I am in need of a brand new storyboard template for the pilot. The college ones are utterly terrible and the ones on Google images are no better. I think the best thing to do is look at and develop an understanding towards the more professional storyboard templates. It's actually a really important thing to consider during the storyboarding process, since I want this to have really good quality cinematography.
Adventure Time, being a board-driven series, is a great example of how to design a storyboard template. It has a nice 16:9 aspect ratio, with a dotted opaque guideline showing the 4:43 ratio. It also has a little space that shows where the CN logo would be on the bottom-right. It's nicely laid out so that it's straight forward and has enough space to either write or draw actions, and a space for timing, which is quite vague but depending on the context of the scene being planned can actually be self-explanatory. On top of that, the panels themselves are big enough to establish the shots effectively, and the dotted lines give the artist an idea of where to place the characters within the frame. The information around the panels is simple and easy to follow. It's also easy to read a printed version, because it's designed for the landscape layout, which perfectly enables you to read it from left-to-right, instead of up-to-down.
There's really no other series with a better template that I can think of, to be honest. I don't see why everyone wouldn't simply just copy this template, instead of trying something different.
For the main theme of Sillie & Millie, I really want to place a lot of importance onto the music, not just for marketing reasons but in terms of the theme of nostalgia, childhood, and innocence, I wish for the main theme to reflect those themes. I would like a simple melody that could be remixed into something more trans-formative, such as a sad tune, a happy tune, a catchy tune, or even a song with vocals. On top of that I want a tune that I, or a child/beginner, could play on a piano with one finger, because that makes it more comforting to the audience to take in, and could even inspire them.
I watched this clip of Angelo Badalementi talking about how he came up with Laura Palmer's theme from Twin Peaks for inspiration:
Here are the instructions I would like to give the person I hire to write the main theme:
"For this main theme, I would like this to be a simple tune that could be remixed into a more trans-formative version, such as a sad version, a happy version, or even a version with lyrics. It should be a very simple tune that a child, or a beginner piano player, could play on a piano with one finger. I want it to reflect the feeling of remembering a melody that you enjoyed hearing as a child, perhaps it could be a lullaby, a nursery rhyme, or a music box you enjoyed to play in repeat; regardless, it should reflect the feeling of hearing that type of melody again and feeling nostalgic for it. Here are a few examples of tunes that follow similar guidelines:
These are examples of songs that reflect similar themes of nostalgia, childhood, and innocence, as well as how they sound remixed with different meanings or with vocals.
Here are other examples of memorable themes that can be remixed:
For the full series, I would like to place a lot of importance in the music of the show. Up until now, I have always just sort of cherry picked a few public domain themes to use for my stories, but right now I need original music to keep my pilot and the later series fresh. In terms of the soundtrack as a whole, I want a contrast between light and comedic, with gentle and heartwarming. I'm looking for somewhat rock vibes, with a touch experimentation to make the music sound unique and surreal. As such, I have looked into the soundtracks for the Mother (AKA Earthbound) series and Undertale. For TV inspiration, that would be Adventure Time, mainly for similarly experimental background music.
I feel like these all represent the kind of bitter-sweet tone that I am going for with this series. For the main theme of the show. What I'm going to specifically ask for with regards to the main theme is a whole other story that would need its own blog post to explain.
I started working on Young Creatives, which is basically teaching young people art, in my case I help with the animation course, in University. I did this both for extra cash, as well as to study my audience, since I am making a TV pilot for a kid' show. I've actually had a lot of fun doing this. The kids are fairly well-behaved and fun to work with. There are a lot of varied characteristics among them too. Some of the kids are introverted and work in their own pace, whereas others like to be very vocal about their work. One child in particular is very talented and makes the most depraved and disturbing animations ever (I'm not even kidding, they're practically Eraserhead-esque), and one of the girls makes pretty cute ones, with the occasional violent ones, normally involving cats. She is also very talented in terms how she times the comedic parts.
I haven't seen a single one of these children that are, well as idiotic as people make children out to be. There's actually one kid who's eight years old but still very mature. He's even chosen his religion, and in the latest session, he was actually helping one of the kids out, because he was completely not motivated at all. They all tend to have very dark senses of humour and I do mean all of them. You could go through all of their animations in a row and not find a single one that wasn't in some way tragically humourous. One of my favourite examples was one kid who made up a character specifically to make his life miserable, every step he took. He kept telling me about all of these scenarios in which he seems to triumph but somehow winds up getting a worse deal than ever at the end.
I could go on for hours about the different personality types we get in these courses, but overall my experience has taught me not to hold back too much in terms of my language towards this audience. I can safely say that children are just people and there's no need to patronise them at all.
Well, I finished the initial script! That was certainly fast.
I think it's now time to start sending it to people to have a look at and maybe start the rewriting process. I actually did show it to a friend of mine and she really enjoyed it, so that's a good sign that I'm already on the right track. The one thing I'm expecting to happen is that certain things get cut down for time, adobe story estimated the length of the pilot at around nine minutes so I may need to rely on Mr. Snip-Snip to fix that if it's accurate.
That's the huge setback to this project. Regardless of my confidence in my animation abilities, even if I reach the minimum of five minutes long for this pilot, the actual animation will still be a huge process. On the other hand, the animation for my two minute Context of Practice 3 short took less than a month to do on my own, including the keyframing, and I had an essay to be done alongside it. I can probably speed up the process of this animation to that amount of time if I simply do the keyframes then send it over to a group of inbetweeners. Easier said than done, probably. I might spend the last few hours cleaning up the animation, which will certainly be a hell of a lot longer and tedious than the animation process but we'll see.
