This year, I’ve spent a lot of time developing new projects.  And that’s a very different sort of thinking than required for actually writing them.  At the development stage, I’m concerned by finding the identity of a story, establishing what makes it different from anything else out there.  And at the same time, I’m curious what existing stories I can learn from.

It’s an interesting stage, that utilises some of the same thinking skills as copywriting does.  The commonality is about establishing uniqueness in some regard, and finding a way to capitalise on it.  My training in this comes initially from working in the world of recruitment advertising, writing job ads that would appear in anything from The Sunday Times, to (seriously) Plastics & Rubber Weekly, to whatever your local newspaper is.  Having to capture the essence of a job in three paragraphs, while also conveying the employer’s brand, done to appeal to the small number of people you want to apply for the job and put others off, all packaged halfway creatively with a credible headline…it takes some doing, and I did it again and again and again, writing thousands of ads for two agencies as a copywriter.

I got to write brochures, and radio ads, and speeches and more, but recruitments ads formed the basis of that skillset.  Now, those copywriting skills are invaluable in coming up with concepts.  But actually writing the script calls for a different set of muscles.  Here, what’s important is empathy, to be able to understand where a character is coming from and how they wish to express themselves.  Pace, so scenes move at a rate that pulls the audience along with them, and changes as and when necessary to create a compelling rhythm.  And purpose, so that each scene serves a function in the overall story.  There’s also the business of conjuring what happens on a screen in terms of images and sound, so that the story is told primarily by those means, and isn’t just a matter of talking heads.

Every time I do some scripting, I learn again what it’s like to do so.  Sometimes it works beautifully, other times less so.  It can take a while to hit a groove that works for the script in question.  The last couple of days, that’s been about finding the rhythm of the pilot episode of an animated series for kids.  And I reckon I’ve got it, though can see that I may be challenged on some of the choices I’ve made.  That’s in the realm of tone: the series has a quasi-fantastic setting, but I wanted the relationships between children and adults to feel real.  So, the mystique is in the world of the story: the kids can and do have adventures, but adults will be around some of the time when they do.  Which I hope is a feature in this story’s favour: I like the idea of realistic relationships in a fantastic milieu.  Fingers crossed.

It’s been fun playing with some of the possibilities of animated storytelling.  The episode has a false start that leads viewers down one road, before making it clear that we’re headed down another.  That’s done through a fantasy sequence, which is a case of both having and eating cake: ie, it presents the show as being more full of derring-do that it actually is.  A risky strategy, arguably, to show viewers what they could have and then take it away.  Making it important that I get right what is actually delivered.

Another delightful animation element is the brief appearance of a buffalo as imagined by three different characters, an indulgence which would be ridiculously expensive if filmed, but costs no more than a cat or dog in animation terms.  And it brings to life the interior worlds of the characters pondering the hairy herbivore beautifully.  Fun fun fun.

There’s already some concept art been done for this project, and when I hand it over to my collaborator he’ll do some more inspired by the script I’ve written rather than the one we’ve been imagining up till now.  This is something we’ve developed for a few months now, and it’s been fascinating to see it evolve.  And in a couple of weeks we’ll be pitching it to an outfit who may want to take the project further, as partners or in some other form.  It’s an interesting adventure, and I’ve enjoyed every minute.