bowler hat and a pinstripe suit” will result in the Production Manager flagging “CH – MAN IN BOWLER HAT AND PINSTRIPE SUIT” as an asset to be designed and modelled. The first thing that happens is that you’re asked WTF a bowler hat looks like, and you’re forced to look it up on Google because – despite years of being confident about the subject – you’re suddenly uncertain if you’ve used the wrong term after all.
Next, you are shown several designs of a man in a bowler hat wearing a pinstripe suit, and asked to pick one. In most cases, the second option is the best. There’s no good reason for this rule, and certainly never tell anyone you think this way, or you’ll start getting the Line Producers’ choices in second place in every email. And the Line Producer has a thing for big fluffy pink feathers, so you’ve got to be careful.
Once you’ve chosen the design, it goes to be modelled in 3D. One cannot say much on this subject. One cannot remember why. Every time one tries, one has a striking headache in the back of the head where the microchip was implanted.
Now that you’ve got your finished 3D model of Man in Bowler Hat and Pinstripe Suit, you’re ready to make your episode. All’s good in the world. Except… four episodes later, your main character is meant to be conversing with a pretty woman in the park who he’d really like bring out for dinner. And your Line Producer informs you that you’ve run out of available assets for the series, so you’re going to have to start doubling up. And so it’s suggested that you swap out the woman at the park, and use the Man in Bowler Hat and Pinstripe Suit instead! It’s an asset! It pre-exists! Perfect!
“No no no”, you say, “I don’t want to have the main character hitting on some crumply old man in a pinstripe suit!” It’s not that there’s necessarily anything WRONG with that… but y’know… once you make an episode like THAT, that’s ALL anyone’s going to talk about. So why don’t we just swap out the man in the hat with the woman in the park? It’s like reverse-asset-reuse!
Sadly, that is not how assets work. At this stage, too much investment has been made in the man in the bowler, and it can’t be undone. The woman has to go. And you cry a little.
But not to worry! The Line Producer has an excellent idea! They can arrange to have the Man in Bowler and Pinstripe Suit re-textured so that he’s wearing a GREEN SEQUIN SUIT instead! And one of the lead female actors can do the voice! So rather than having a wobbly old codger in a fine black suit flirting with our main character, we have a wobbly old GENDER-CONFUSED codger-ette in a sparkly green suit flirting with our main character.
And strangely, at this point, you think it’s a pretty good compromise.
I know I’ve said on a few occasions that Line Producers eat cats and drink the blood of virgins, but I don’t mean to imply they’re bad people. If anything, Line Producers are the greatest and most decent people on the planet. They juggle dozens of streams of activity and the wants and needs of at least that many people, all without snapping and killing their co-workers (usually). They are the thing that makes the show go from A to B without devolving into a mess of infighting and thermonuclear war. They deserve all the praise and reverence that human souls are capable of. Without Line Producers (who are often gifted with a great sense of humour, I might add), there would be no show.
I may mock Line Producers, but they are truly God’s chosen people.
(Oh, and they also authorize pay-outs.)
Continuing my random insights into making a TV show, which started last week with Outlines.
As a show creator, you are given great freedoms to invent elaborate plot lines, character arcs and other devious things to make the audience wet themselves with glee. It’s what you’re hired to do. And once you get into it, it’s actually a lot of fun trying to blow the minds of the other people on the production. It’s a wonderful world to be in, except for…
Script Clearances.
Script Clearances are there to protect you in the same way that root canals are there to make your mouth happy. The logic behind them is a bit convoluted, but bears some examination:
You’ve completed your outline, done your first and second drafts, and now the script is in good enough shape that the Line Producer thinks it’s ready to be reviewed for legal concerns. Since you’re writing fiction (and thus have no facts to check), the only thing to worry about are lawsuits regarding creative turf-treading. To avoid this, the script is sent off for clearance.
