Moho Forum

Marvink, consider finding an animator to collaborate with on making a short animated trailer for your script.

If you post a trailer for your movie on the internet and get lucky, somebody with gobs of money may see it and pay you to make the animated film.

Something like that happened recently with the movie "The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It."

Hoping an animator will work for free for several years on your animated film is not good planning. Even if the animator loved your script, loved you, and loved animating, he or she would burn out and quit before finishing 6 minutes of animation. That's just how it is. Animation is a LOT of work. Money is necessary if you want more than a few minutes of simple animation.

Another thing. In my opinion, if it's just you and a guy, you don't need to reformat your script for animation. Normal screenplay formatting is fine, as long as your animator understands what's what.

You also should probably upload your script on Mediafire or somewhere and post a link.

Good luck.

Tony, thanks for the info. I post all my scripts on simplyscripts.com. Check it out, there are many great scripts posted there. marvin.

tonym wrote:In my opinion, if it's just you and a guy, you don't need to reformat your script for animation. Normal screenplay formatting is fine, as long as your animator understands what's what.

Not entirely sure I'd agree with that as its easier to think visually and create shots with words. If you have no shot-listed script then you will need a good storyboard. But that will inevitably mean throwing away storyboard panels, which is wasteful, more time consuming than just writing the same set-up: Unfortunately been there, done that and it's painful ... someone once changed a later sequence which caused the dev team to go back and modify sequence from day to night, in a different location. Had we been able to catch this at writing, it would have been two minutes work, changing the location and and time of day.

Rhoel

I was thinking that if there was only one animator, then the animator was also the Storyboard Artist and the Art Director, and he would therefore do whatever he felt best.

But you're right. If the writer wants more influence over the animator, using the animation format in the script would help him exert that influence.

Of course, what would exert even MORE influence over the animator is paying him money.

tonym wrote:If the writer wants more influence over the animator, using the animation format in the script would help him exert that influence.

Not so much about exerting more influence as providing assistance. Done properly, breaking a script into shots actually makes it easier to storyboard.

Working on the international series based in Thailand, I had a close working relationship with the story-boarder. He was total free to ignore the scene breaks if he wanted, and often did, creating a 28a, 28b etc. (THe numbering of scenes never changed; If scene 26 needed three shots, then they were numbered 26, 26a, 26b, not 26,27,28. THis is to preserve the link between subsequent scenes and the script.

But there were debates - sometimes we would meet to look at how I had originally envisaged something. It never once lead to a disagreement - he was in charge of the board, his call: The director then producer had final call. Generally in a 10 minute script, around 95% of the original scene cuts would make it intact through to the final film.

But done right, a shot broken script can greatly help the collaborative process, and save much time and money.

Rhoel

Thanks for elaborating on what you had meant, Rhoel.

I'm going to go back and number the scenes in my screenplay. Even though I'm the only person working on my animated film, numbering the scenes will make story-boarding easier.