The Animation Pitch Bible: Create and Share an Animated World

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] A great idea needs oxygen. If you hold something too close to your chest, people won't ever really get to see it and tell you what they like about it. It's good to get those things out there and there's no other way to create art. Hey, my name is Ian Jones-Quartey. I'm an animator, cartoonist, and show-runner. You might have seen my work on Cartoon Network. I would the animation director for Venture Brothers, as well as working on the animation teams for Adventure Time with Finn and Jake, Steven Universe, OK KO and Secret Mountain Fort also. It's the thing that I've always wanted to do, and it's really exciting and fun to work with other creative professionals. Today I'll take you through making an animation pitch bible. We'll talk about characters, stories, settings, and how to communicate an idea. I know you have a great idea. Once you have it on paper, you can then show it to anybody you want. You don't need the animation experience to take this class. It's great if you like drawing, but you can also do this with no drawing experience. As you'll see, I use digital tools like Photoshop and Google Docs. But honestly you could do in any way you want. You could write it down on paper, or you can put it in a sketch book or a journal or something else. What's important is that you come with an idea and we can expand that and turn that into something that we can share with everybody. I hope you walk away with confidence and your own idea and also a way to share your idea. I can't wait to see what you create. Let's get started. 2. What’s Your Idea: [MUSIC] The first thing we want to talk about is your idea, we can start there. You may be have idea for a show or something creative in your head. What we're going to do today is take that idea in your head and then I'll show you different ways to take all the pieces of that idea and explain them to someone else who might not know you or might not know your brain. You might not have an idea right away and that's all right, but there's a lot of places where you can go to get those ideas. The idea we're going to talk about today is actually something that a friend of mine created when we were kids. He just drew this character and we just made fun of it and we were laughing about it, and then we really liked drawing this character. Sometimes people in your family or your friends can inspire something as well. For instance, I used to make characters based off my older brother, and those became characters that I used over and over. At first just clowning on him, but then they became their own thing. Then you can take those characters and explain them to other people and in the process of doing that, you're creating a relatable thing that can become part of a story or a different idea. You can start thinking about what would that character do? Where does that character live? What are things in that character's day-to-day life? I want to show you the first PitchBook I ever made. These are characters that I've had for a really long time and that they were things I came up with as a kid. I carried them around for so long, they are basically stick figures. These are two characters of mine, Quaz and Cyclopsbird. When I was in college I basically came up with a pitch for a cartoon. It was called The Best Cartoon, and it started with these two characters. I'm going to take you through a few things in this PitchBook. Maybe it'll give you some ideas of what you can do with your own PitchBook. The Best Cartoon, I created a title page, it tells you a little bit about it. A logline that's two unstoppable, fun-loving aliens try to be the best at everything on earth. I tell you a little bit about the story of which is that these two are going to take over the earth by being the best at everything. I wanted to come up with the character that was very fun loving, very open, very creative, and sort into himself, and that was Quaz, he's the brains of the duo. He takes charge, he fails at every mission that he's given, but he has so much fun doing it. Then I created Cyclopsbird who is his sidekick, who's a devoted friend, who's the brawn of the duo, who is basically really vacant, but always helps out the main character. Once I had that I thought, well, I have these two characters, they have a mission to go to earth. Who gives them the mission? So I came up with Space-Father, who is like their dad, who tells them what to do. So he would check in every episode and give them their marching orders. Then I came up with a few other things to throw a wrench in the works. Oh, maybe Quaz has an older brother who shows up every once in a while thinking of, oh, there's some great story ideas that could come from just having the interplay between two characters. Then I came up with rivals for them and these are two other space soldiers attempting to also be the best at everything. Who, even though they succeed, they don't have fun. Then I came up with a bunch of premises and these are just really short descriptions of what things they could do. Like, for instance, here's the first episode, it's called The Best Pilot. It's about them actually being pilots, mastering the controls of a 747 and flying the plane all wrong. I also added some concept art and then just a wrap up of what it's all about. An idea can be as basic as something like that. This seems like it was a lot of stuff, but it basically just came out of thinking about these two characters, who they are, what things happen in their day-to-day, and then writing all those things down and then you get a full idea. Now that we've got our ideas and our framework, let's move