Okay so I followed this video about foreshortening and…
Sycra. I love you so much for making this video.
YOU GOTTA BE FUCKING SHITTING ME
Sure! There are plenty of resources for those who might be interested in writing for animation!
Writing for an animated television show or movie isn’t all that different from writing for a live action show or film. There are certainly different schools of thought pertaining to the subject - so it’s important to gather as much information as possible and make your own judgments. Also, be weary if you search on Google because most people are just trying to sell you their books on how to be a writer. I’ll list a few of my personal favorite books at the end of this post; books that I’ve used in school while taking creative writing and screen writing classes.
A lot of animation writers will cram as much information as they can into a script. Some writers will even say that every two pages of an animated script should equal about a minute of running time - while a live action script is a page per minute of film. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case though. John K. even argues that a single page of script should equal two minutes of film.
Some argue that an animated script needs to be longer and needs to have more information in order to make a storyboard artists job easier; when really you may just be making it harder. The more information there is on a page of script - the more your storyboard artist is going to have to draw. And just like John K. says before you know it you’re paying thousands of dollars for stuff that’s gonna get cut out of the film anyway.
I would personally trust my storyboard artists to fill in the details themselves. It is their job anyway to visualize the film and provide certain visual cues and ideas. But as the writer it is necessary to provide the basic details such as the time of day, setting, characters involved in the scene, dialog, and even providing the type of shot and camera movement that may be involved in the scene. That should be enough for any storyboard artist to understand. You don’t have to write a novel in order to get the idea across that your character got up from the couch and walked across the living room to the kitchen.
As a storyboard artist I’ve boarded scripts that were too complicated and filled with far too much detail and I drew a lot of boards that were cut because of this. When I get a script that is easy to read and provides simple basic information and nothing more - I just want to hug that writer!
Whether you’re writing something long and complicated, or simple and short - always make sure that it has your vision. Don’t sell yourself short!
But really, it depends on who and what you’re writing for.
In the 30’s Disney created the idea that animated film should be as close to life and reality as possible… and their scripts were pretty complicated at the time because of this! But thankfully guys like Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and the fellas at Termite Terrace kind of broke the Disney tradition. Writing was made simple and the most important and necessary things were left in the hands of the artists - exactly where it should be! Neither approach is wrong though…
In the end, different studios approach writing for animation differently. Some prefer it to be a long, complicated, and winded script… some just want the basics. So it’s important to read what you can and write how ever you feel comfortable writing. So I’ll try to list a few different resources and hopefully they will all help in your quest to be a writer!
Online Resources:
Screenwriting Book Resources:
- The Writers Journey by Christopher Vogler
- Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder
- Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
Animation Book Resources that writers should read:
- The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston
- Animation: The Whole Story by Howard Beckerman
- The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams
If anyone else has any more sources or references that they want to add, please feel free to reblog and add them!
The MET has got some wonderful, fully illustrated textbooks that are available online for free! (X)
DOWNLOAD
- Art of the Islamic World
- The Art of Africa
- The Art of Ancient Egypt
- The Art of the Ancient Near East
- The Art of Renaissance Europe
- The Art of South and Southeast Asia
- The Arts of Korea
- Auguste Rodin: The Burghers of Calais
- Greek Art from Prehistoric to Classical
- Islamic Art and Geometric Design: Activities for Learning
- A Masterwork of Byzantine Art — The Story of David and Goliath
- Medieval Art
- Nature Within Walls: The Chinese Garden Court at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Roman Art
WOW take advantage of this please free knowledge is the best knowledge take it from someone who has to pay lots of money for education
I found this relephant to our interests.
SHRIEKS,
4 all u kids who wanna study some figure drawing/anatomy
- Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth - Andrew Loomis >PDF download<
- Mastering Drawing The Human Figure - Jack Faragasso >PDF download<
- Figure Drawing Design and Invention - Michael Hampton >PDF download<
- Dynamic Figure Drawing - Burne Hogarth >PDF download<
All the downloads are free they only take a little bit time to download because these are big files!
YES
Native American zodiac according to Algonquin moon signs. Includes personality descriptions for each full moon sign.
What is yWriter?
yWriter is a word processor which breaks your novel into chapters and scenes, helping you keep track of your work while leaving your mind free to create. It will not write your novel for you, suggest plot ideas or perform creative tasks of any kind. yWriter was designed by an author, not a salesman!
yWriter5 is free to download and use, but you’re encouraged to register your copy if you find it useful.
If you’re just embarking on your first novel a program like yWriter may seem like overkill. I mean, all you have to do is type everything into a word processor! Sure, but wait until you hit 20,000 words, with missing scenes and chapters, notes all over your desk, characters and locations and plot points you’ve just added and which need to be referenced earlier … it becomes a real struggle. Now imagine that same novel at 40,000 or 80,000 words! No wonder most first-time writers give up.
(Although yWriter was designed for novels, enterprising users have created their own translation files to customise the program to work with plays, non-fiction and even sermons.)What’s so special about yWriter?
I [Simon Haynes, the program author] really struggled with my first novel because I wrote slabs of text into a big word processor file and I just couldn’t make sense of the whole thing at once. No real overview, no easy jumping from scene to scene, nothing.
Next I tried saving each chapter to an individual file, with descriptive filenames, but moving scenes between files was a nuisance and I still couldn’t get an overview of the whole thing (or easily search for one word amongst 32 files)
My last attempt to use Word involved saving every scene as an individual file - e.g. Chapter 01 Scene 01 - Hal Spacejock Gets a Job.doc. That was fantastic until I decided to move one scene three chapters ahead, and had to manually rename all the files. Then I decided to put it back again! I could never remember which of the 200+ files contained a note I was looking for either.
As a programmer I’m used to dealing with projects broken into source files and modules, and I never lose track of my code. I decided to apply the same working method to my novels … and yWriter was the result.
I realize Word, OpenOffice and other modern word processors have outlining features, but they don’t have snapshot backups to sequential files like yWriter does. Roll back scenes to where they were half an hour ago, or re-read a version from four months ago - yWriter stores them all, automatically.————————————————————————————————————————-
^—all the above is c/p’ed from the main website.
I just really wanted to share this with others who might be in need of a really, super useful and FREE writing program to help them keep track of their longer works of fiction. While I love using programs like google Docs, and do still use it for my roughs, Y!writer is really helpful to the editing process in being able to easily drag and drop scenes around wherever you want them, or navigate quickly through huge backlogs of material.
It also allows you to create tags that let you know what characters are in each scenes, where important items turn up, what locations you’re at—and will even run reports to see how many instances you’re using of particular words. Best of all, you can easily export the entire project into a word doc, pdf, or (in beta, i think) ebook.
If you haven’t checked this out, it may be worth a shot.
for my writer friends! :D
