How to Make an Animated TV-series on a budget

1. What will you learn here: Hi there. My name is Maria Ramova and I'm a director, writer, animator, illustrator and producer of animated movies. I've been in the industry for over 15 years working on both my own productions as well and others. From feature films to animated TV series to commercials and music videos. During my years of production, I've learned a lot of what makes a production successful and cost effective. Also, what makes a good story. I have combined this knowledge to create my own TV show, which is now distributed ww, and Jane, a lot of success. But when I had the idea for TV show, many told me that it cannot be done. That I need a lot more resources and a lot more time than I actually did need to make it. Maybe you have an idea for a TV show. You're wondering, how can I do that? How can I make a TV show? If I don't have any money, where do I start? How do I make the budget? How do I design the stories. I have designed this course for you to tell you that it can be done with a very limited budget. And you can start with no budget at all. You can start right now today, but there is not only one way to do a TV show, and what is most important is story and character. Having that in mind, story and character are for free. They are only fruits of your imagination. I'm sure you'll find this extremely useful and extremely valuable. I'm looking forward to seeing your show out there and seeing what you can do with this course with this knowledge and to get you started in your career as director, producer of TV shows. 2. Introduction - This is an introduction of what you need to think about when you start planning you T: So let me start this lecture by guiding you through some questions on how to make an animated TV series on a small budget. I know you think this is impossible. And seeing this image, obviously, I'm going to give you my TV show us an example which is called spatial mode. And I, I'm Madison advertisement budgets. And now we even have Season 2 out there and I'm working on season tree. So what do you need to know when you start making you your TV series? Yes. This is the question, the big questions you need to know. What do you need to know before you start your animated TV series? Well, you need to have an idea what the show is going to be about. Is it about aliens like my show? Is it about humans or animals? You need to know what the show is about. Who is the story about who we are, are your main characters. We're going to talk about each one of these topics on separate lecture. I'm going to guide you through what you need to know and where you can actually save your money and your time and still gets a very nice TV show. And how to think, how to approach the storytelling and the making of the TV show when you don't have a lot of money, oil a lot of time, and you just starting. Also, it's important to know how many characters are there in your show. And I'm going to just give you a hint of what we're going to go into closer later. If you don't have a lot of money and a lot of the early sources, limited amount of characters. Now, for this show, for example, are pad. I started with three characters. And obviously I added a new character which is just a ball and an AI. Why I started with these three characters was just because when I started making this TV show, TV show, we already have a concept with a, with a board game called SPAC route as well. So we have these characters already developed. But even though we had them done, they pretty simplistic. And if there were more advanced, I'm not sure if I was going to approach the concept of division in the same way. So keep the amount of characters as low as possible, one character or may be two characters, something they interact with. So the amount of characters you have in your TV show is very, very important for your success to finish it. Where is the story taking place? This is also an important questions because one of the main things that actually it's your budget is creating the environment. Sometimes it's even more than the characters because when you design the characters, you already have them and you can do animations with them. But if you try to place them in a different environments, they are going to go to the mountains and d, going to swim in the sea or they're going to be on the water. Or you have all these different environments. That's very budget heavy. You'll have to model, you have to design or draw depending on what technique you use. But you have to model this sets and it's going to take you a long time. So one thing I decided for additional, for example, is just to model the elements that I need to suggest where the characters are. At the moment. Like for example, here there are deflect the beach and I keep the background clean. There are no environments, but they're sitting under an umbrella and they're sitting on the beach tears, which suggests that they are on the beach. And the rest are described with sound waves and their fleet sounds as if there is enough for my viewers to understand where the action takes place. The next thing is what kind of technique you're going to use to tell your story. These are two of my short films that I've done before and both are pretty short. They look like I've done them in. 2d animation. But actually the one on the left I've done in After Effects, and I've drawn these characters. And the one on the right is actually 3D, 3D modeling that I've done pretty simple. And this both ways are just on different expressions. But they are also done in a very short with a little budget that I'm going to talk about it later. Like the one on the left with the girl and the boy. I did an actor effects for. It was a four minutes short that I animated in one month. And the one on the right is also short film. About 33 minutes short film that I did for about two months because it was rigging involved and it was more complex. So how long will each episode P. And this is very much depending on your time. How much money managed to collect, what are the stories about and how simple you keep them? Simple. You keep your stories or an NGO or your technique, for example, if you do a 2D technique, say like for example, South Park, you see South Park, they're pretty stiff. They're pretty they don't move a lot and they move their lips more. So if you go for that style, you can do more, more episodes. You can do longer episode. So their dialogue based. So you can have your dialogues, they can make a pretty funny and focused on the story. If you have something that is 3D or you want to add more, more movement to your characters, more advanced animation, then I would suggest you keep it simple and start with maybe 30 seconds or a one-minute. Does what I did and my phospho my first test word thirty-seconds at, at the top. And what I wanted to do for this show, it's actually make a pretty advanced animation and explore the characters. And I want them to have this look. So remember, animation is pretty expensive, so you need to consider what fits for you. And I'm going to give you more hands in a later lecture. Yes. So eventually, everything ties down to how much budget do you have? And budget, it's equal to time, whether you do it on your own or you can collect some money to start producing it. Or you can involve other people basically pay someone else to do certain things. Money or your time is also measured with money. So the thing is that many people think that if you start doing new show and you start working on your own, you're basically doing it as a hobby. Don't don't be fought. I understand you enjoyed it a lot about the things you create are actually your currency. Because I mean, look at all these shows. They didn't event, they didn't start with a lot of budget, but now they're making a lot of money and now they have more money and more of their time to do bigger and better things. So your time spent on this episode is actually a currency. And if you later on decide to bring up in investor or your cellular show, you don't say like, well, IT.com, in my free time, you said no. I worked so many hours, which means that my time costs that much to create this show. Yes. And it's of course, fun that you can do what you love and getting paid for it later on. So let me continue with the next lecture. And when we break down each of these themes and an alto tile, you can think about your, you're showing your work to actually completed because that's most important, you have to complete sounding too. So you can count it as done. Otherwise, no matter how many ideas you have, if you never do them, well, it doesn't matter it that they don't exist. You have to finish what is stopped. So see you in the next lecture. 3. Characters - Introduction - What makes a great character? In this chapter you will learn the basics : Hello there and welcome back. Let's start the next section of our lecture about how to make a great TV series on a small budget. So what is the most important thing actually for making successful Tilly's years? And that's very simple. It's just two things. So what makes a movie a good movie, is just great characters and great story. That's it. Having that in mind, you can do whatever you want and you can use any technique you want, as simple as you want it to be, or as advanced as you want it to be. But you have to have these two components in place. You need to have a great characters and great story. Which is very liberating in a way, also a little bit difficult because making great characters and a great story is actually the most difficult thing of the whole process, even though you might not think so. So let's start with the character. What makes a great character and how you approach designing and building new character. I'm going to talk a lot about that because if you don't have this thing on place, it doesn't matter how beautiful the TV show is, is not going to work. So pay close attention to just lecture. So these are, this is the character from one of my animated movies called layer and the forest pirates. And how do you create believable characters? Also, I'm going to talk about how do you create great characters for a low budget film? It is important to know that what is the most important for a TV show is not how your character look like necessarily, but how your character acts and who your character is. Yes, that is really true. You can make a stick figure and have your show be brilliant and Barry watched. So designing this character, I have had this in mind. That's why my character here looks a little bit like just a sphere with arms and legs. And I've also excluded feed or fingers because you remember everything important in your character. In animation, it has to be animated. So if you put fingers for your character, then we'll have to be animated. You can just leave them there. So simplify your character and add more believability and features to him. So what makes a character? The character is a combination of its physical appears and it's the character's behavior and one affects the other. So if you character, for example, is very active, it's the character exercises a lot. It will have a different kind of body posture and different kinds of features. And this will also affect the character's behavior. Maybe the character will have more confidence depending on if the character really wanted, wanted this kind of features. If the character doesn't want to be well trained or if it's forced to be trained, maybe the character will do, will act in conflict completely different way. Or if the character is a little bit chubby or slow. This will also affect the character's behavior. And again, also, if the character behaves more moody, slower, they don't want to move a lot does. We'll also, of course, Effective Character, physical appearance. So one comes together with the other. Now, physical appearance. And what can you have in mind when you design your character? And one new traits in the characters. For example, if you use different animals to design a characters, you can use, they are kind of traits in your character's physical appearance. For example, if you design a bear and the bear is pretty big and slow, difficult B, this can affect the physical appearance of your character. But of course, if you, if it's a Bayer that actually exercises, this is something that we don't recognize in a bear, like really strong bear. This can tell something about the character's appearance. Why the characters do that? Because we recognize how bears actually our age. And the same thing applies to eight. Of course, evil character is a baby, a child. Their job, beer, they move in a different way, they act in a different way. So their appearance will be completely different if the same character is actually a grownup or an older version of themselves. And we talked about physical activity, how active the characters are, how, how they like to spend their days, and what are they or their state, basically the state of mind when it comes to physical activity, values or beliefs. And why is that important for our characters? Physical appearance. The thing is that we are all factors by, or environment, or environment, or the people we hang out with or families and how we're brought up that. And also what we accept as more, or values or beliefs also shape what we do in our lives. So if a character has a value that, or a belief that say, for example, the character say, Well, I'm big-boned for example. So the character will do, will behave in a certain way that you try maybe to exercise a lot, but he will also eat a lot because he has this belief that is big-boned and that also shaped the character behavior. Yes, environments can, can affect or physical appearance. If we are among, among children, for example, if we spend a long, long time among children, we do become more playful. We see the world even bright away in a more fun way. Then if we expand or lives of most of our time, for example, in an office, we have this strict environment. We have a certain way of behaving or talking to other people. This also will affect how we dress, how what we do with our lives, how we eat, how we walk or talk, basically everything. So behavior, again, behavior is completely connected to their, to their physical appearance. As we talked about emotional traits or values. Is the character sensitive or is like tough? It's like, no matter what happens, he doesn't cry. Is the Ave. good or are they mean? Do they believe that? Yeah, and that connects to the next topic, their beliefs. Do they think the world is a good place or do they think the world is a bad place? If a character thinks the world is a bad place, there will be always a protective. They will be rather mineral, there will be maybe even spiteful or there will be withdrawn, for example, that would not share, share a lot of their emotions. Or if the cat in the world is a good place, there will be joyful that the more helpful. So these are two extremes that I've given you on, but just try to come up with more values and beliefs. Look at yourself, for example. What do you believe about the world and how does that affect your behavior? And what clothes do you have if you believe exactly this certain thing? And why do you have the glossary? Where, why, how do you work? Where do you go? Do you go to a coffee shop, for example, when you are on your free time or do you go for a walk or do you go to bar? Do you hang out with new friends? So do you stay home and read books? This is something that comes from your trace in beliefs and values that has formed and shaped how you think. And this is how you need to explore your character to make them more believable. Also imposed expectations. So our environment is imposing expectations on us and does also define or our behavior and appearance. For example, if, if people expect for you to be proper, for example, to dress well certain way but you don't feel that way. But still you want to meet people's expectations. You'll be dressing a certain way, but you will feel that you're not at the right place. One character like that, I can give you an example where it is, for example, Mr. Bean, mr. Beam is like a grown-up child. He he'll doesn't like to behave in a way that people expect him to. Thus, why he gets into this funny situations where he wants to hide the mischief he doubts, or the things he does wrong. He's isn't the board because that's who he is. He wants to do new things all the time, but he needs to just in a society where you have, you need to behave. And those will you get. He gets into this very funny situations where he need to replay the expectations that the other, the society has imposed on him as a grown man. And this is something also I used for my, for my characters, for example, a goal at my TV series. He is a character very similar to Mr. been, for example, because he is a little tile inside. He's very impatient. And that's why he gets into some very funny situation. I'm going to talk about later on. So preparing the characters. So when you know who your character is, you can do so-called character sheet to explore how your character will stand and how they will react in exactly a certain situation. Because your posture describes who, who you are, basically how you spend in forms everyone else are your emotional state, your state of mind? So these are the sheets I did for my TV show on space. You're good. Let us go in the next lecture and explore the same process together. And I'll give you a concrete example of how I go about that. See you in the next lecture. 4. Character Exercise - In this exercise you will get hands on creating a character by using a specific: A character exercise. Now, do this exercise on your own. Make up a character while answering those questions. Who is your character? Here? Think about, is it an animal? Is it human or is it something else? Where is he, she or it from? Decides an age proctor, physical activity. It can exceed the age of human age span and then justify why are they older than a certain age? What does the character beliefs are? What beliefs are about life themselves, about others. If he or she, a positive or a negative person. And even religious beliefs is that important? And beliefs about the, it can be, the beliefs can be also very unreasonable beliefs that they believe that the sky is red, for example. And why do they think that way? Or they believe that maybe the world will end, or they believe that they're the best person in the world. Any kind of beliefs, just brainstorm dots on a piece of paper and do this exercise as long as it takes, do it a couple of times. How does the character express him or herself? Is it through clouds? Is it through a move to the Move slow or fast? Or do they have a specific gesture, maybe a waving of a hand. Make a video of yourself or how, how you walk. And you will discover a lot of new features that you haven't thought you were, you had. What did they eat for breakfast? Why is this important? Because sometimes what we eat for breakfast also describes how we start or a day. And who the character is to the eight and oatmeal for breakfast? Or do they eat a muffin? Or do they eat across on or do they eat bugs? This defines who the characters are. You know what I mean? Because if you eat bugs, then what kind of person are you or, or an animal, or if you would cross, some are from France. Or do you adopt the cross on eating because you, you, you think of yourself as such in a certain way as a French person or you just like croissants. Just small things describe the character a lot and you'll find this out when you do this exercise properly. How do they work? Do they run? Do they have a goofy world? Do they have swapped slow woke today, drag their feet or they jump. What would the character never do? The limit we set for ourselves what we would never do. It's also describing who we, who we are. Would you would you jump a bungee jump or would you never do that? Would you were to eat a bug or you would never do that? Or would you go to would you go to a disco tech or is it something that you would never do if you don't define yourself as a person who goes to this vertex or try to find this about your character. What would they do, what they never do? And you see where their limits are. This is important because later on, when you design your stories, you can find these traits. You can look at this list and you can challenge them by actually making them do exactly what would they would never do an experiment? How would I handle this situation? What does people say about this character? Because often or sometimes, what we think about ourselves is not necessarily what people say about us. So if this character is seen from the eyes of his friends, over at the eyes of someone completely