In the Script Clearance dungeon, a thousand little elves are chained to desks and whipped regularly until they Google every single person, place, or thing in your script. What are they looking for? They’re trying to figure out if anyone ever used your ideas before you did. If you write “hey turnip-face!” they will search for “turnip-face”, and discover that it’s the name of a little animated GIF on deviantART. And the elves will then try and decide if there’s a good chance that anybody is going to sue you over the use of the word. They will weigh all the evidence, and usually decide you’re screwed.
But the elves are also helpful. Rather than just telling you “95% of your ideas aren’t going to fly”, they send you recommendations for “safe” alternatives, which they dutifully check ahead of time. So rather than “turnip-face”, you are told to use “penny-ear”. Or instead of “chromotron”, you get “fairyhop”. “Excalibur” becomes “twinklestick”.
How do they come up with these wonderful suggestions that obviously keep the tone and theme of your original work intact against all odds? Well, nobody knows for sure, but it’s assumed that the elves are semi-literate inbreds whose constant exposure to unshielded magnetic radiation has distorted their appreciation of reality and made them incapable of assembling any thoughts more complex than a search query.
So the Clearance Report comes back to you after much nail-biting and anxiety, and you discover your cool show about metal and action and mind-blowing tension has been reduced to something that reads like Cinderella enacting Care Bears after being kicked in the head repeatedly with a steel-framed boot. And a little part of you dies.
And you say to the Line Producer, you say: “Please, please let us ignore all these changes. Let’s just leave it the way it was and pretend we never asked the elves at all. Can’t we do that?”
And the Line Producer, who has just finished his lunch of Kitten McNuggets and virgin blood, sadly informs you that there is no way to ignore the Script Clearance. The Script Clearance is the Word of God.
This is why: let us suppose you wrote a script with a character named Indiana Jones. Let’s assume that there’s a good reason you’re doing this, because otherwise you seem kinda dumb. But this character name somehow slips in, and it survives to second draft, and you’ve grown attached to it etc etc. Let us suppose that THERE ARE NO ELVES to tell you that Indiana Jones is a bad choice for a character name, and so the show goes into production, airs on TV, and is watched by half the world.
You get sued. You not only get sued, you get sued so badly that a collection agency invents a time machine to go back in time to steal pennies from your piggy bank, to be sure that they leave no stone unturned. You will never work in this town again (whichever town it is) and furthermore, the Line Producer is unemployed and suddenly free to prowl the nighttime streets in search for fresh victims. It’s like Old Marty seeing Young Marty wearing inside-out jeans, and Christopher Lloyd crying out in a quavering voice. Those elves are damn important.
Now there’s this stuff called Insurance which protects a production against space-time paradoxes, but the Insurance Masters have rules that suggest they won’t insure a production that has not had Script Clearance done. But they’re nice about it: you can defy the elves and use a term like “turnip-face”, and the Insurance Masters will cover you on all names EXCEPT that one, thereby maintaining your creative freedom.
Not that you can really do it, because everyone else on the production is staring at you with wide, fearful eyes, pleading silently for you to just tow the line and help them keep their jobs and houses. So “penny-ear” it is.
There are some other side-issues such as appealing to the Lawyers for permission to ignore the Elves, but as most of you know, the Lawyers charge nearly $9 million per hour, and as such every single question you ask them reduces the number of episodes in the season by 4. It becomes a question of: “Do we want these five principal characters to have these names, or do we want to have any screen time for them to appear in?”
When you experience Script Clearances, you start to realize how amazing it is that anything ever gets made for TV. And yet, it also helps explain what appears to be the creative retardation of the entertainment industry. It’s not that they don’t have good ideas, it’s that they can’t get the good ones past the damn Elves.
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to share what it’s like to be the creator/writer of a series. I’ve read a lot of screenwriter blogs, and I always enjoy finding out the ins and outs of a particular niche of the industry… so many things you’d never guess from the outside. As I do my day-to-day work, I think to myself: somebody’s gotta find this as interesting as I do. If only I had enough time to write about it (instead of, say, working on the show, or eating, or sleeping). So for the next while, I’m going to try and give tiny insights into what my job entails. In case anybody cares. Y’know.