on to ways that you can build your own universe. [MUSIC] 3. Build Your Universe: [MUSIC] Now that we have our way in. We're going to talk about what you need to build your universe. Sometimes you have a story in your head. You have a specific plot that you want to tell. Sometimes you just have characters that you really like, that you want to expose to oxygen and share with people. For this idea, I started with the characters first. I had the idea of creating two fun-loving aliens and putting them in a world and then I had to come up with a story. I like to start with characters and then just spend my time doing sketches of those characters, figuring out what I think is funny about them and their designs and thinking about the things that they would do or the situations they would get in. Basically, I sat down and just started drawing qua and Cyclops bird, thinking about what their motivations would be, what their actions would be. I had a thought with this, Oh, what if the world is basically just the UFO that they live in? Then the city that they rampage in. Maybe that city is the size of the whole planet. Maybe it's a world where everybody is bored. Humans can't get anything right. Maybe it's a place where our main characters have a reason to try to be the best at everything. What you can do with all of those ideas is synthesize them into one single logline. You come up with a catchy phrase that basically explains what your idea is about. For this idea, I came up with the phrase, two unstoppable fun-loving aliens try to be the best at everything on earth. As you can see, it has the subject, which are your main characters. It has what they're trying to do, and it has the setting. You should be able to tell someone your idea in one or two sentences and have them get the gist of it, even if they don't know the details. [NOISE] Moving into the next lesson, what you're going to need is a description of your world. You'll need drawings of the characters or ideas of who those characters are and an idea of what the story that you want to tell is. There's no wrong answers because it's just your idea. [MUSIC]. 4. Character Page: [MUSIC] Now you have a bunch of drawings of your character, things that you drew. I sat down at the dinner table and just do the character a bunch of times. You can do something more fancy, you can bring a digital file in, you can color the character, but let's just do it real easy style. I take maybe a drawing of a character. I'll do screen capture, and then I'll go to the character page and I'll just paste that in. Here's Quaz, and then we just think about what things do we think about this character? What do we know about him? I'll just write down, like right underneath, he's Quaz. He's the brains of the duo. He's on a mission to be the best, maybe come up with something that is a little more evocative like, what would he think or what would he do? He's the kind of person who always needs to be the center of attention. Then you could say a little bit about what that character struggles with. He constantly tries his hardest to impress his superiors. There you go. Now you have the character description. You can complete the same thing for all the other characters. As the example that I had of the original Pitch Bible, you can see what a character page could look like. You'd end up having a page where you break down the things about the characters that are important for people to understand. It's very easy, you can maybe come up with quotes for the characters and put them in, elements of things that they do in the world, how they interact with other characters. Once you have your character page altogether, a thing that can be really fun is to create a chemistry page so we can compare and contrast two of the characters. We have our two main characters, Quaz and Cyclopsbird. Maybe this is a story about how they get along and what they do. For instance, here's one one you have portraits of both the characters. You talk a little bit about the things about them that gave them chemistry. For instance, Quaz is talkative while Cyclopsbird is quiet. Quaz is weak while Cyclopsbird is physically strong. You have this balance, the brain and the brawn. That way, anytime somebody is going to look at this document, they'll be able to tell, these two characters work together in this way. Then I like to write a little description about what makes those characters have that specific chemistry. I wrote, what brings them together. They're the leaders of a mission to outclass earthlings at their tasks. Talk about exactly how they bounce off of each other. They work together as a great team, and then talk about how they're different. Quaz takes the lead at all times, Cyclopsbird is strong and silent. Another variation on this, say, this is a show about an adversarial relationship. I created rival character for Quaz called Dinkoff. I tried to compare and contrast how they're different. You can see different ways that these characters could bounce off of each other. Then in the description you write a little bit about what that chemistry is like. I said, even though Quaz fails at his mission, his superior, Space Father, loves how much fun he has and keeps promoting him. Dinkoff is different, he wants to be the best but he hates failure, so he gets upset and throws tantrums which bumps Space Father out. It gives them different things that animate them as characters, make it so that they bounce off of each other. Perhaps in this version of the show, it's something where one person is trying to do a mission and the other person is constantly trying to upset them. Maybe you have characters that bounce off each other, maybe they're best friends. It's always the