unknown person. What would they say about his character? Find no specific person who would describe a character. How you're, how would you Mom think about this character? How would you think about this character? Or how would the lady in the grocery store think about this character? Because the way also we perceive other people as completely different. And what would this character say about themselves? How would they describe themselves? If the discriminant says as brave or in this graph, lazy, there are certain things that would do or not do. And that will also define, define how they behave. Just come up with more suggestions. Like, what, what kind of bank do they have? Do they wear back? It would weigh airbag. You don't need to put the biking or TV show because if it's not important, Destiel, it is something that you'll have to pay for it. So be careful what kind of items you put him in a TV show. But think of the traits, because the more things you think about your character, the better your character will become, and the easier it will be for you to know exactly what to animate what kind of scenes you have to put a character in. And don't worry if you don't get that at the first time. Because I'll tell you what the characters will evolve with time and you will know exactly who they are. And only if you do the exercise over and over again and before you even release the series, you just put the work in, you will get more believable characters and they'll be more fun to animate. And they actually will tell you what to do next. 5. Case Study - Space Yoghurt - Learn from an already existing character and how I approached creating : So welcome back. Here I'm going to walk you through my own process when I designed character sheets, when I go about and figuring out who the characters are. And even though my characters were already figures from the board game, they had no traits that had no characters. Those I put in the, so let me go about the exercise that I already showed you. So I'm thinking like who my characters is. He's an alien. And it's going to make the letters a little thicker. She is an aid in. She is a male, about 17 years of age, but behaves like a five-year-old. He is goofy. She is in patient, does like a child. Childish and easily, isn't important. But he is also good hearted, good heart, and he never he is He's never miss JVM materials on purpose. But only because he is clumsy. Clumsy. So he was, he eats for breakfast, he space yogurt. Yogurt for breakfast. This is yogurt, strawberries and honey. And obviously he loves to eat. She would do anything for it. What else he thinks of himself? Thinks himself as great, great guy. What other things are of him? They think that is a little knots. And he is like all over the place. But because he's got hot it, no one really known. No one is really angry with him. And his friends. Friends love him. But they're also looking after him because he gets himself and others in trouble. So she works differently. If he's impatient. She he can be really fast, fast when he wants a treat. Treat, and slow when he is an indirect. Let's work. So these are some traits to start with. And then I'm going to imagine how this character would go stand and walk to see what kind of gestures he does. Usually. How does he how does he stand or how does he woke and so on. 6. How to creat a Character Sheet - Why you use a so called Character Sheet and how you go about creati: So I'm just going to start posting the character given these traits. And I'm going to do some really rough drawing just to feel like how the character acts given the trait dot-dot-dot written. And if you want to know more about designing a character cartoon character, you can check my other course on here on Udemy and have some really easy techniques there to show you how to do that. So I'm just going to pose him here because some using the traits. So she's kinda of a casual guy, always happy. And he knows it all. He's a little bit alpha. Best advisor, a servicer. How do you save up? It's like, Oh, come on. I already know that she wouldn't admit that he's wrong until he finds a proven that it is. So, so I'm just gonna do some typical posters for the sky. How his fans, how he moves to say really quickly with a very, with an opacity lower positive because I feel comfortable just filling the movement, not going into too much details. How would he loved given traits? He would be hysterical. He would, he wouldn't be able to fake laughter if he loves. He would love with his whole body. He would like almost be in tears. When she loves. As a child would love. They're very, very honest. And they can pretend when something is funny, even when what makes him love is seen as a little bit mean. She would love if someone falls, falls down or if someone misses something. And and so let's see if when what he faked love. He would shoot fake love. If if she feels that she's done something wrong, He's been mischievous and he doesn't want to meet. What would he do then? He would like pretend that he had oh no, it's nothing wrong. In our fake cloth was like really wide smile. An innocent kind of pressing up the shoulders. Just like a child would do. Know it it wasn't me. They would like maybe squeeze their legs like that. Again, I'm showing you this process of how I've done the TV show. But you can, I'm going to show you later on with a much simpler character. This can feel a little bit advance if you're just starting, starting, starting in this business and you really feel like you want to use this course to you actually do your TV show. So I'm also, I'm going to draw him how he actually how he is upset. He wouldn't be, he wouldn't be angry in our hue because he's never mean angry. But he's more like when he's angry, he's more frustrated because he's a really positive character. Sometimes even silly, positive. When he's angry, he'll be more frustrated. So she's like Heuvel squeeze his his arms like that. You can find this show online and see how I've animated this process that when you, when you look at the animation, the pulses are very much as I've drawn them from the beginning. And I did have animators, other animators working on the show, especially on the second season. And they found these guidelines disposal is very useful because it does feel that the character is the same throughout, throughout the show. And why does why does it feel like that is because I've done my work before and export how the character reacts, which makes it very easy if played around two to animate him and to draw it, to draw him according to his character. So when she is bored, he's going to be really exaggerating board. Because you'll be like, Oh, you know, when we are in a boring meeting, for example, we try to pretend that we are interested because it's socially acceptable, socially accepted thing. We try to maybe, but we will do things like maybe check or phone. But we will have a pose where we tried to be to look as if we are interested. Maybe we'll look at the person who is talking and pretend that we are interested. But my goal, this character, he wouldn't do that because he's like a child. So she would definitely show that he is not interested. So let me draw him in a situation like that. How if he's in a boring meeting, how would he react? Maybe has a chair. Here will be almost lying down in the chair, has an arm. So chemo look as if he's waiting this to finish. And maybe he will do, let's do this. Here. Will like push one of his cheeks, like popping chicks from one side to the other just to keep himself go through this experience and also show the viewer. Whoever delays giving the lecture that it is really boring. Character like him will not consider the feelings of others. He will, as a child, consider his own emotions. So does this one he is a consequence to, to his own character. It's very important to know your character very well because then you could be consequent with who your character is. And if you're not, you will break the illusion that this is a real character. So that's why doing this exercise is even more important than choosing a style one MHC, or when you have this character. Solid. Doing, making the TV show, nicer is just something extra. But if you have that in place, you can do really rough animation. It can do very simple animation, simple characters, but there will be entertaining and they'll be funny. So let me, let me get this poses and just clean them up a little bit. So I'll have them I'll have them ready and I will give them to my team or nanometres or I'll just use them myself later on to decide character is. And this lecture will lead to actually make your own TV show on your own, even without the help of others. I'll show you some simple techniques later on of how to do that. Or you can even have a small team of maybe friends or even family. Now if you try to do a technique that I'm going to show later called stop-motion technique. If you, if you are an animator, exactly what I mean. If you just started. This is also simple technique while at where you don't need a lot of technology, a lot of programs to do your animation. You can also do it from your phone. There is a very simple programs to do that with your phone with a very good resolution for the final product. So here is he's saying, Come on. I know what I'm talking about. Here's a little bit of megalomaniac, not in a bad way. Keys just like to, to solve problems and to be center of attention. Does cookies. Yeah, you can go to Amazon and search for the show and, and watch it and actually use it as a, as an example, as an exercise to see how I designed these characters and what they become later on. He's like laughing like crazy here, almost painful really is a character who can't hide its emotions. But he's also character that he thinks are very, he thinks everything is possible. Also. He's also very curious. And sometimes he gets his friends into trouble because he thinks, God, everything is Bowlby, All right. And he will never get into trouble. He always thinks he knows what he's doing. And even when he gets into trouble, he thinks that he can get away with it. And eventually here was does because the other two characters, his friends, they are always there completing him dead because they're always trying to make things right. They know that he's not going to make it right. So they're always trying to find solutions, how to look after him, how to stop him, or how to fix the problem and the situation he get themselves into. And that's why it has a good balance between them. So, so think also of your friends. So often we find friends who actually balances out. If we are not good at one thing, we probably have a friend that is good at exactly that thing and help us out in a situation like that. This is kind of like or oppose that. Like I didn't do that. And this is the post, angry post he uses when he's frustrated. So he's not really evil here. More it's like frustrated. There is an episode like that width is very frustrated with an annoying fly who doesn't let him serve his phone and eventually he breaks his phone. And one of the episodes. Also, when you have your characters very solid, they will suggest to you the stories and the situations that will, that will be most familiar for if you put them in this situation for your viewers. Because we are doing animation, the stories here and we doing this some kids animation. There is also TV shows that for grownups, but I'm not going to focus on those. I'm going to show you how to make a TV series for, for children, basically. So I'm going to focus more on comedy rather than than CTO or grown-up animation is going to be completely different topic. And you can do the same process for creating a character if you wanted your grown up animation. But I'm going to get into just comedy and animation here and tell you how to create dot. Because most of the animations out there, they are for children, even animation, even TV shows like Simpsons. They are successful. Or I'm in there for, for grownups. But it's also a comedy here. Here we just tried to show up wherever he's talking about, he's born, he's bought. And people because they don't want to be mean. Maybe they will even ignore him during that. So he will try to increase his annoyance with popping his, his ship. And it will, the problem will just escalate. And this can be also a funny episode. So when we talk about story later on, we will talk about exaggeration. Because animation is exaggeration and you have to find funny situation and just multiply them, exaggerate them many times on top of the normal situation to create funny situation, funny animations. So here are some houses who described the character and you see pretty quickly that this is who this character is and how they react. And based on the trace that I already described, you can, you can start building your stories. So this is an example of how I do it. And on the next lecture, I'm going to show you a completely brand new character that I've never done before. And I'm going to design this together. And I'm going to show you how you can go about doing that with a very, very simple characters and start with just a sphere and adding traits to it. And you'll see how you can make a character from a very, very simple shape. So, see you in the next lecture. 7. Creating a Simple Character - In this lecture we will create a very simple character. This has the p: Hello back. Now I'm going to design a character from scratch, a very simple one. As I said before, it's important to start with a very simple character. Because if you want to design, if you want to create a TV show, you know, you have a lot of episodes to work with. And as simply the character is, the more chances you have to finish your TV show in, in a reasonable amount of time. Because the more you stretch it, the harder it will be for you to get motivated to finish it. So start with really simple characters. There is a beginner's mistake when they tried to make everything, everything at once. And they do this complicated characters and complicated scenery. And they start the design, everything and the reaches a level where it can just make a couple of minutes for a year and then you, you don't have a product, you don't have a TV show. So let me show you how you can create a character. Develop a character from a very simple shape. So let's start with just having a ball. And again, look at my other lecture where I'm designing characters just from spheres. It's very easy. And it's going to be very useful for you to do that. If you want to approach character design and especially character design for your TV show. So let's say a ball. So this is all gangster. Who is this guy? Is it? The guy is it's a girl. So let's give him a trait. Let's say this ball is a cowboy. So what does it have? It has a hat. Let's make simple cowboy hat. Now. We already have a character. Now, let's take a writing software here and write some, some traits. So let's answer the questions that I gave you as an exercise. So who is this character? Is? Cowboy. Where is she? She, she from 0, we'll say, okay, let's eat. So he, and he is from the wild west. Wild West. How all this game. So she is probably in his 20s or he's a ball, but he's like has a good posture. Atlantic think. And he's very physically active. And very active. I'm just going to make as traits boat. And what, what does his beliefs are? His beliefs are that life is challenging, challenging piece like this, dark dots. Everything. Everything is an adventure. He's not religious or he believes in his own. He built, his religion is basically cowboy lifestyle, cow boy lifestyle. So basically owner. And he believes in faith. Otherwise as he believes and he believes in great love, great love, justice. That involves basically the cowboy lifestyle. Let's make it smaller. So how does he character express themselves? He is he always. Strive, Strive for justice. Even if it's not needed. It's not needed. Remember that because of who loves his lifestyle is he basically sees the world as an adventure, as a challenge. And he find different ways to, to, uh, see where is their stride for justice. This can open opportunities for bulk funny stories. Because even though there's nothing challenging, QED, see that it's a life-and-death situation, and he'll go for it as a real soldier would do. And then it can be just a very general situation or a nothing needs. No one is in danger, but he would disappearance of him. This beliefs there we'll give him a motivation to search for it. Is behaving. Behaving like a soldier. I'm not sure. Spelled right. So soldier. So this is bold. And what does it for breakfast? Porridge. Of course, with his horse. Clean, old-fashion orange. How does he walk and run? And he jumps and they end because he is also a ball. So she's like very bouncy and he jumps around and his his hat is basically also jumping after him is always in the air. And so he is very high paste, paste character, very active. He's not a moody, slow character, but he's just an active, jumping brave little cowboy. So what would what would the character never do as a cowboy? What would he never do? She would never leave. He's had his hat. So she would never leave his hat. And this is something of a funny trait. You can find more things that you would never do. But he or she would never because of this lifestyle, maybe she would never leave a lady in trouble, Live lady in trouble. Even even if she doesn't need help. This is also a trait that can open for very funny situation. Like easy is a girl and she's probably on a walk. If you place this cowboy in nowadays, in today's times, he would be, he would go around like for example, in New York streets and he would see a girl on her having her jug. And he would try to actually help her because he would maybe think that She's running away from someone. So he will find dangerous in situation when there is no danger at all. And this is coming from his lifestyle and his beliefs. So thus why it's important to create these characters, because you'll see how many opportunities there are for stories. So what, what does other people say about this character? Well, here's a base a, of a, of course that is very brave. If, if the people who are judging him are cowboys, they'll say that, they'll say that he is honorable. But the people, if, if this character is somewhere else, like if you're asked, for example, your mother, your father. If I asked my mother what he thinks about this character, she will say, he's crazy, crazy. What was the neighbors I was at the grocery store lady say she'll say while on y. Whereas this horse thus, does he have a horse. This is something that we have to think about. What else would they say? That would say he is cute. Because a small bowl of cowboy, like a cowboy that does kind of cute. Just a ball and a hat. So these are the things also that will add to your story. Because you can impose these things like his brave and cute. Um, how does go, go together? Of course we want he tries to save a lady, for example, is a middle of the streets of New York. He's trying to save a girl who's jogging and he's surrounded or ball bowl with a hat. And what he does is he never leaves his heart. So when he tries to save her while she's in the jogging, jogging, and suddenly he forgets his heart. So he tried to do these two things at the same time. He'll try to get his hat back at the same time, trying to save a lady who doesn't need self saving. And there you have one episode. How does he solve these problems? So let's say, what does he, what does do they say about themselves? Basically that they are the he is a man of honor. He is a gentleman cowboy. Yes. She wouldn't say of himself that he's brave Hawaii because being a man of honor and being a gentleman, you don't really price yourself. So you see himself like more of a humble guy. She wouldn't take take pride TO take pride. But he wouldn't try to ask for for a metal, for example, for everything good that he does. He would just retreat and just go back to his own tickets, Other Adventures because he's bound this job. So here we have a completely brand new character. And that's what he is. Thats orbital here. So let's see what else can we add? Knowing these traits and making really simple? Will he have some ice? Maybe not, maybe we can just have this eyebrows. Are very thick eyebrows that he's expressing himself. Shall we? Shall we give him my legs or arms? Well, let's not do that because we have expressed this character as being a cute little ball, a cowboy ball. So let's play with this idea that he doesn't have any arms or legs or he just bounces around and mouth. He would he would bring out his mouth only when he needs it, when he's angry. For example, a very simple cartoony mouth. And now we have a true character. Let's