Unless a specifi c brief has been set requiring an answer, such as an advertising campaign promoting a particular product or service, the job of the scriptwriter is fi rst to seek inspiration for the story. This can come from a rich variety of sources, including a writer’s own experience, observations, and ideologies, or from responding to facets of the experiences of others.
These could include recollections, interpretations, dreams, or fantasies.
Such starting points are known as the “premise” or “inciting incident” for a story, acting as a driving motivation for the production as a whole to be made.
In attempting to establish a narrative structure for the story, the scriptwriter must identify important contextual aspects, such as the history, geography, sociology, and duration of the piece. It is vital to introduce immediately a sense of when the story is occurring, where it is set, who is involved, and how long the story lasts, as all these factors directly affect both the following structure of the narrative and the wider context for the audience. Importantly, they also provide an early overview for the writer of the possibilities and limitations of the structure, establish “story laws,” and help defi ne “logic” for the production more broadly. These laws are especially signifi cant in an imagined world that does not conform to realistic conditions since given factors, such as jeopardy, need permission from the scriptwriter to exist.
Allowing certain situations to occur, while refusing others, helps embed a
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AnimationPreproduction—Planning and Scriptwriting
conditionally defi ned logic that the audience can understand and relate to.
These conditions serve to signal occasions where, for example, danger might lurk or fortunes could be sought, and have a pivotal role in developing a deep structural narrative because they permit the connected ideas of anticipation, suspense, and release that are crucial to storytelling and which ensure the audience is emotionally invested in the story.
Premise
A premise manifests itself as a simple description of an outline for a story in literal form. Through a combination of the scriptwriter’s research, deliberation, and play around the broad subject or focused inciting incident, a collection of words and phrases becomes a more refi ned description, simply structured into the beginning, middle, and end of a story, which allows the formation of an animated narrative structure to emerge.
In his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (1999), Robert McKee suggests that narrative can be identifi ed by some key structural components. For example, a story that explores a coming of age or a rite of passage can be identifi ed as “maturation,”
while one that follows the journey of how a central character or characters go from bad to good is classifi ed as “redemption.” A story depicting how a central character, or characters, go from good to bad may be described as
“punitive,” while a work that examines the struggle between knowing right from wrong and acting on those impulses can be regarded as “testing.”
“Education” describes those stories that explore how characters “learn” to see a new direction, while “disillusionment” represents stories that explore
how a character might be turned to having a very negative worldview. These early drawings for Animal Farm (1954) not only help visualize scenes, but also allow a sense of mood and atmosphere to be evoked that underlines the sentiment of the story.
Opposite Animation is often used in television advertising as a way of seeing how something works “inside,” penetrating the surface to reveal the inner life of the subject.
Story ladders and friezes
There are simple visual and textual mechanisms, such as storyboards (see pages 75–81), to help writers quickly review and test the premise of a story. As animation is a highly visual medium, it makes sense for the writer to get used to seeing his or her ideas in rough visualized preproduction format.
For example, a story ladder can be employed to review the main aspects of the plot before subplots or additional storytelling information is considered.
Here, single panels are roughly drawn and contain brief written descriptions of plot developments. A story frieze performs much the same purpose, but is often displayed in a horizontal line or grid format.
Grant Orchard employs a story frieze to lay out his animated exhibition design for the “Live Science” exhibit in London’s Science Museum.
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Plot
Once a story has been decided, it then needs to be carefully constructed and tested so that all of the informative events link structurally toward a conclusion. This is known as a “plot.” In animation, the plot is often designed in tandem with the narrative structure, which is known as a “storyline” or
“story arc.” Storylines allow the textual depiction of several characters involved in the story to be accommodated in parallel with plot events, while story arcs usually describe extended or ongoing storytelling in animated television series that may run over several episodes. Both storylines and story arcs offer a framework that supports the continuity and accuracy of the story, the latter helping the audience understand where the story was left and where it picks up in a subsequent episode as part of a bigger series of programs.
A plot is generally made up of a simple structure involving some or all aspects of exposition, rising action, confl ict, climax, falling action, and resolution. The beginning of a plot opens with an exposition that introduces the key characters and settings necessary to tell the story for an audience.
The plot develops through a rising action in which events occur that help the audience understand both the passing of time and the way in which the events are interlinked together. These events inevitably precede some kind of confl ict, where problems between a character and other characters, environments, society at large, or even with themselves, are illustrated and amplifi ed for the audience. This leads to a climax where these agitating factors combine to “peak,” perhaps exposing secrets or signaling struggles and confl icts, before receding through the falling action where the impact of the climax is refl ected through characters or situations. A resolution can be achieved when a conclusion to the plot is attained, although some plots deliberately prevent this in order to keep a story open or alive. Resolutions allow an audience to release their tension or anxiety, whereas a
non-resolution deliberately keeps an audience in a state of suspense.
British animator Joanna Quinn begins to outline a plot, using quick sketches to capture her ideas for framing scenes and also thinking about how to animate the unfolding story through transitions and camera moves.
Animation plot themes
Writers might consider using the following plot themes as useful starting points for creating their own animated material, or categorizing the work of others. Here are some examples of animated productions, or productions that use animated special effects, that illustrate the themes described:
Adventure—Alice in Wonderland
Forbidden love—The Hunchback of Notre Dame Love—Beauty and the Beast
Maturation—The Jungle Book
Metamorphosis—While Darwin Sleeps
Pursuit—Beep, Beep (Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner) Quest—Jason and the Argonauts
Temptation—Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Underdog—Cinderella