For set-up, I should say this: I’m not giving away any production details, nor am I naming anyone by name here. This is about a 3D animated series done in 26 episodes in Canada… I realize things are probably different when you swap out individual variables. This is just my own personal experience.
So: Outlines.
An outline is a short version of your script. Whereas your script is about 30 pages, your outline is only 9. In it, you set out the major scenes, the action, and whatever dialogue you think is really really important. It gives the Story Editor (praise be unto him) an idea where you want to go with the episode. The reason the outline is 9 pages is so that the Story Editor can read your script and say “holy Mary mother of God, no!” and not feel too bad at making you re-do it all.
I’ve never had to re-do one, but I think that’s the reason.
I also think I may have just jinxed myself.
The other thing about outlines is that it gives the production folks an idea where you’re going with the story. It’s amazing how things get broken down, analyzed, cross-referenced and re-assembled in the blink of an eye. When you write about an incidental background character named “Doctor B” in a story, the immediate question is: “Is this the same Doctor B as in episodes 104, 109, 116 and 121?” To which your answer should always be: “Uhhhhh sure.”
So when you pass your outline by the production folk, they are looking at it to see how completely insane you are. You may think that inventing a fantastic new set piece with elaborate action and wonderful potential for drama is what screenwriting is all about. You poor, silly creature. That’s only true if “the set” is an existing asset. Otherwise, your outline will be hit with a gnarled hammer, you will be told you’re horrible pond scum, and you will drink yourself to sleep. Or so I hear.
Now after writing a few outlines, you start to understand how the production limitations work, and you try and accommodate them up front. New character? Nah, we’ll stick to the base cast. New location? I think we can make it work if we stay in the principal location. Special effects? We can do without this time. Why, when you’re done with this episode, you’ll will be a celebrated hero of the production! Victoire!
And yet, as you write your super-efficient episode, you realize that you’re second-guessing all your good ideas. Your action sequences become stationary wordplays, your comedy becomes insightful prose… you find that your story is starting to resemble a stage play, or worse yet, a one-man play. Your characters sit around being philosophical and very, VERY occasionally threatening to go out and… and… wait, OUT?! Ha ha ha, no! It’s just a ruse, of course. Wasn’t that a clever twist? I can smell an Emmy in the making!
And when you’re done, you’ve got a 3-page outline which makes Dorothy Parker look like Ronald McDonald. You send it off to your friend in the UK for a critique, and you never hear from him again. The suicide rate in your town doubles after you lose a copy at a bus stop. The dark cloud of Misery follows you around until you finally decide that you have to re-do it, and this time forget how your creative flamboyancy will cause the Line Producer to have his third aneurism in a month.
You write the second version in easily half the time it takes to write the first version, and the few remaining birds in the trees start to sing with joy. The Story Editor compliments you kindly on such a quick turnaround, though you suspect you’re missing the sarcasm in the email.
Sometimes you want to show the Story Editor your original outline, but you’re sure it contravenes the Geneva Convention.
From there, the outline runs the gauntlet through producers and broadcasters until it is cleared to become a First Draft, at which point you have to figure out how the hell you’re going to pad 9 pages into 30. In the process, you will inevitably invent 900 new props and characters, each of which will cause the Line Producer’s lifespan to decrease by 10%.
(Incidentally, Line Producers stay alive by sucking the life force out of small kittens. Never let a Line Producer babysit your cat.)
By the time you’re finally getting the hang of outlines, all the episodes in the season are done, and you really want to do one more, just so you can show off a little. This is where professional scriptwriters come from. Series creators don’t get to do this, because they’ve got too many other things to do to write for another show. Or so I’m told. Also, we don’t get to go to the bathroom more than twice a day.
So that’s outlines. Just like colonoscopies, they’re an important part of your life. And that’s all I can think to say.