draw him a little more, a little cleaner. This layer. And so that is basically or character. We can play with colors. We can have his head. He's had been in a darker color. Just just to make a nicer, nice silhouette. If you want to make, to try out this character. I mean, of course you can play with other colors depending on what technique do you use you use 3D may be using 3D with his character can be really simple. You can do, I can do that in 2D, you can do that in stop motion. You can try all kinds of different techniques. But this is already a character we have here with this personal traits. So on. In the next lecture, I'm going to do the same process like I did with my character and just break this down and have this character express emotions and see how does he do that. 8. Making a Character Sheet for The Joe the cowboy - Here we will create a Character Sheet for Joe the : Hello back. Now, let's start with designing and poses, playing around with this character and see how he reacts given the traits we've given him. So, so how is this character happy or he ever be happy? As as a cowboy, he'll be like maybe mildly, mildly smiling, but he would not, he will never hysterically love at something. So Let's make him more of a serious kinda guy. So how, what can be happy? It'll be like raising an eyebrow and maybe just smiling with a corner of his mouth. This hat. You'll see that if you, if you have the eyebrows, you can easily just get this character already alive without even having his eyes. And how can he be set? If he said he sadness would come from maybe losing his horse or losing the love of his life. Said pose. How would he be? He's more like on a mobile. So he'll have this serious balls mostly all the time. We can have his eyebrows even detached from his body. So he's like they're sticking out and they are separate from his body. So so we can move them more freely and give a more give them different expressions. You have a gun, of course. And the thing is that he doesn't need to have arms. As soon as you optimize the gum. Moving, people will perceive that as if he hadn't I, Iike head arms. So you don't have to worry about practicalities. You don't, this is animation. You don't have to interpret things. Literally. The most important is that this character is acting believable and never breaking the illusion of being exactly this character. So what she have a horse, let's, of course you would have a horse. Let's design his horse in a similar manner. Just using some very simple shapes. Just the head, a body, and sticks for four legs and a tail. And here we can have smaller, as just noted, the proportions according the proportion next to his horse. Here we have it. Shall we? He has, when he is in love, he thought would break. Now, I'm drawing this hat in perspective as well from different angles. This is easier to be done in 3D. Of course, if you're good at three 2D animator, that won't be a problem. But if you're animating in Flash, you can maybe simplify the head as having a maybe just one shape from here. And from the front. If he is at the front, you can still have the head slightly tilted like that. So it's simplified. Or you can decide only to use the character from, from the side. This is artistic decision that you have to decide how you want to do it. But the styles are already very simple because it's just a ball. And I'm hat. And now here is, he's also like absurd. So these are some general policies with or character. He's basically seldom kids always in action and he seldom extremely happy. Let's define him a little better. And by, by moving the eyebrows and the mouth on the spherical shape. You can also create the illusion of perspective and a volume. This is very easily done in every program, even in 2D and 3D or wherever you decide to work with. When you, when you make your design and when you want to clean it up, you can decide eNO, the shape, the shape of the head more properly, because now you see the head is different in August designs, but this is the first time I'm working with this character. So what I'm looking for here is basically his personality and what, how I need to decide him, design him later on. When I know his personality, I know how he moves and I want and I know a lot poses I want to choose. This will guide me from my design later on. And sometimes, if you design a very advanced character, but you don't know how the character moves. You can end up with no situation where you have to design a lot of details for this character and to make it, to make it the way you want it. And you will end up discovering that, wow, I mean, this was more advanced and I really thought it would be. So this is the horse. Just a simple forms. We don't even need to make an egg for the horse. His head can be floating. If you want to simplified it a lot. I mean, if you, you see that we already have a pretty good character without having his eyes just with eyebrows. You can, you can give life to this character if you want to add also some eyes. You can put it in another layer. And either you can have a doubt. You see how easy it is when you already have your character. And now we have even more advanced little cowboy. So that's it. And then the next section, I'm going to show you how you create a story using this character. And I'm going to also show you my process, how I went about working with Spaceship of characters and then we goto character designs. I showed you how I designed in the previous lecture. So see you later. 9. Character Design Exercise - Use those simple questions to design your own character. Make it as simp: Exercise. Design, a very simple character using just basic shapes. You can use spheres, you can use squares, triangles, or you can combine them. Decide a personality for, for this character, who is this character? Follow the list and the questionnaires I've given you in the previous lecture. When you do that, draw the character in different poses using personality traits you've given him or her. What attributes you can add to this character to enhance his personality? Does it have a bag? Does it have had does it have a specific style? Is does he have a longer or shorter body? Does he have legs or hands? Is he on a we'll just be creative. Design your own style and think outside the box designs I'm a character that is unusual. 10. Story - Introduction - In this Story Introduction you will get some useful advice on what makes a go: Hello again. This is the next section where we're going to talk about story and how we create episodes, how we create short stories for an animated TV series. It is a little bit different approach. One is about episodic storytelling. And there are a couple of different techniques you can use. It depends whether your episodes have dialogue, whether they continue our story, for example. Whereas story starts in one episode and it continues to evolve in the other episodes. Or if you have just a separate episodes, where does the story has a beginning, middle, and an end, and it's completely different story in the next episode. What I'm going to talk about here mostly is about a finger episodes were the stories are not connected. And I would suggest if this is your first TV show, you should go for this approach because it is very difficult to have a larger events happening over a period of time. And and of course, if you've already done that before, you should go for it. But for this lecture, I would suggest to start with single source that don't continue down, but they are a small shorts in themselves and you change to scene or topic for the next episode. So, so what is an episode, even even if it's in a very short span of time, even if it's a ten seconds or 30 seconds, an episode should have a beginning, middle, and an end. And in animation, everything is about exaggeration. So what makes things funny in animation that you can make them bigger and wider, you can exaggerate every single event. Here is an example of an exaggeration with an episode of spacing would call the fly. Here is basically the fly controls his body, which can, of course never happened. But in animation, this is allowed. And it's, it gives a really funny situation when the flight controls his body. And yes, you can continue watching this episode on on Amazon or into Google's. So in each episode, they must be a conflict, a problem to solve. And and you can, you can find these problems within the character's personality as we talked about what, what the character is, who the character is, what their values are, what the principles are following these values and just put them in a situation where it would be challenging for them. How do you create a conflict? You create a complete by challenging your characters comfort zone. And going back to your sheet of character traits, you can find what is challenging for your character. The things that I believe, and the things that they will do, and the things that they will never do. And this is this is your character comfort zone. The things that believes that he has, the person that he is. Character comfort zone, putting things in your, in your characters ways that challenging them will create a tension in their perception of the world and which they have to resolve. So you have to find out what does he or she fears. What is the characters default mode or comfort zone, and what does he or she wants, but what does she or he needs. The thing in, in, in animation actually, which is different from the narratives are the feature film that sometimes the character wants something, but we give the character what they need. In comedy, for example, you can actually mix this up a little bit. So if the character wants something, you might give it to them. And the thing is that they don't have the skills to complete the task because if they're out of the comfort zone, so just giving them all the tools available to actually complete the task. But don't not giving them the skills to complete the task. Like for example, I'm going to show you on episodes of space you've got where my goal is, spotting and strawberries, his favorite fruit. And he but they're on the other side of a cliff. So he needs to go and touch them. And he tries in every kind of way to reach them and she finds pretty good solutions. We're giving him the solutions, even though they're a little bit unthinkable for the real-world because it's animation. Again, you can exaggerate. But eventually, just as he's very close to get it, strawberries, something unexpected happened. Hi. Hey. So this is the other things like how does he or she perceives the world? And every scene needs to move your character forward. And every scene should tell us something about the character. This is very important that every seems to tell us something about the character. So in each episode, you can discover something about your character. And so you can, so your viewers can come back for more. And thus why TV shows becomes unpopular. Sometimes just one episode doesn't mean a huge success. But the more you watch of this character, the more attached you get to the character and a new kind of expect what they would do next. Introduced the problem very early episode. This is important because you don't have a lot of time in thirty-seconds episode, you don't have the time to set the scene up. You have to come up with the problem pretty quickly, resolve the problem in an unexpected way. So this is a surprise element where you kind of leading the viewer's to expect something. And suddenly you surprise them by coming up with completely new. And this is a lot of fun to do and a lot of fun to brainstorm. Because usually even you don't know when you start an episode, what the solution, one unexpected solution for this problem is going to be. So sitting down and brainstorming completely wild and crazy ideas how an air dissolved cannons is a lot of fun. But then you will discover that there are so many ways to actually end up on Microsoft and unexpected ways. Surprising character and surprise your audience. So there is this combination of what the character knows and what the audience knows. So the more you come up with an unusual, unusual surprises for 4M director, the audience obviously watches the episode through your characters and they'll get equally surprised. And that will release a lot of fun, a lot of laughter. And that's what you're, what you're looking for because your audience is gonna watch your show. Because they want to be entertained, because they want to live. So build-up an expectation without fulfilling and it creates comedy. This is another trick you kind of like build up and trying to mislead the audience that this is going to resolve the character's problem. And suddenly it just doesn't S-like blowing up a balloon. You blow up alone, blah, blah, and watches. Think is that the balloon is going to fly. And eventually it bursts or the air comes out of it and he flies without air. So, and we come some funny situation. 11. How to begin? - Sometimes it is difficult to just start the process. In this lecture I´m going to gi: So how do you start? It can be overwhelming, but first you decide what your story is about, which we've now done. Let's say we have orbital character, the cowboy. And let's say we're going to have this show being without dialogue. So how do you start? There are a couple of ways to start, but first you have to start brainstorming the episodes. And it is really just an exercise of just thinking about ideas with, without being afraid of doing anything wrong, without thinking about structure, without thinking about what was right and wrong. How do you write a story? You just come up with the idea and brainstorm with. And you can have different tools to do that. You can write it on a computer or you can write it on your iPad. But because this is, so, this is a lecture, while you can do that as cheapest possible. I'm going to tell you what I actually use for writing Marshall is this simple book basically. So that's what I do. I just brainstorm the episodes and I would write everything that comes to my mind. I'll start with again who the character is and try to find an uncomfortable situation on, or even a general situation where he or she will be. And I will just see what he will do. And I'll think of things that might happen to him during the episodes and how does he resolve them? And not not always do come with the best. Not always welcome up with the best idea. Dfs at once. So I do a couple of takes and I'm just, again, this is my little notebook and I write all my ideas here and I always have it with me. And sometimes this one i'm I'm basically not graded on the beach. Sometimes I even, I even draw some sketches just to relax. So it's doodle a lot of different reactors. So, and this is my work-life, really. How I wake up in the morning, cup of coffee and start brainstorming. So you don't really need any fancy, fancy software. Of course, he can invest in an iPad and an Apple pencil. That has been my life savior. But if you are in this business, you have to equip yourself with some digital to be able to, to create animation. This is actually where I used to, where I work. I work everywhere. I work at dinner, I go have dinner or go into edit on beach and designs a max thoughts and create some episode. So and that caused me biophysically Nocturne You don't need you don't need fancy office. You don't have to have that. As an excuse. Many people do that. The seller has to pay for an office, I have to pay for a proper computer. I'll have to pay for this and that. And they just make it too complicated for themselves. And, you know, when you know what matters, the most animated TV show is basically character and story. You don't have to fill up your, your wife with the things you need to do to just make a good characters and good story. You can do that on the go, on a little piece of paper. And there you go. And I have this program called animation creator HD, which you can download. It combines pretty cheap online. This one, I bought a simpler version. It's for free and I use to design characters. I use Procreate. And I have to screenwriting programs. I have screened script, right? And I have final draft. But actually, to start with, you don't really need any, any offensive program. You just need to write down your story. 12. Outline - what is it? - How do you write an outline and why do you need one?: Hello there. So how do we start or story? When we, when we have a story, we start writing our so-called outline. What is really an outline? Basically what I showed you before in my notebook. What I'll do is actually just student that an outline is writing the events of the story as bullet points or just telling what the story is about. So let's try this out with our little character that we designed with the cowboy and just write a simple story does we can turn into the first episode of all TV show. So what story can we come up with? With knowing who our characteristics, we want a challenge or character and to bring him out of our comfort zone, we want to exaggerate. So we want phi to find the opposite of what character is to tell them chimp. And we want to surprise or viewers. So we need to have a story that a beginning, a middle, and an end. 13. Writing The First Episode - You will follow me, step by step to create the first episode. The purpos: So let's, let's just do the exercise with our little cowboy and design. The first episode, make up the first step is odd. The show with the little girl boy as an exercise. And we'll decide that this episode will be 30 seconds. And It's going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. What would we name the show? Let's name my last name meant the cowboy named Joe. That sounds kind of funny. You can come up with your own names of the show. And, and let's have the episode that's called an evil bunny. In this episode, we'll try to work with exaggeration would contrasts. With contrast. We can have a very funny situation and create a lot of comedy. Like for example, because our character, cowboy is very, very tiny and he's very brave. He thinks he can find everything. That's already a contrast that is not compatible with each other. That can create a very funny situations where you can place the color of this little cow boy in front of a giant monster or whatever it is. It will be, it will look pretty ridiculous that he saw grave and he's still trying to fight this monster. So let's try an outlining these episodes and see what we can do with it. So you grab your, your software, writing software. And again, you can write this on a piece of paper. I'm using OpenOffice to write those on. So the evil been, what's going to happen basically? Or a cowboy, Joe sees a shadow. So these are large shadow. Bro, approaching or, or, or falling on him. It turns around, around to see the Though growing. And the distance. He sees two large ears. It's a giant. Bonnie. Of course, jaw. Grabbed the gun. But in a hurry, actually grabs just just the branch. Something we can add in here is, for example, Joe calls his course, is a course like this. Or he, he whistles his horse. What could be funny? Instead of the horse coming, coming to meet him? The horse actually is, obviously the horse is fast asleep. That would be funny because like eels contrasts like buildup expectation. But don't mean the expectation, just do something completely different. So, so now Joe has to fight this John banging on his own. So in his career, he grabs the gun. But if she doesn't grab his gun, he grabs can branch. And because he is brave and he run, runs towards the giant Bonnie. But when he reaches near, discovers that the box is tiny, it's. Just cast shadow. So basically, we can have the scene when he is actually building up this energy to actually fight the bunny. And he can even make some really advanced character moves or something that is even not typical for a cowboy. He can, you can bring in different specifics of how a cowboy would do it and then add something really funny on top because maybe he's not a very good cowboy. But because he thinks he is and getting in his very brave here, we'll just go for it. So, so the bunny, bunny is tiny and so wants to fight. He realizes the body is. So basically all this energy goes for nothing. What else can happen? So this can be now for our episode. But let's just build it up. Let's have something even funnier happen. So we have this unexpected thing happening that we think it's a and our counter thing is a giant Bonnie goes to fight it and suddenly it's a very, very tiny bunny, if Stephen tinier than or a little cowboy. And suddenly he's like releasing all this energy and he's a little bit disappointed that he doesn't, that there is no enemy out there that he can fight. But also he's also relieved, but suddenly, but suddenly someone, someone else is approaching. Jaw up. And really, really giant. Funny. So now there is the real giant bunny that didn't cost any shadows and she didn't even notice Soviet counts. It has unprepared for this disjunct binding to come. N3 is just right there. So what, what can you do? Suddenly we see that it's dangerous for the character and the other parties also afraid. So Joe takes on carotid pulse, for example, his own for the fight. But of course this is very, very tiny. So the real giant, funny, just grabbed him in the inland in his hand. And we build up this moment that, I mean, this bunny could be the real danger. But instead what he does, and during that time, Joe fights him in the mean his hands door continue fighting with his little branch? Yes. Little branch. And when the giant bunny grabs him, he actually only wants to cuddle because his relatives coupled Li Bonnie. So the bunny remove, removes the branch and just cut off with jaw reaches again, you build up an expectation. We use contrasts. We have this giant Bonnie. Would we think that we associate everything big towards everything little dots. Now it's a real danger. We don't know who the character is. And suddenly we parsed this bubble by surprising or views and some price surprising or a cantor. And have this bunny actually be really, really just very cookie cutter little bunny. Or I mean, it's a big bonding compared to draw. But all he wants is to cover. And then what we see is that while the struggle will be for Joe and what can be funny MDM is that we end up, we'll finish with a scene where the giant, the time funny, is laying on the ground, squeezing squeezing jaw in a couple and tries to get away. Yeah. Because, I mean, obviously he's not a sensitive guy. He is this Brave. Was he thinks he's brave, big cowboy, but he's actually, yeah, right now. A tiny Cold War in the hands of a giant company bunny. But funky count. And that's the end of our episode. And basically this is or outline, as simple, as bad as you just write in your own words, what's the, what happens? And you can change this later on if you come up with new ideas. You can just put them in. It's like nothing is set in stone here. And the thing is that the more revisions you do, the more you work up to this outlines, the better your story will be. And the more of those you do, the more you will start recognizing your characters. And it will be easier to work with them and to make up new stories. So when we have this outline, you can, we can basically start working with the episode. But if you are going to present this outline for a team or if you have an investment, for example, if you have a studio, what you need to do is you need to put this outline in, in screenplay. So in the next section, I'm just going to talk about writing a screenplay for this episode. So I'll see you there. 