Thinking Animated
Posted on 24. Sep, 2009 by admin in blog
I’ll be at Flip this year running a mini-scriptwriting course. One of the things I’ll be talking about will be “thinking animated” which is a clumsy old phrase, but a useful one. It was something that the late script editor Jim Campbell started me and brother Greg thinking about many years ago when we were starting out.
Basically the basis of thinking animated is to ask yourself – why is this idea that I’ve come up with an animated idea? Could I make it in live action? If so, why am I going to the trouble of making it animated? If you’ve got talking heads, why animate them? If you have very little visual comedy in your idea – why is it in need of animating? If you’re planning on blowing up the moon, using a chainsaw to hack up kittens, or need a two headed man who disagrees with himself – okay… that sounds like a good candidate for animation (especially for the kittens one – live action could get you into trouble).
Of course like any rule it’s not a hard and fast thing. One enjoyable exception that springs to mind is from the Depict! scheme – Operator by Matthew Walker.
Operator (2007) from Matthew Walker on Vimeo.