14. Screenplay - What is a Screenplay - You will learn what is a screenplay and what is the difference b: So screenplay. What is a screenplay? Screenplays basically a detailed description of the events of the story, including dialogue. If you have dialogue in a screenplay is written always in present tense as events are happening right now. And there is a standard format extended by the industry of how a screenplay should look like. So if you, if you work with dialogue, for example, it is good to use green plane screenplay format. So even for yourself, so you know where to put the dialogue and how the dialogue is. If you're working on your own and you have private investors, so you have YOU bunch of friends that you're doing this show where you don't really need. This kind of format is kinda of advanced screenplay. It depends where you want to start your show with and who you're working with. If you want to present the show and getting investments from private, from other investors or from TV stations. You need to have a screenplay that, that's a must. They, they want to have that format. So what is, how much a screenplay you should write? A rule of thumb is that one minute of film is equal to one page of screenplay. So basically, your story that is thirty-seconds will be approximately a half a page of screenplay. And what is the difference between an outline and a screenplay? Is that in screenplay, you basically detailed, describe the the action. So you take the outline and describe exactly how it happens and what it happens. And there are certain rules of a screen plate which I'm not going to go into right now. I'm just going to show these basic, basic screenplay roofs and how you do it, how you put this, I will take this outline we already wrote and how he put it into a screenplay format. So I'll just give you a hint of how it's done. Because usually a screenwriter would write an outline first of their stories and then they'll put it into screenplay format. In the show of space, your growth. For example, I did not write any screenplays and I did not write outlines on any software. The only outlines I wrote was the dawns. I'll just show you on my notebook. And that was because I had the freedom to do that too, because we had private financing. And so so I could do however I want that. And the thing was that I said a lot of time and a lot of money doing that that way because there was no why? No one to tell me, for example, you should do it this way. That way. The most important thing for your show is actually the final episodes. You'll find our show. How you do the things in-between doesn't matter. It only matters if you have other people working with you and they have certain rules and certain expectations of how you should present your material. So I'll show you a little bit how a screenplay it looks like. So this is basically how our screenplay look like. This is a short I've written based on my book, which is called, it wasn't mean this is a program called Final Draft. And basically there is a lot of software out there that you can use. But I usually, I'm, I'm very used to using final draft. And I write I write my script on my iPad, so I don't need I don't need to and I don't need a computer for that. And I'll show you later some other screenwriting apps that are completely free so you don't need to pay for a software like that. And what you do is basically you write details, what happens and every action in the present tense. And here you write the dialogue. Dialogue dairies are to be set and you put all the characters that you have. And the software is formatting your texts already so you don't need to do that. It just places everything and what it needs to be. That is why it's comfortable to use such a software because you just need to write your action and your dialogue and your uterus scenes basically. So you there. 15. Apps and Software for Writing a Screenplay - There are many ways to write a screenplay. You don´t ne: So as I said, I'm I'm working basically on my iPad. Only. I can take it with me everywhere and I don't need an office. I work at coffee shops, I worked in restaurants. I worked in front of the TV one. I watch some some shows senior. I really yeah. And the thing is I'm used to do more things at the same time. So I'm using the software called here have final draft writer. There are there are a couple of softwares. And this is one was called script, right? That is a free software. And here I'm offering you, I'm showing you some screenwriting ups and how much they cost by no drought. There is a free version which is more simpler or is like a really simple version. I really like final drug because I'm used to it. It's not because if it's the best well, too for me, it is the bios, but there were a lot of other softwares that you can use. It doesn't really matter on what software you use as long as you write your script. There is a script write that I sometimes use and there is fading. Writer do it. I mean, there's a lot of free software out there so you don't have to pay for it. It's it's very convenient. These are some handouts I've taken for you, but I'm going to put this list as an additional files so you can check this out, but you can also go, go free apps or software, screenwriting absent. You've got a lot more. And yeah, it could be like a big jungle out there and you come to switch one to you to use, but just stick to one of the software. It doesn't matter which one finds something that is comfortable. There is no right and wrong. Scriptural, for example, is a very simple one and it's free, so just try it out, try different softwares. So let me go and show you how return the outline into a screenplay. 16. Writing the Screenplay for the First Episode - Most often, you don´t have a problem with coming up w: So let's write the screen plane and amusing final draft. Right now I'm using it on my computer. So the formatting there is some type of document. There is title page where you can write your script and we can write the evil and the evil. Money. Yes, my vehicle, a gun rights at the evil by the AP episode 0, 1. And based on it, Any don't need to write down. And you can write your address and your number here. I'm not going to write that now. And you can say, your screenplays say. And so, and then you can close that page and it's going to be saved. So what's happening here? Let see or outline. So we see that there is a job that sees a lot of shadow that is falling on him. So maybe we have thus happening outside. So we write exterior and you see you get suggestions of what to write. Exterior. And desert. Desert tend to say time of the day. So the cowboy Joe, because we know what the character is. Cowboy Joe is it's good, it's good that the character is doing something. So it's not like waiting for the shadow to approach, but it's good to, to find for him sampling to do. So what would he do? Joe? Well, so maybe DO is relaxing on the grass. Grass. Relaxing on the ground. Just to avoid repetition. Suddenly. A lot, a large shadow. The Sun. So I'll look up and see the shadow. Big ears from distant objects. Objects. Joe, up, alert. It's a giant monster. Or bang. Here. I mean, it's a personal car. How would you write a screenplay? There are different styles and I have approached tao where actually if I don't have a dialogue, I give a suggestion, for example, 2, to the filmmakers, uh, how, how to approach or what the character is thinking. So, so whistles to his horse. The horse is passed. Asleep. Though. Again, I doubt any success of waking up. The horse has to deal with the money. If the giant. Giant. Yes. You can check the spelling later on because it's important that when you're right and when you presented your investor in data, I'd like to see mistakes in screenplay. When I wrote for, for spaces, I actually didn't care at all about spelling because I basically didn't show the scripts to anyone. And that was a huge freedom. So if you're going to do TV show yourself, yeah, the screenplay doesn't really matter. If you know what you cannot do. It just matters if you present that to someone else or if you want to find financing from a TV station or a studio. So the graph is gone. Sorry. He surely grabs a large branch. So something about having guns. In the show. There are many public devastation especially that have certain rules of what they can and cannot show. So be careful of how and what you use in your show. Because I have had short-form social worthwhile iPad. No mama characters had guns and even if they didn't use them in certain TV shows, have restrictions and censorship of what you can use and you cannot use. So so make sure you know why you want to present and where you want to have this show. So that's why I'm going to have this setup here where he actually doesn't use his gun. So you can see how you can find a turn alternative to it. And also, this makes the show, is the episodes even funnier because she needs to use a branch against a giant bunny. And I mean, his chances of succeeding fighting this bunny is getting even smaller. So you just becoming more and more ridiculous. And he has attempt. So so runs and runs towards the shadow. When he comes closer TO starts fighting the time. And then he sees now Bonnie is very small and it is scared. Real life exists. Only. Tell me the setup was large, is little pointer. But also really suddenly there is someone else. Standing next to. It is a real giant. Jo takes fighting. Real giant grubs. Grubs. John is with this hand to hand, draw these fears in bunnies. Continuous fighting. Giant, money. That giant looks at him and smiles, corrals. It first, it removes, remove the brand. Now is almost here, refuses basically to, to defeat, to give up. So you get the notes from the software to save your script. So when the home is gone, The giant cell rises. So when cuddles him on his cheek, and then we will start a new thing. And here you have, you get this exterior desert. Desert. Long lens later. Giant funny lays on the ground. Kotlin. The cow boy. Joe. Joe tries to escape, but without Bunny character Sam and catches him and cuddles. And again here really humiliated, of course, because he's very proud cowboy. So and Dr. And this is the first or fourth script. It's almost a half of a help page. Which was because we have 30 seconds or a film. So if you have a TV show that Let's say you have 20 episodes, your rights to any Betas. And you have one page basically per episode, which you can present for an investor or for TV station. And now we have an outline and we have a script. And before you present that you have to check the spelling, you have to check the language if everything is recent properly. Basically, I would do that. I will find the friends or pay for food out to have it checked and have it corrected. But most important is even if you if you don't if you're not sure if you can spell right? And if you, if you're not, if English is not your native language, don't be afraid. It doesn't really matter because someone can help you correct these things. But the most important thing here is your story. This is number one because there are many people that can write really well, but they cannot make stories and they cannot come up with ideas. So if this is your passion and you're like making up stories, don't worry about language. You can get that fixed and you can get help with fixing and polishing down. So let's go to the next stage. 17. Storyboard and Animatic - What is it? - What is Storyboard and Animatic? In this lecture you will ge: So the next stage of your process of creating TV show is storyboarding and the Matric. So when you have your outline and you have your, your screenplay, you have to break down these events in basically in visual storytelling. And that's what a storyboard is. Is basically every scene told as, as close as possible to the final animation. For this purpose, I'm also doing everything on, on an iPad, and I have really invested in an iPad and an Apple pencil data has really made my life really easier. But the thing is that even before Apple pencil, I used this drawing apps on the iPad to do storyboarded many Multics with a pencil dot had a little bit of round tip. And it costs us about line dollar store. But it was, it was like a really much cheaper, I would suggest that you invested in these chose because it's really liberating that you can work anywhere you want and you can finish so many episodes during that wine you, you don't have to pay fees for expensive office or for expensive computer. You can distribute your time the way you like it. And you can even draw embed in on Sunday, sometimes Saturday morning, I would just put on some TV and out of the slave but Hudson coffee bag. And then I'll just do an episode in the middle. It doesn't have to be more complicated than dots. And what I'm used, what I used here isn't called animation creator HD. It's this one. And this one here. And these are all my scenes does undoing even for the next show. And, and it's so easy to use because if I open, this app is not very advanced. But it allows you, because of its simplicity. It allows you basically to draw each frame at a time. And this is how I approach each. So here I can draw every frame and you see, I can see that home and draw. And I draw really quickly. And I don't I don't need to draw very clean drawings because only, the only thing I care about is the animation, the timing, the poses, the acting. This is the only thing I care about. And you see there is a possibility to actually copy a frame and add a blink here, for example. And you can, you can work pretty quickly with your film. And then I added those scenes. Um, I create a one scene where for each episode, for a bracket, I break the animation down in different scenes. So when I change the camera, I just start a new animation and animation creator, HD. And then I render those animations as a QuickTime movies because there is an option like that where you can run the data, the QuickTime movies. And I bring the mean in, in iMovie. And when I bring the mean there, I can add it pretty quickly and I can shorten them and I can even add sounds to them temporarily music. So this is how my episodes can look like. When I'm drawing them on the iPad. And you don't have a zoom in and zoom out till there, but you have to do that in every frame. So it's basically just straight ahead animation. And yes, I do as much as possible to get the movement right and to convey their idea. So whether I care animations later on or to it by myself, I know exactly how much everything will cost because the timing is so tight that I know exactly how long the episode would be and how much it will cost them. What I need to do laser on to complete this episode. So really invest your time in preparing very well if you're doing a low budget, production, preparation is really key and this is something you can do on your own, on your free time while watching TV, just using free software and free applications that are available everywhere on the Apple Store. And in their 400, they're probably a lot of those as well. So yes, so there are some other animation programs as well. This animation creator HD was free when I acquired it, when I got it. Now, there is a free version of the same program there, but it is not. I think in that program you can't you can't extract videos. So I would suggest you just buy their kids score. It's about $4. It's not much. So you just get the programmer and other, other free apps. I mean, you can, you can do that in any free, in any not possible. It doesn't matter as the same as the screenwriting. It doesn't matter where you do it. If the mother is. What is important here is that you have done and you can even do it on piece of paper or you can do it I'm old fashioned way. And so what you need to do is find your own method and just get it done. It doesn't have to be, if not flushing programs and it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. So I'll designed all the episodes in this software in my app, but iPad, which is pretty handy before the production started. So I'm going to show you how I do it with our little script. And I'm going to draw the oral little cowboy as an antibiotic in animation creator HD. So you can see how quickly this can be done. 18. Making the Animatic for The Evil Bunny - Scene 01 - Let´s start drawing the Storyboard and Building : So let me show you how I approach the antibiotic after I have written the script. And what is important here is to to keep it rough, to keep the drawings rough and not to worry so much to do clean drawings. Because what you wanna do here is to test the timing and to test the characters. So let's start with the cowboy Joe. Joe is relaxing on the ground, munching on a grass draw. So what I'm going to do and just have the white I'm going to have the grass on the ground like that in one layer or E1 know. I'm going to start with a wide inventory. So lane on the grass. Let's give him eyes munching on the restaurant. He doesn't even need to have a mouth to do that. But let's have a stone that he's laying next to a stone is linked. And I'm going to put the stone actually in a knot that layer so I can delete this tone whenever I want to, or just so we can work with a character freely. So this is the stone and no, and I'm going to make the stone less it is. There is this possibilities here to create layers. And this is the timeline in animation creator. And now I'm going to start with doing just duplicate the frame. Work on this layer. And I'm just going to have him how he moves the grass, the grass wrong. Duplicate. Duplicate. And this is basically my scene already there. And you'll see why here I have four frames of that scene. And here when you play, here, you have the possibility to use how many frames per seconds you're going to have. You can do. You can minimize the frames per seconds, so it doesn't have to be the exact frame per second as you will end up working with the video. But you can, you can time it. So it's good time for a film. So let's see him munching on the grass. And here we have the first thing that he's laying on the grass munching, munching on this grass, relaxing. And I want to do this as a loop later on, on IMO in iMovie. So I'm just going to exceed the scene and I'm going to copy the animation. And I'm going to have a new scene with him munching on the grass. And in this scene, I'm going to do another layer. And I'm going to have the CSM, a shadow approaching. So I'll have the shadow. I'll, I'll go for a broader lens and I'm going to minimize the opacity and you'll have it in a different layer. So this is this rabbit pain approaching again, don't worry if it's too messy. It's not really important at the moment. It's here is the second frame, giant bunny pain. And, um, next to another frame. Okay, V1 to why they're here. And less opacity is just following falling on him. And next one is just covering. And here he stops munching the crust because it's basically something has happened and what you can do system and this one just duplicate many frames. So you'll get these frames and these are exactly the same frames. So and look at D animation at the moment. You can play that. And so you can even have that. He's some actually munching on the grass still before he started his completely still. So somewhere here, here you can add on this layer continuous with the, with the grass drop. Go back to this length. Again, this program is not advanced, is very intuitive. But you can't copy and do, you can't do a lot of stuff. Now I didn't put it in another layer, but That's that's okay. Doesn't matter because I mean, you will understand that there is approaching is basically what you need here is the axon. You don't need, you don't need to have clean frames. And that's why you can have a little bit more of a follow through, a little bit nicer animation even on the grass straw. So we have like this in she stops. And here he will open his eyes. So he kinda what was happening here. So here it would just he's alert. And we all hold this frame for some time, which means we'll duplicate the frames. And here we go. And this is our first scene. So let's have this scene like gum. Here is a video tool library and I can choose the number of loops I wanted to, I'm going to have five loops of that and export it. And I'm going to have this exported as well. I'm just going to have one loop because it is not a loop, it's continued C. And I'm going to go to iMovie. Imovie here. And I'm going to solve my other projects. I'm just going to choose a new project, movie. And here are my two scenes. And I first moved to create movie. I'll create the movie. And I'm just going to get this videos in here, this one, and then this one. And I'm movie if you haven't worked on it, I mean gives you immediately like smooth toning here, but you can have this one, this transition here, so it doesn't turn in the videos here to a softer transition, U1. And to be, to feel like one seen. Here we have, our character. Is the bunny, is like, Oh, it's opened his eyes and now he needs to jump up. This we can do in another in the next scene. 19. Making the Animatic for The Evil Bunny - Scene 02 - We continue with making the Storyboard and Anima: So now we are here at Joe looks up and sees the shadows to be hears a cast from a giant object. And now we want him to jump and to be alert. So now I think I'm going to, yeah. So let's draw a one layer with the opacity like that. So this is the bunny. And we want to see the hookup of Johnny seal of John Doe laying on the grass still. And we still want to see the stone here. I need to move the ears a little bit. And here I want to make the ears longer. There's, there are some tools that you can use in this program. Not much. Do the tools are a little bit harder to use. But I prefer Dos. Because of the simplicity of this program, you can assuredly find another program that you think it's more, It's better. But I really liked this one because there's the cost of this, its limitations actually. So here's the ground and now I'm going to draw Joe. He has already waken up smaller pencil. So He's looking at the giant with his hat. We start with this, withhold the frame a little bit. And then he jumps up. He closes his eyes, he jumps up. Head. We can even have the he's still having his grass draw on and we duplicate it. And because we're working one layer and we want their underground never seem to be. There still equals another frame. This is the thing that if you, when you do all these frames, you will also get a better hold handoff thing up, down characters. And I mean, how much the animation and animation you need to do. So basically what I'm doing here, I'm just deleting the frame. You can also have clear frame of course, but because I just get better flow of it. So I'm just going to use the delete. He's just now he's spitting out the grass duplicate. And here we'll stretch. And his hat just be in the air. And the grass draw is out of picture and then you don't need to draw it anymore. You don't need to draw the things that are already No, There you have his hat still in the air? He's bouncing and his hat is coming in and falling exactly on his hat. You see that I work really fast and and you can do that. You can do a lot of antibiotics, a lot of automation this way. And now I want him to call these polls. I'm just going to duplicate. And let's see what we've got. We have the 25, 24 frames per seconds to start with. I'm going to decrease it to maybe nine frames per second and see how the animation plays out. And here we have one automatic and then you can just explore it. Edits, save to library. I just want one count. And I'm going to into iMovie. And I'm going to add these digital. And let's see the animation we've got here. Joe is sitting in the graph, is laying in the grass. A giant bunny comes in. Johnny, Johnny, joe wakes up. He jumps up and he's ready to attack the bunny. 20. Making the Animatic for The Evil Bunny - Scene 03 - This is Scene 03 from our First Episode of The C: So he's like he sees the giant bunny. What, what we have to do next is actually see the shadow somewhere in the distance. So Johnny's point of view edit animation. So we see somewhere in the distance. This less or no, I'm in and do this one. And that's a positive t. This is the giant Bonnie. But Johnny says, somewhere in the distance. Let's make the horizon here. On a new layer. I'm going to make Johnny. Here he is. Stone is watching. Might've been more transparent. So on and so now he wants to call his course. Or we also, we also can make now sometimes because it's a very short amount of time, we need to make sure we don't have too many seams and too many dots. And so we have to think about that too. So let's see. Duplicate frame. He co, his horse. Clear it. Now I can just animate the mouth. And in the next shot we'll say that the horse missing the horse is asleep. So Johnny has no time. Joe, I don't know why I'm talking. Jaw guess Jony and then I guess it does feel like a journey to me. So he grabs, we can say that he grew up. He grabs a branch. We can have a branch here where he's going to grab instead of a gun. He's questioning and crops. Without even having enhance the grounds. The branch. And just jumps in the air. Why I do so fast is because I just want to keep the flow of the pace basically. And he's had is again up in the air. And in a way he's had just on its own jumps back on him. It's a little twist to it because it's so important is that he will never leave. He said So is it can be fun to have just had that takes a live on its own and it has its own personality because it's so important to him. And then he goes to fight this giant Fanny in. And then maybe we can have that like and how they live. Dust. We can have that he leaves a lot of posts of dust behind him, as in the Cowboys fans and disappears in the distance. Just add some more frames just to be sure. So let's see what we've got. And again, 24 frames. Let's do it this time, eight frames. And this is what we got. The horse is not there and he disappears. Now I think I've left. And a positive two of these four. So I'll have to delete a whole the previous friends because obviously it was lower opacity on the eraser. So I'm going to do that. So this is what you get. And export is seen as well. So to library one at one time. And here we have our movie at it. And we put this in. So here we have our animation. But John finding approaches. Now, you see that this is already too large, too big. We can just shorten it here. And we can actually extend this one. When he's waiting for the horse. You can split that. And you have to split that to, you go to this frame in iMovie. And here you can have a freeze frame. So you have justice bit longer. 21. Making the Animatic for The Evil Bunny - Scene 04 - Scene 04 of our First Episode.: In the next one is the vaccine is basically we'll have our little and brave cowboy basically erasing. So you can have the scene of him. Now, I'm going to switch actually because he says to move in that direction. I'm going to switch the the branch that he's holding it in this hand for better purposes. And obviously when I animate this and I'm going to make sure that he actually takes the branch with this, with his other hand because it makes it better composition. So he is hurrying up to fight the gym, bunny and duplicate. And here we can add his route. We don't need to actually. The next frame, we can draw completely new frame because we can have the ground also moving to to have his, him to look obviously is moving forward. And it can also be my king. And add another frame. So here we don't need to duplicate it. We can add another frame, sat, and that's it. So we can have only three frames here. And we can see how it plays out. Or you can have it at six friends of seven frames per second. Emil have his movements and use movement forward. So I'm just going to run the dot as a loop. No, no. Maybe five frames. Export. I'm going to go to iMovie and just get that in. Now I can see that this is already too long. You feels too long. I'm going to shorten dot because I'll need an even this is too long. I need to have to have the action happens really quickly. So I'm just going to shorten it a little bit. And I can Jane Moore more seconds for later on. 22. Making the Animatic for The Evil Bunny - Scene 05 and 06 - We continue with Scene 05 and 06 of the A: So let's have him approach the bunny. So make another scene. How this can look like is some, we can just hide a little bit more where he's going. Just time him go into this dark bunny shadow. And we'll get the grounding here. Saw. And we will have our character basically just erasing Living of dust behind him. You see, I don't even draw the whole character anymore because you'll see that you just noticed the movement eventually. So let's see what we've got. He's moving forward. Let's keep that as a scene. And let's do another scene where E is coming in from the side. Sometimes let you know when you have an action scenes. It's nice to do a couple of them, and that's how you can also delay the gratification or dumb. Delay the action and cheap the audience waiting for you to, to resolve the conflict. So we have him here and just delete that frame. And I'm going to add a new frame to create movement. And just keep this going a little bit. We have him as a close up and I'm going to copy this scene. And here I'm going to do that. He stops, he notices the bunny. So hero goals, the goals. And then here he's stops. Why I do this lines is because they're giving me a perspective. Let's make his hat just fly for is actually trying to stop here. Having some more dust. For Girls his eyebrows here. And we expect, of course we can see is still the shadow. We suggest that she, he's still having this shadow near him and duplicate. And now he stops completely with still not showing the bunny. We'll still delaying she or he stops. And then we make a pulse and look at what we've got. 23. Making the Animatic for The Evil Bunny - Scene 07 and 08.: Scene. We're going to reveal the bunny, but we're going to review it in a separate shot. So we see the bunny from this perspective, a law perspective. You have the tail. Now, you have to design the bunny when you do that as well. But I'm just going to try to keep it in this style. Well, I'll just have the bunny being still. And the next shot, I'm going to reveal how big the bunnies. And the next shot. I'm going to say the bunnies or little cowboy 0s here. Looking at the bunny. And the bunny is really tiny. It just costs this big settle. So we have to draw the shuttle to have the explanation of why this he has been afraid. So just and the subtle Starting from the bunny. So here he is. And the bunny turns around. And these rather scared. So you have to make this note. His mouth may be shaking. And what you can do, it can go two frames. And you have to remember. What I do is like these basically I copy every second frame a couple of times just to create the Bunny shaking with his mouth. And we'll get what I've got. So he's standing there, the bunny tones. And so we basically our charter look up, look up, and we see that this is this giant bunny, but let's render these frames. So let's see what we haven't rendered. We are, we've come so long as this. So we need to render this one. Mpeg-2 library export. We will render this as seven frames per second. Feature to library render as a loop four times. And we will rent it out. As one time. Sport. We will rank the dot as well as a single frame. One video. And this one. So here we go. We have this one, so we need to run that this, this one here, this one here. Another thing is that we've got more than 30 seconds now. So if you are in production, you will have to cut this out. Or if you're working on your own, you can just extend it. If you don't have to get exactly as it's old, or you have to find solutions of how to cut it out. How to speed up the whole action. Because you can maybe just leave, leave the horse out of the picture. You can just have this or our character without calling the horse, just go straight ahead and trying to attack the giant. So we have to cut some frames. Here. We have to cut some frames. 24. Making the Animatic for The Evil Bunny - Scene 09 - We are almost there with the whole Animatic.: So we'll have this new animation where we'll see this giant. We have the ground over here and we have an separate layer. This huge bomb. And old character is small. And there is this other little bunny Solve. So we know what's happening. Just duplicate these frames. And of course we'll try to be brave soul. He will like take a stick and jump in the air. Let's move on to the other hand. So we have a Beta silhouette. The head is still floating and she is ready to fight. And she will even like wave with his little made up swatch as if to show the bunny. He's meaning big deal. And he can, he can waive couple of times, but this one you can loop in later on in editing movie. So you see what we got going on seven frames per second. Maybe I'm going to do even faster. I need to do some more frames here to have him a little more. And let's export dot v2 to library. Let's go in iMovie. And I have, now I need to I'm going to take this away and just use the Alt and duplicate it. Because of increase the size a little bit. So basically he's showing off. And what the bunny does is just is just pick him up. And couples while he's still trying to fight to the bunny. I'm going to change the last thing. 25. Making the Animatic for The Evil Bunny - Scene 10 - Final Scene. Here you will also learn how adjust: So the last thing, I'm just going to do, a close up of the bunny. Instead of him, instead of the bunny line on the ground that it was on the script. Because obviously we want to see or little character very close. And it's not gonna be very well if it's form farther away. That's the thing that involve the script and the storyboards are guidelines and you come closer and closer to the final, your final film. And you can change all of these things in the course of your production. That's why you shouldn't be afraid to just change it. Change the script if it's necessary. Here is our little cowboy. And he's basically waving with his swatch. So I'm just duplicating frames and I'm just deleting one. I don't need to. And the bunny is kind of amused of what he's doing. And then the bunny just cuddles him. And or little cowboy will just want to get away. So he'll just try to push himself out. Let's have the mouth shaking and duplicate that. And then he'll just give up with his hanging in the air. And thus how we finish. So let's still around the dot one because we didn't do that. The last frames. And let's render this one. Let's see how many frames per second. Sis 224. You can try out the animation to see how it plays out. I need to a little bit faster on the K. I need, I need another pose for the bunny when he's picking up. So between this one and this one, I need to so this played out. So I need to wait a little bit more before he starts struggling. So from here, yeah, this one, I can add it later on in iMovie. So export dot 26. Finalising the Animatic for the Evil Bunny - Use iMovie to edit your Animatic. It is easy and it doe: And get the new one and the ending of this one in the movie. When he's kind of picking the guy up. I wanted to play off little slower. So harris, in iMovie, you can have a slower motion. You need to split and duplicate that. And she needs to struggle a little more, not just one time. And this one I need to make it slower. On this one, I'm going to just make the struggle so little slower given more. And I want to have this last frame longer. So I'm just going to duplicate it and I'm going to freeze this frame. And then that's it. So basically all of them got 10 seconds longer. And so what do you want to cut? Is I'm going to cut the horse seem I'm not going to add any horse. He's just going to wake up and he's going to straight away and go to the danger. And I'm going to cut this thing shorter. So we still have 10 seconds more. But this is something that our story is working on right now. So I'm not going to cut this seconds. But if you have to put ten seconds and you have to maybe tweak this story. This is a process that you have to basically work on. But these are, now, I have one antiemetic and one episode. And in iMovie here you can play a sound. You can record sound if you want, but we don't have dialogue on this one, so I'm going to talk about sound on separate chapter. 27. Music and Sound - Music and Sound are very important for the Success of your show. How to add a qual: So music and sound design. This is a big part of your TV show because basically 60% of an experience of a film experience is music and sound. So you should not ignore this chapter. And if you're an animator and you want to make your own TV show and you're not a composer, this can be a little tricky because this is something that if you don't have a talent for it, you basically it's difficult to do it on your own. But sound design, actually, you can construct on your own, because there are a lot of websites out there on the web, where there is free sound designed. There is free sound design on YouTube. You can search for free sounds and you can find a lot of sounds on YouTube and you can convert, you can take these videos, you can convert them into MP three, and you can edit them in your animation. And you have to follow the specifics of this person's sound design. If there are a lot of creative guys and girls out there that have put a collection of sounds maybe for a credit. On your title, you'll have to figure out how to pay the right basically for the sound design because nothing is really for free. You have to either credit it or you have to pay the person to do the sounds. Or you can also record your own sound design. You can do some steps. You can be very creative doing your own sound designs. I will just give again an example of Simon cat, where the person who created the video also made his own sound designs and his own sounds. The same applies to music. There is a royalty free music out there, which you can find. If you want something specific, you can use a garage band on your iPhone. This is for free. You can you can make your own music out there. You can decide not to do any music. You can have just ambient sound. But actually, I would suggest to have music for the show because if you don't have dialogue, it will be important for you to have good music and good sound design. So if you choose to have actors, be careful which actors to choose and make sure the actors are good because they'll set a tone for your show. I was very, very lucky for my show for Space to find a really talented guy who actually did my music, my sound design and the voices of all of the characters, except some which I'm doing. I'm just going to show you a small clip from how he is working. It was really fun working with the studio and we basically the sound of the fly. And here is another one. Okay. We were very creative he was very creative doing the sounds for all these three characters. So find your own way to do music and sound design. 28. Who is the TV-show for? - Who is your main target group. Why do you need to have a target group and : Choose an age group for your show because this is important when you're going to distribute your show. Even though many show many good shows are seen both by grown ups and children. If you're going to distribute your show through the conventional ways if you're going to sell it to TV station, for example, they will ask you this question. Who is it for and what is the age group. And even if you don't stick to it 100%, you have guidelines of what to put in the show. Like I mentioned before, for example, having gun a gun in a show, it will bring some difficulties with distribution in certain channels. So you have to think about it, what you what you put in your show. For example, if you do a show about if you do a show for preschools, for example, there is a certain specification that you need to have at least a voiceover that explains what is happening. For this show, I'm going to choose a wider range of ages, which is 5-10 or 12 because There we have more freedom to experiment, even to have cool characters or more gut characters. We can have maybe weapons and our cowboy has. We don't necessarily need to have dialogue because children in that age, they understand better even through only body language. You have to think about that. 29. How to choose a style for your TV-show if you are on a low budget - How to choose your style and wha: I So what you need to choose for your TV show is also a style. What technique you're going to use. Is it going to be a three D animation to the digital animation or to the animation? Will you do it in a cutout or stop motion or pixillation technique for those who, for example, not familiar with pixillation technique. It is basically animating physical objects or humans, like you use yourself as a puppet and just move one frame at a time and take and take a picture and that is your animation. You can experiment with styles. You can combine both of those tiles. You can combine styles out of it. There's a lot of examples right now where there is a combination and experimentation with different styles. And also, you can use the same program that I was doing animation anomatics to actually complete your animation. Or you can use other programs that are also for their free apps or cost at a very low cost where you can experiment and you can do different techniques. This is up to you to experiment. So what I chose for my TV show and why I did that. What I wanted to invest my money in was character and their performance. So and also I wanted them to look good and I wanted to have a somewhat advanced animation. So what I did is, like, I decided to do the show in TreD First, because I'm mostly comfortable with tree D myself, but also because I had the possibility to work with a TreeD team. So I invested basically in designing and creating these characters in TreeD and keeping the backgrounds completely empty because again, every background that you decide to put in, it involves more work for you. So So what I did I designed really simple props and characters, and I always just modeled and put in the props and the characters which my main characters interacted with. In that way, I could really focus on animation and storytelling, and I didn't need to waste a lot of time on the background. So this is how I rigged one of my characters. The rigs are really simple. And actually, I chose to hire people to do that because I'm not so good at doing just that. And also, what I decided to do is I decided to use stop motion animation in TreD which means that I animated the characters on two as if I would do as a stop motion. And I set up the style, working with stop motion, but having the advantages to go forth and back because if you are an animator, you know basically how much time consuming it is to work with the character animate and then to polish your animation. So working on step keys so to say, or just doing each frame at a time, I saved a lot of time I could really do more advanced animation and still keep up with the time and still work really fast. You basically need to find out what works best for you, where you have your resources. Do you have friends or do you have availability to use certain tools that will be cheaper for you or can you have a style in mind and can you invest in maybe financing this kind of production? This is something that you have to choose for yourself. Okay. 30. How to Fund your TV-show - How to find funds, where can you look for it and how to think when crafti: So how would you finance your TV show? There are many different ways to do that. First, you need to prepare as much as possible to finalize the show The way you want it to be. It's going to be easier for you to sell it or to promote it or and to get funding. So I would suggest you do this work that I've shown through this, through these lectures. And right, and prepare your show and designing characters as much as possible. And think about it as your own investment. So don't think about it. This is just a waste of time or I'm doing I'm doing it for as my hobby. There's I know that you love what you do and thus why does, why you do it. But this is something that people later on or pay you for to do. If you, if it's a successful TV show, they will pay you to do that for a living. So you can combine one and the other. They are not excluded. So you can have different, different ideas are put up. Some, some of them, I'm pulling in some of them here. You can have a Kickstarter campaign or Indiegogo campaign where you can have the financing. You can involve private finances. You can treat that show as a startup because many people, many in finance years, they don't really know that. You have your show out there. We are used to believe that private finances are only four tech companies, you know, like Facebook or Twitter or Google in all they collected private finances. And we're not very used to think that a TV show or movies are, are financed by private investors. But you should think that does way because if you do it well, if you get the private funding, then you can have a more freedom to do the show really well. And the well, the more well you do it, the more chances you get to be successful. So look around and see what kind of private finance CSR in your area. And there are a lot of meetups. For example, you can go to meetup.com and you can find startups in your own local area and see what's going on in the film or field of angel investing or venture capitalists in this, in this area. And how small businesses or small startups like UP company is starting their business and how they attract finances. So another thing is local grants. Local grants are really very grateful way to do that. Very nice way to finance your TV show because they usually don't want their money back. So you kind of get so-called free money. I mean, you have to work harder to get those money, or they're also called like soft money. This is because they're trying to help out businesses and filmmakers to start their films or their companies. And this is very, and this is very common in Europe, for example. I'm not sure I feel from the other parts of the world. I don't know how it sits in the US, for example, if you have this local grants that support our 10 support filmmaking, just look around. Google Grants. You get the local grounds in your area. Friends and family. I mean, this is basically your biggest asset when you start doing your TV show. Because tried to think of that as having these tools that I've been given you now, you see how much you can actually get done without any funding in place. So on. The one thing is, one thing with the funding is that it puts you in a situation where you have to do certain things, you have to give back the money. It can be challenging for you to get the grants, even though you don't believe you don't believe that it could be so. But the grants are really not for free. There is certain the rules you have to follow and it will tie you up for certain conditions. For example, if you find a local distributor or a TV station, they will apply their their rules and their requirements on you. And this will be in a way will limit your creative freedom, for example. So friends and family are the people who would believe in you. And if you make your production really small and start with this 30-second episodes, or even have longer episodes, but not a lot of automation. You can. With the lip-sync. And so you can have friends and family who can, who can add the voices, do it. Or you can, for example, have a friend or family member that can play guitar or can add sound design. And this is discipline use really this you can do really easily. And you can ask maybe your friends and family for a 100 dots here, a 100 doors, they're there. You can put this together and then you can also start your Kickstarter campaign with the help of that. So just try to play around with the idea of different possibilities. There is a lot of possibilities. Don't limit yourself with just the idea that this is impossible. And notice the TV station and distributors, this is a common way of actually making a TV show. You prepare a package with everything on place with the things that we have, the animation Bible, when you have all the described, all the characters and you have the visuals while loop, again show the visual style. You have, the synopsis, you have the treatments. At least the first six episodes of the show in a screenplay and Linda screenplay form. You have to make the budget. You have to make the time schedule. I am. You have to do. You have to have a motivation letter from the director, from the producer. So you have to have these packets in place to operate producers. And this can be overwhelming to know. If you just a beginner, this can be too much for you to think about as a creator. One you only want to do. What you want to do is only just having fun and designing episodes. But don't be scared or without. It's easily alarmed. It doesn't take a long time to prepare. It just helps you get rid of that mindset that it's annoying or it's hard to know. Just don't think, sit down and do it. And you will open the door to another way of financing. And another thing that you have to think about when you're approaching TV stations and distributors is sometimes that if you actually succeed to do approach and to get Funding, we'll show to be accepted them both by big distributors that sometimes you'll have to give up on the rights of the show, so they'll give you the money and you can work on the show and you can make it happen, but you have to give up your rights. And which is, which could be worth doing. Because eventually you will have a show and you'll be paid to do that. It just see how you feel about it. So I've added based financing. This is something that they do a lot in games that they play, especially product placement. And the EU going to contact different company sends. You ask them to, if they want to finance your show and you could put their product in the show when a, so basically it's a product placed. So there is a big disadvantage doing doubt. Of course you get the money. But many TV stations, especially public stations, they did not allow to show advertising on their station, their TV station, because it's basically public, a publicly financed. So you're, you're excluding new TV show from all these public distributors. Which do you wanna do that? There is a possibility because there are other ways of distribution. You know, you can distribute it on YouTube or you can distribute it on Vimeo. I can find other streaming channels where you can have odd based financing or product placement. But if, for example, you want to show it on BBC or some other local or public station. Yeah, they're not, they're not allowed to do that. So is plus, plus and minuses and dots. And so these are basically some of the possibilities to finance your show. If you, if you decide to make a more episodes or if you want to get more money to finance, for example, 20 episodes of this thirty-seconds. You've done ten episodes already on your own and you want to continue, there is an opportunity to it. But also if you'd first episodes, would you done on your own, getting successful on the platforms like on YouTube or Vimeo, you actually have the chance to attract finance seers, just doing that, so you don't even you approach them. So wonder, typical example of someone who has succeeded that way is, for example, sign on the cat. Who started with just one video and it got viral. And he's, he did more videos. They got pi over 2. And then he was contacted by via very big distributor and variable. And there you go. It's a history. You know how popular sites on the catalyst. If you don't know it, you can Google it and see the history of Dutch Shell. So study and learn from the other shows that are out there and how the have approached and financing. There is no limit nowadays because TV station distributors, they may make you think that would make you think that this is the only way to make a TV show is to actually contact your TV station, local fuel station, and get funding there. Which is totally not true. It used to be that way, but it's not that way anymore. So you have all the freedom and possibilities to finance your shell and to make it happen. 31. Budget - How you approach and craft your budget.: Hi there. In this section, we're going to talk about budget. This is for most creators, is a topic which is rather boring, but it is a very necessary step for learning how to create your TV show and how to pitch it or how to find co production partner or even private investing. So for budget, you need to know that the time you put in in your project, the things you do yourself in so called free time is actually is actually your currency because many people see the things they do, which they do for fun, as something insignificant, and they will just waive it off and they would say, Well, I'm just doing it on my free time, so It's actually free. But it's never free. You should count this as your currency or as a money spent from your own pocket into the project, and that is going to be the money you actually invest in the project. So let me go and show you how you schedule a budget and what you put in, what kind of costs you bring in to your budget, and later on, we can discuss of the finances, which topics you can skip, which topics you can leave out. And it really depends on how you're going to finance your TV show and who you're going to bring in. So let me go in the next section break this down a little bit for you. Okay. 32. Budget Breakdown Part 1 - What do you need to put in your budget and how to calculate what you need : Hello there. No, this is an exciting moment. When we talk numbers. Usually, when you're a creator, you don't want to talk about numbers, usually you don't have to because most of the part when you have an idea, you usually find a producer before you even start. But if you have had difficulties to find the producer, you maybe have given up on that because you are waiting someone to do the numbers for you. This doesn't have to be that way, and that's why I'm going to talk to you about how you design a budget, what you write in one budget, how you calculate it, and how you put things together. So you can pitch your TV show for TV stations or distributors or investors or even if you want to have it for yourself. If you want to know how much does TV show cost to make. So you can have a kick starter campaign and you know, I can get so much money and what do I buy with this money? How do I use them? So I'm going to go through and I'm going to set a price it's going to be an estimated price. Because I'm doing this lecture for an international use and the prices are different in every country. If you want to know the real price is in your country, you should get interested of how much things cost. Or if you already are in the business in animation business, you know at least what somethings cost. If you are, for example, an animator, you know how much you early as a monthly fee for an animator and you know how much you can hire animators in your country. To work for you. And you know how much you can elaborate with this prices. But I'm just going to give a rough estimate. It's a totally made up. So it is not set in any standard, so you don't have to say that this is not what it costs. It definitely isn't what it costs. I'm just going to make a made up estimate. For example, if that cost that much, for this amount of time or for this amount of episodes, how much does it mean in numbers, and then you can make your own calculations. Basically, you may have much more detailed budget here depending on how big productions you want to have and how much things you want to put in. There are people that have catering and every single detail that they do, they want maybe to have fees for renting a cinema to try out the first episodes, how they look in the cinema. You can put those costs in, you can count them in. You can put cost like for example, you want to have teachers coming in, teaching your staff how to do things. So you want to have an advice. You want to buy a script advisor you put all these costs in things that you can think of that you may think of using, you can put in. Even if you don't use those things later, you know, can you have the money, you have calculated the money to put them in and then you can distribute them and use them in another way. But it's good to have the mean because if you're in the middle of production and and you don't have the money, you'll be like, Yeah, it's not going to be a good situation. So script This is basically you decide how much the script will cost. If if you write the script yourself, you still write this budget because this calculation will be used later on to present what is your investment. And as I talked before about that before, about previous section, your time spent on this show is basically your on investment. Even if you do it on your free time, this is the money spent from you into the project. So for example, say for 26 episodes of 1 minute, And this script involves also revision. So all the time you will take to write the scripts with all the changes that you're going to make. You should write in and it's 26 episodes of 1 minute, you need to write one page a day. This means with all the changes with everything, then it's kind of like a little bit more than a month if you don't count in the weekends, if you have a regular Week or if you want to count salaries per day. You can decide that on your own, but say you make a $1,000. And I have set the budget here to be in dollars. I'll do that you count the same concepts. Now, what concepts do you make, if you make the concepts yourself in this thing involves you work with the concepts until they're done. The concept I did for a cowboy named Joe is just the first draft. I just mentioned the whole concept the whole the character will look like. But later on, I want to have it maybe more developed, more. I want to know what the color his body is, what kind of will I have the textures, what kind of hat I'm going to use and how I'm going to make a turnaround in my previous lecture about character design and cartoon characters, I talk about turnarounds and character sheet and character development as well and how you do it. So You can check that and you can see how long does it take you to get the concept right. So let's say also, for example, it will take me a month to have to make the characters roughly. You can also say that I can make the characters in a week then you just say let's say just to be roughly estimate like rounded numbers. Let's say I'll have $100. I can make the character for those for this time. If you hire you have to be also reasonable with the prices because if you hire someone and they tell you it's going to take me three months to make these characters, and I want $3,000 because if a monthly salary is $1,000. I obviously don't know the monthly salary in US. So that's why I'm just bringing this number out of thin air as an example. But if someone says to you, I want 3,000 or $30,000 because it will take me a long time to develop the characters, well, then something is wrong because, you know, it doesn't take that long. It shouldn't take that long. It should be a reasonable number. So director, if you're the director, you'll have to be there for the whole show. And let's say the show takes 12 months to produce. So maybe 12 $12,000 because you need to be there all the time. Producer, if you are a producer, you can decide if producer as well. Maybe get this number in if you want to get a salary as a director or as a producer. Or if it's a low budget production, you can say, I can just have a directors salary and I'll do the producer's job. But if you want to bring in producer, you have to know that you'll have to pay them. And this is a a separate position. So if you were asking an investor on how much money you put in, well, I did both of these jobs. I was a producer and I was the director. So this is my investment, and that's the money I put in modeling and rigging. Um, for this character, for example, if you have just one character, and the character looks like it does. I would say one week is enough to model and rig. So let's say $100 again. Texturing again, it would be maybe three days, so maybe Let's give an estimate of $30 for texturing, if it's like a really really simple texture. Workstation and software. You have to count in how many workstation you will need for people who will work in your project. Will you buy the computers, will you rent the computers? This is another thing. If if you need to have maybe three people working with you at the same time because you don't need all of your team at once at the same time. You can have the story borders first or the the concept artist first, so it can be there and one concept artist and one model and rigger, then it means that you need to have three working stations, one for you, one for the model and rigger and one for the concept artist. And then you'll need software for these people. You will need for example, if you want to do it on Photoshop, or if you want to do What kind of software do you have? You need to put you put in these numbers. Obviously, I worked on an app and I did all my storyboarding on an app that was free. So I didn't have any costs. I just had one time payment for an iPad, which I bought previously and and an Apple pencil. But so I had that as my investment. If you usually bring your software to a company, they high you bring your own software, you do have a fee that you rent your software to this company. So you have to decide how much you if if you don't give you software, you can take a fee that you use your own computer or your own software. So here you can add a number depending on what you're going to do. Let's say, For the whole project, let's give it maybe ten $10,000 in software workstation through the 12 months. Backgrounds, this is how many backgrounds do you need? Do you have backgrounds? How long do you need the background artist to be on a project? You don't have the background artist if you do it in three D, or even if you do it in two D, actually, you don't have the background artists from the beginning, maybe before you have the concept and the design already, you have background artist when you start the production. And you have them almost until the end for 12 months. Here you'll have to decide a salary for the background artist. If he is there for ten months, let's say $10,000. If we set a one month salary, $1,000. Storyboarding 26 episode episode, say you do it for three months, $3,000 layout if you work in animation, You need to you can have a layout artist. I did not do any layout for my show because my show was stop motion. So I skipped that stage altogether and went directly into animation. You do not do layout in stop motion productions. For example, you start immediately working on the scene from the storyboards. So that's what I did. So I didn't have any costs in here and animation. You can decide like 26 episode 0.1 minute. Depending on what kind of animation you want to do, you should estimate how long time would it take you to do this animation and how many people do you need. And you estimate that as how many seconds per week you can do, and you kind of like multiply it and get a rough number that I want. I'm aiming for this animation. And when you make this calculation and you take in people, you can say that well, we have set the animation for you should make 40 seconds a week. And if they say, Oh, well, that's too much because I'm used to making just 2 seconds a week, like people working in Pixar, they're making maybe 2 seconds a week that are really, really spot on polished animation. Well, there are other productions where you basically have stiff figures and you just have post pos and you just move them out a little bit. You maybe do even a minute a week or even more. I myself, haven't worked in productions with so much animation per week, but my estimate for my animation was pretty high as well because I did stop motion, and I had higher minutes, higher seconds per week, then a normal production would have, which is probably about maybe 20 seconds or 15 seconds a week is kind of like a European kind of production standard. Let's say you have animator wrestler say one animator four, for nine months or three animators for three months. So let's say we have 9,000 and composting inclusive rendering. Um, So here. It's obvious when you have the animation. You have to compost and render it. How long does it take when the animation finishes? I'm going to take talk about time table, time scheduling on the next episode. So you can combine the budget with the time table and you can work for and back with the budget and the production schedule to fit in these numbers to make it as close as possible to the real numbers and try to hit them. And Yes, and to design a budget. So basically, maybe three months, let's say $3,000 editing to edit the whole show. Let's say you'll have an editor for a month. Which can be maybe too much. I don't know if you have a very solid storyboard and you have the very solid editing in storyboarding, then you can be pretty quick with editing in the end. But let's say a month. And you can be picky. In the end, you can decide that, well, you know, these episodes don't work as I want. Let's bring a good editor to polish and to do everything. Let's give them two months to do it. Let's work with this together. You can do that. But in animation, it's a little harder because if you don't have a lot of money, this is a luxury you can do in live action in animation where everything, every scene costs a lot, and you don't have the luxury with a big company and big money machine behind you, it's tricky to decide at the last minute that this doesn't work. Just put your time in script and anmatics to start with. Here, I mean, story boarding, I forgot to put in anomatics and you can use layout here as an anomatic. Matic. And I say I'll do three months anomatic this one has to be 3,000 here. So I did storyboarding and anomatic at the same time, as you noticed. I did not save images, but I drew directly in this program. So it was very organic. I just went forth and back. It was very organic process, and I didn't have to save JP and then bring them in in the program. I saved a lot of time. And even when I wrote the scripts and they didn't fit or I wanted to get a different action from my outlines or from the script. Well, basically, I didn't write any scripts for a Spacioc but from my outlines from the story ideas, I just did it in anomatic say what will happen in the character does that. And I just sketched the scene directly in the iPad and I didn't have to go and rewrite it. That's the luxury of working yourself. Everything happens so quickly, so fast because you have a control of the production. You don't have anyone. You don't have hundreds of people giving their opinion and telling you what to do and what not to do. Sometimes getting an advice is good. I'm not telling you that you shouldn't get an advice because sometimes you lose sight of what is funny. You may be work a lot and you don't know if he's working or not, you should show it to people. But sometimes you have many people telling you what is good and what is not good. You just working for yourself making your TV show, you skip all that and things happen fast and you trust your intuition and you trust your characters, you listen to your characters, and things just happen quicker and more fluent. 33. Budget Breakdown Part 2 - We continue with adding more items to the budget. Why are some things impo: So actors. Here, obviously, it is important to hire actors. I was very lucky for a previous show, I had a really great producer who found professional actors. He was very good negotiator and because I did and they were rather expensive actors. But they were really, really good. What I did is because I did all my print production really, really tight because before I even met the actors, I recorded the sounds. I recorded the dialogues myself. I knew exactly how long time I needed each dialogue to take. And I knew exactly what the scene looked like. So I was very thorough with the anomatic and with the storyboard. So when I was there in the studio working with the actors, it took them 3 hours only to record the sound. Well, they were budgeted maybe for one day or two days. So Eventually, they get more paid it actually it finally costs. So actors, let's say you have a day with the actor or let's say three days, let's say three days with an actor and 300 and sound. So depending on what to do with sound, let's say you have four weeks to do a sound, four and let's say composer, so you have a composer for two weeks, 2000 Master is basically putting the sound and the picture together. It's when you work with the studio, they can do this final polishing. Because if you do a mini TV show, if you do a web TV series that is going to be viewed only online on YouTube. This is not so important, but mastering is important to get a grading right, which means grading means the colors of all your scenes should be the same. So it should be like flickering, one green is this color, another green is this color. They just even out, so it looks that everything is coming from the same movie or the same environment and putting basically the sound and the picture together in a more polished and professional way. So for mustering, let's say three days. This can be maybe too little, maybe for a whole TV show, you need to give it maybe a whole week. But let's say if we do it on a minimal budget, then you say to someone, I have an allowance for I have an allowance of three days. I don't have a lot of budget. Let's give it three days and let's give it 300. $300, which can be too little but the shorter the job is, the more expensive it's going to be as well, but it's also a negotiable. It's what kind of price you can set. It's negotiable with the people who you work, and this is just an approximate thing I'm doing, so I will allow mastering for $300 for this budgeting for your purposes to see how I do things. Let's move on Travels These are basically all the costs. That you will have if you need to travel for the production. If you need to meet producers, if, for example, your sound designer or composer is in a different city and you're going to travel there or you're going to invite them to work with a team, if you have a team. These are basically the cost that we'll take. And you do an allowance here. Now, if you're in such a small budget, you might not put these costs in, but if you want to if you want to have them, if you have a production going and you presented for your for your investor, you want to have some troubles because the production gets much better if more people if the people who are in the production meet and if they talk when they're in the same place. So maybe you want If you have different people from different you want them to meet. So let's say allowance if your production in the same country, you can say $1,000. If it's not in the same country, you should think of ticket price and so on, how much does it cost. But let's say for the sake of it, I'm going to give $1,000. It's going to vary from case to case. I can't speculate how your production will look like. I'm just giving you a rough example how you do an estimate of a budget. So presentation and meetings. This is basically the same thing. If if you're going to meet someone, if you're going to meet a distributor, you invite them for lunch because you are interested to show your show, they will take their time to meet you. Or if you want to have them in your place or you want to rent a conference room because you work from home. This is the cost that you estimate. And again, it is just an allowance if you have this $1,000, you said, Well, okay, I can meet you here and here and I can travel to meet you or I can invite you for expensive lunch. If you don't have this allowance, well, then say, Well, can we have a sky talk? And so it depends what you can elaborate with. Lawyers fee. This is very important. You will need at some point to have a lawyer, no matter what you do. So either you put that in even if you have your concept artist and your creatives, where I talk about legal issues later on, and you will need to have contract contracts check. I'm just going to give you an example of a really bad case that it is something that that happened to me a long time ago when I actually started in a business. I was I was just a student. So I have no idea about legal issues and all these things. All I wanted to do is draw funny characters and just do animated movies. And obviously, I drew some characters for which were very well received and they just wanted to get them from me without paying anything. But that was not the worst part. The contract that I was shown there was that they wanted if I had signed this contract, basically, what it would have meant was that I give them the right to to use everything that I created from my whole life. Something that was written in a very complicated legal language, and I didn't really apprehend. I didn't understand what I was going to sign. And so be careful with what you're signing. And what you do because it can be it can be tricky. And. So let's say we have again, I don't know how much you will need legal fees. You need and how much does it cost in your country per hour. So again, a general number of 1,000. Insurance. You need to have an insurance if something happens to your computers or to your files. And if you if you have your budget in place, if this is in production already, you need to have sign some kind of insurance if you brought investors in place and they paid you this money. You just get them. And and suddenly, something happens. Someone breaks in or a fire goes or the computers are completely trashed or I don't know, you get a virus on the computer, whatever can happen, and all the f, all your project, everything that you've done up to here and is gone and you have to start over and you need someone to cover all these expenses. So that's why you need insurance. Again, let's say the general $1,000. It can be also I mean, can have expense, let's say, $3,000. Financial uncertainty. This topic applies if everything that we've counted in here is not enough. If you've made the best estimate to do that and still something goes over the time that you've estimated it took longer time for animation. It took longer time to composite or whatever. So you only put 20% 20 20% of financial uncertainty. That is a standard thing of 20%. So whatever you come from here, you just put in 20% on top of that in case of something happen and you have the money to cover it. Administration, this is basically everything that has to do with administration including hiring someone to to run your taxes or to run your paperwork or whatever. So let's say 10,000. For example, you don't have to have this person all the time. Administration, obviously, you put this number, let's minimize it because if you're just starting, you will put this number You'll maybe even not put this number because all you want to do is the money for this production. Everything else that you count in if you have your own company or you don't, you may be already doing administration yourself. But it depends also who you presented with and how you have done things. If you've administrated this all the time. You should count these hours in as money spent in your project. If you try to get the money from another source, kick start or something, you can say, Okay, What do I need to pay now? What do I need to get the money for? Do I need model and rigor, or I can do the rest of myself. So I can just get these numbers, and this is my investment. I'll do the concept, I'll do directing producing. I'll do animation, storyboarding. This is on me. So what I need I need maybe workstations or maybe one workstation, whatever you need to do? So let's see how much you can invest and how much you need to make this project going. So basically, you calculate you calculate all these numbers, and this is going to be your budget for the show. And in the numbers, you also include taxes. So this is including taxes. If if you pay some $1,000, but it costs you $1,200 to hire this person because you pay taxes to hire the person or social fees for the person or health care. So you include this in. So instead of $1,000 that you will give to the person, you write 1,200 because that's what you will pay to hire the person. So put all the extra expenses in in this number, so you don't have to pay from your pocket this health insurance and things like that. And when you pitch your project, this is going to be together with the time with the production schedule, which I'm going to talk in the next section. This is an important chapter, and the people, the producers who are out there, they look at these numbers in the same way that you can spot wrong animation or something wrong with a script or with the concept. The people who are looking at numbers and have that as their work, they will scan this immediately and they'll say, if this is a believable estimate or if it's not believable estimate. That's why this production budget goes hand in hand with your development because you want to see that, is this a tre D is this a TD? Is it a cut out, you know, if the animation is simpler, if you say I will have this more simple animation, that's why My budget is lower. I don't need to spend a lot of money in modeling texturing. I'm planning to have the show made 1.5 minutes per week. Instead of just 2 seconds or 5 seconds or even 20 seconds. It's a huge difference, you see, but you have to put this together for the investor or the co producer or whoever you're interested to bring in the project to convince them because if you put very low numbers also and you want to make a very polished production, they will not believe you and they'll say, Well, this will never happen and the show will not look good, so I'm not going to invest in it. Even if the idea is interesting because the budget is too low. This also can happen. You want to please the producer and say, I'm not going to put too big a numbers just to get some money and then I'll figure out how to do next, how to finance. Then I say, well, that's you cannot make this show with these visuals that you have this ambition. You can't do it. You need to have more money for that because we know how much this cost. I mean, they have done it, obviously, they've been in production. So you need to be reasonable with your ambition, how of the project contra your budget. Basically, that is a very, very simple budget that you can start with. And I would suggest as an exercise, You go and you ask people in your area how much they get to write these things and how much it will take them. For example, to write 26 episodes of something. Just ask them and see how much they take. Ask someone that is professional that's already in the business and ask someone that is aspiring writer or aspiring model or rigor. The prices will shift. Sometimes you can take someone that has just started. I've had a great experience with students who just start because they're so ambitious and they are so innovative. They find new ways and they know all the new tricks and things in the new software, and they know much more than maybe someone that have worked in the business longer, but has worked in just one version of the software and doesn't know how to do things faster or better. So it's very relative. Who does what. Just do that as an exercise and write your own budget and here you sum this in and you write the total of the cost that you're going to take and then see where is your investment, meaning what will you do yourself and count that in as an investment and say, I invested this amount of money in my project, so I need additional investment, for example. Yes, that's it. I'm going to leave this this Excel sheet as a separate document. So you can use that and write your own numbers here and use it in your package if you design a package for your own TV show. Dosite for the budget the budget site. 34. Production Schedule Part 1 - How to design a Production Schedule for your TV-show and why is it impo: Production schedule. This is again, an estimate of how long you estimate it will take to do the TV show. You estimated an amount of minutes and how you get this information. If you're in the business, you pretty much know how long it takes you to do things, although there is a little glitch within what you know and how much it actually takes because if you are professional and if you're working in the FX business, for example, this is a minute of animation can take up to a month because the animation is very, very advanced and is very polished. So if you have this expectation that show will cost that it will cost for 1 minute of animation, you'll have to spend one month. This is going to be unreasonable for your show. You have to prepare yourself with a different mindset. Because again, you can have your show look really well, really good, but you can find alternative ways of how to do a quality animation, a good animation, or you can have characters, very still. I mean, think of a South Park, for example, which is various stiff animation, but great characters, and it's still going on. People still love it. So you have to approach the mindset of animating if you're in the business in a different way. If you were just if you're a writer or a director, this is not going to be a big problem for you because you don't have the demands on particular area of the production. Like, for example, I have I've talked to people who are actually lighting and rendering artists and they don't care a lot about the animation. They just care things look really good. You have to find a middle ground because you're going to be the director of this show and you have to balance out. You have to compromise basically, but never compromise your characters and your story. This is the main thing. 35. Production Schedule Part 2 - We continue to talk about a Production Schedule. It can make or break y: So what is production schedule? It is basically an estimate of how long it will take each department to complete a certain task to complete the whole TV show. And this is a very typical time schedule graph. You can do that yourself. And with different colors, it's marked how long things will take in weeks in different months here. And you just go for and and draft how long each department takes. And later can base also your financial plan, your budget based on this estimate. So this is the things that you will need to present your investors or if you want to receive a grant or your co producers of how you thought that you're going to make this TV show and The people out there have done this many times, people that you will meet, especially co producers. So they will check this plan, the schedule, and they'll see if that is a realistic plan. Usually, when we start to plan these things, we want to squeeze thing in and you want to have we are maybe more optimistic, so we want to do things in a shorter time. And we push processes together, or we have, for example, certain parts of the production too early or too late. So it always cost us money. So you have to be realistic. For example, if you're doing something in three D, you need to have all your models and your aging in place. Before you even go and invite animators. Many productions, the productions that I've worked on, they haven't had this in place. They haven't had the rigs in place when as animator have come in and start working, which have caused a lot of waste time. And, a lot of frustration and eventually, a lot of money wasted. So if you want to do things for a low budget, don't get people on place until you have everything ready and everything done. Like for example, here, editing, I have four weeks of editing while I'm still while there is still animation. Why I've done that is because I know that I will have a pretty big chunk of animation here already done. So I'll have some work to do and I can edit it and I can have one week at the end where animation is finishing, where I can actually spend time to even edit this last chunk of animation. Here is voice recording, which I overlap also with the last episode because I already know that here, I'm going to have a big chunk of animation already finished, and I'm going to I don't need all the episodes to be rendered, so I can start the voice recording. Here, obviously, the voice recording can be a little longer than that. You can always change this forth and back, but not during production. You should have this already in place when you start. But you can because if you do the production design, if you make your characters, for example, if you take or a cowboy jaw and you've done this little bouncy ball and you've decided, Well, I want him to have legs. It will take you longer to animate a character who has legs and arms, simply because there are more stuff to animate. So you have to readjust the animation time according to more advanced your character becomes and how many more stuff you have in the scene, If you add another character. Now, for example, for this episode, I excluded the horse. This can save a lot of money and a lot of time. But if you want to include more characters, you have to increase even your schedule and with that, you have to increase your budget. That's why it's very important for you to have everything in place before you start the production because it's not going to be in the middle of production and discover that you don't have more money. So, Yeah, and online and mastering, I have to last. And obviously, the animate the director and the producer should be there the whole time. And this is this is laid out here that they're there all the time. So this is not quite a correct budget for the episodes. This is just an estimate because I don't know how many characters we're going to have there and what kind of episodes we're going to have there. So I would suggest you break this down yourself, you go through the exercise, design the character that you want and do a precise estimate how long each process of production it will take, even if you are a stop motion animator or your two D animator or your three D animator. Just do this exercise. You may think it's a little boring, but it will give you so much freedom later on when you have the production going to know what follows what and what needs to do to be done next. And also, This is something that you have to have in place if you approach producer, I mean, other producers co producers. You have to present this material. So it's a very, very useful exercise. So I hope you will go on and do it. Even if you are created, it could be a little boring as it was for me in the beginning, believe me, I I didn't want to do this kind of things. But eventually, when you do your on TV show, you you kind of go for it because I mean, it is for your own good and for your own for the best of the TV show. Okay. 36. Pipeline - How to track your progress? What do you need to know when on a small budget.: So what kind of pipeline do you need to use. There are a lot of expensive pipelines out there and you have to pay a monthly fee to use the pipeline, their pipelines and to track the progress of your show and why you need a pipeline. You definitely need a pipeline because you need to track every she what's happening. If you have more people involved, or even if you adjust yourself, you need to track the process, the progress because you will forget what you've done, what you haven't done. And even though you have a very short episodes, you'll have more scenes. You'll do revisions, you'll go forth and back, and you need to know where you are where you are at and how much you have left and what kind of changes have you done? And there is just one very easy way to do that, for example, I've done it, it's Google Sheets. It completely free. It reaches everyone everywhere online if you just share your Google sheets with the people you're working with, and you can actually work wide. You don't have to have your team sitting with you in expensive office. You can use resources from all over the world completely for free. Always always use what's available and what's free to make your progress better and to work faster because The more ways you'll find to make things happen for you, the faster you will move forward if you don't need extra financing. Google Sheets, that's what you need. Okay. 37. Pitching your TV-show - How do you pitch your show to producers, investors and distributors.: Pitching your TV show. At some point of your production, you will have to sell your TV show to someone else because you want your TV show to find a distributor or even first an investor or co production partner. So to do that, I'm going to tell you briefly what you need to know when you pitch and what kind of material you need to write down to create your pitching material. So what do you need to have when you pitch your show to co producer investor, and later to a distributor. Now, this is an example I've written down of what you need to have when you pitch show to co producer or to an investor. You need to have a synopsis of what the whole show is about. For example, we have the cowboy named Joe. It is about Joe meeting challenges every day and conquering tasks in his daily life. In synopsis or outlines of each episode. This is what is happening in every episode. It's basically the exercise that we went through in the previous section of writing what basically the story is about in this episode. So you need to have at least six scripts of the episodes. So the investor or the co producer can sense the tone of your show, how does it play out and does it have dialogues and how are the characters talking. Character description and characters design. Here comes the most important main characters and some secondary characters. The more you present the better, so you'll need to do some a character design and present it in a nice way, and how we design a character and how to make a character sheet, as I talked about even earlier, but you have that in my previous lecture for character design. This is basically you move the character in different poses and without showing the viewers who the character is, how they hold themselves, how their pot is, how they behave. Description of the world and the design of the world. So we want to know where the action takes place. Do we have backgrounds, how we describe the world of these characters? In my show, the space goods, I do not have backgrounds, but the I designed And I say that the action takes place in the alien's home planet. But we don't see how the planet look like. We just see the things that they interact with every day. So we know that there are space ships there. I've seen a spaceship. We know that sometimes they do stuff in the sea or there are trees there. But basically, what I describe of the world is that they're at the home planet. If we talk about our character, Joe, or cowboy is basically in the Wild West and we need to have some kind of a description of how the world will look like. We need to have budget, something that I already talked about, we need to have a production schedule, and you need to have a CV of director producer and writer, the key people in your show. Also, you can have directors vision. What do you want to tell with the show? What do you how do you want to convey an idea? Do you want to entertain or do you want to teach something? So in the producer's vision, if you are the producer, yourself, Well, you can bake these two in one thing in one bit. But basically the idea, why do you want to make this so. And it's not wrong to say that you want to entertain. So for me for the Space go TV show, I really wanted to introduce these fun characters and to entertain and to talk about friendship. For me, it was important to show that our friends are very different. And you don't always agree and they're not always perfect. But eventually, all friends make our life much better, and we always end up laughing with our friends. So in each episode, the aliens end up Laughing at the problems they've just resolved together. Distribution plan, you need to know how you want to distribute your TV show. Are you going to use YouTube channel? Are you going to use local TV station? Are you going to promote it in some other festival? What is your plan really? And The thing is that when you want to find an investor, when you're looking for an investor, basically, they are investing their money, they want to know how they're going to get their money back. This is basically why they will go in for the show. And of course, if they find the idea really, really interesting, they might have a completely different distribution plan than your plan. And they will come up with completely new ideas for you and free TV show? And you can just lift it up. But in the beginning, you need to show that you've thought about it. You've thought where are you going to show your show and how you're going to attract viewers and who are you going to show it too. If it's if it's for small kids, do you plan to have it, for example, baby TV, is a preschool show or It doesn't have to be so that you need to have all the distributors and that you've thought about on place. You just need to have this idea, this plan, basically, that can change all the time. Marketing plan, again, you have to have an idea, approximately, how are you planning to market yourself? Do you have a YouTube channel? Do you going to do a Kickstarter campaign, for example, for a distribution for a marketing, or I mean, if you already financed it for Kickstarter, then you already have people there who are following your progress, and it will be interesting to watch. If you have that, it's even better to find an investor or co producer because people who invest in your show, they will want to see that you already have an audience. This will be interesting also for them to get involved in and actually boost the production, and make it better, give you more space to be creative and so on. So marketing plan, it is important, make it interesting. If you, for example, plan to go to different events, offer you services to help I can be anything at restaurants, but come along and say, well, here is my show, deliver some flyers to the kids or whoever wants to watch it. Just speak creative. There are a lot of ways to do marketing, it's not just one way. There is, of course, Internet everywhere, but there's a lot of ways to do marketing. So basically, this is what you need. Now I'm going to give you an example with Space and how the Bible looked like. 38. Pitching: Case Study - Space Yoghurt The TV-show - Here is an example of how your so called Pitching: So this is an example of Space got bible with the characters. I did not make a distribution investment bible because we already had the investment on place when we did that. So I didn't need to find a co producer. This Bible is basically a distributor's bible here I have a nice image of the show. Here I have the the synopsis of what the show is about in general, and I have the amount of episodes and amount of and the seasons and what kind of in what state I am all day. And here I have the character description, starting from the main character and going through each character and describing who the character are and their personality and just giving an idea with some visuals, what they do and what to what to expect to see. Some new characters. These are some secondary characters that come in the show just now and then. It's not all the time. I put them in as secondary characters. My distributor knows that these characters will not be there in each episode, but will appear now and then. So here I have all the episodes and a synopsis, what the episodes the episodes are about and how long each episode is for season one and for season two, and they're nicely packaged. I don't have here, the budget and the time schedule because this is already produced, so I don't need to present that to my distributor. And I don't I don't need to have I need to have basically a CV of the director and the producer when I deliver it, but that I put in a separate paper because not every distributor wants to read that. The only thing is that I package it with some episodes and they see if they like it or not. And also something I don't have here is the vision of the director and producer because the show is already done, and we don't need to we don't need to know what the show will be when we already have done. But this is something that you need to have also in order to pitch your show to producers and to investors, plus the other things that I've already given you as an example. 39. Distribution - Who to approach to distribute your TV-show and what can you do yourself to help the p: Distribution. You were done with your TV show. Everything is in place, and where can you distribute it? Obviously, most of you know where you can distribute that because if you are here, you probably a fan of TV show of animation and you're watching a lot of animation. So you basically have maybe a dream of being on one of these channels with your own TV show. But let me give you a briefing of that. You can basically have on YouTube channel or a video or another medium. And if you already have a lot of followers there, you can really get a lot of traction for your TV show. The thing is that if you do get attraction for your TV show on YouTube or video, you can even attract the TV station later on who want to buy your show and you can attract kids channel and all basically the things that I've done below. But if you don't have that and you're not active on the social media things, you can try to attract some TV stations and kids channels where you can do that. You can do that on festivals. It's important to send your film or maybe just a few episodes of your film to festivals, where a lot of buyers go there and they see what's on the market, what's new on the market. And it doesn't have to be It doesn't have to cost a lot of money to go to festivals. You can find festivals that are in your area. And there are a lot of places they do festivals that are for free, and they want to encourage especially young people to go to this festival and present their their films and meet professionals. So try to find these free festivals where we can go. Also if you get in a festival, your countries do give grants travel grants to go to the festival. So when you have your show on place, just look for the grants to find there to go to the festivals and they'll pay your expenses. That's pretty good. And you have to be on these places to get connections. You have to make contact. So OD is now growing rapidly. There are a lot of stations, there are a lot of places. You can screen your TV show if it is good, it will be people will find you and they will want to get your TV show for their channel for their streaming service, and so on. And cinema, it's very hard to actually put a TV show on cinema, but sometimes it happens. If you have longer episodes, You can have them in a block in a package. Some cinemas have that. They have a package for small kids, where you put a couple of episodes together or a couple of short films. Then you can take one episode if it's if it's not continuous episodes, that you know you have one story starts in one episode and continues through the whole show. But if the episodes are just separate, you can screen one or a couple of your episodes as a short film. Then you just write that it is a short film. So these are a couple of distribution methods. I'm sure you can think of other distribution methods that, you know, I haven't written here, like, for example, I mean, there's now content for stories, for example, for example, YouTube stories or Instagram stories. If your episodes are really short and you can put them now and then on your Instagram stories or Facebook stories, and you can attract viewers that way, then people will want to see more of your show. So just try to find which is your n and which are you more comfortable comfort comfortable with? Another thing is that you can also get distribution agent. There are many agents out there that they will do a job for you, and they will sell your show for certain amount of manual percentage. So you don't have to you don't have to pay them up front. They'll just get your show, and they will get a percentage in case they sell it, they'll get a percentage of that sale. Yes, that's basically sums that up. So I hope I've given you enough I hope I've given you enough information for you to start working on your TV show. And if I missed something, just ask me and I'll try to answer your questions. So good luck and goodbye from me.