best to have characters who are different but can fit together in the same story. Once you put those characters together, you have an incredible character page. Now that we've developed the characters, let's move on to our setup. [MUSIC] 5. Setting Page: [MUSIC] What is the setting that this story takes place in? Think about the characters and what backdrop that they need. I'm doing a story that's about aliens trying to take over Earth. Clearly, we need Earth, we need space, which is where aliens are from. Here's an idea of what we could do. Maybe the aliens spend all their time in a spaceship. Maybe that's where they hang out while they're waiting to get their missions of what's due. For instance, an idea of what your setting could look like, it could be as simple as this. You can have planets, the Sun, just ideas of scene setting of where they come from. We can have a few pieces to the setting. Their spaceship where they hang out. Then there's the planet that's Earth that they go down to. I was thinking or it could be funny if they do most of their mayhem in one city and create a huge planet sized city. That's where all the humans live while you do this, you can just sketch it out. It doesn't have to be a super detailed version of it, I'm showing you here this is a really quick drawing that you could do in maybe like five minutes or less. Once you have that, let's break this down and bring this into our document. Go to your setting page is probably completely empty right now. You can put in your sketch of the world that they're in. Now that we have this, we can say, quaz and cyclops bird hang out in a spaceship orbiting the planet. What do they do in that ship? The ship is the place where they get their missions and learn about the Earth. You can look at parts of your map, the thing that you drew, and think about what your characters do there. Then the other things we have here are the planet Earth. This is a huge planet sized city where our alien invaders wreak havoc and then you can maybe start trying to explain certain things about it. Let's maybe go up to the ship. What can we say about the ship? It can be funny if the ship was a broken down ship. Let's just say the ship is rusty and old but they love it just the same. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the planet Earth. It's full of humans. They don't know what to do. Now, anybody who's reading your idea has an idea of where the characters hangout, what's a place they like to be, how they interact with those settings and what those settings are like. I think it's really good to maybe first describe what the characters do in the setting. Then describe the feeling of the setting or maybe how they feel about the setting. Or maybe if there's inhabitants of this place. Say if one of your ideas is, this is set in X country. You can say, how do the people who live in that country feel about the country? Are they on the brink of a revolution? Are they really happy? Think about what your character's point of view on that setting would be, that I think makes the best setting page. One thing that I'd like to do that's really easy is to create a world map. Say we've got, this is where their spaceship is. Maybe then we say like, this is a city that the characters all hang out in. Of course, the map doesn't really need to be to scale, doesn't have to be a realistic map but maybe you just want to have an idea of what are the locations in here. Like we know he has a rival, what if this rival has already conquered part of Earth and maybe he has a fortress somewhere? We've got like a fortress. We've got a city. Maybe there's a place where there's already a settlement of aliens. Say there's other aliens that already live here and they're going to have to ally with them or fight against them. Then you can maybe come up with just random things for the map. I don't know, there's some mountains over here. There's a stream and suddenly you have a full world. I think that'll help anybody who's getting into your idea understand these are the things that we're maybe going to see in the show. These are the characters and the places that you'll go and you don't have to be an artist to create this. Obviously, this is a really quick drawing. We've got our characters and we've worked on the setting. Now it's time to talk about the story and the episodes [MUSIC] 6. Episodes Page: We've got our characters, now we've got our settings so what happens in this world? What things do the characters do? Maybe you have an idea for a super huge story. I think it's best to start with what a general episode would be like, take out maybe a post-it note or your sketchbook. Thinking about the things that will be the most fun to happen in a story. Sometimes it can be something just really small. For instance, maybe my idea is just oh what if I drew the character but he had a huge brain? Then you just think well, I like this visual. Where could this come from? Where could that come in? How could that be a story? Maybe as you're thinking about that and this is something I really like to do, just create a little square. Now you have your thought. What can help this character? Why would this character have a huge brain all of a sudden? Maybe this character's brain is growing as the episode goes on. It's just a really simple idea but sometimes that's all you need. An image that is really evocative. Something that makes you think, oh, I would like to draw that or maybe I could come up with jokes about that. Maybe our joke here is that the character's brains grow so large that they get psychic powers. Maybe they have Professor's caps on or something like that. On several things I've worked on, a story can become from something as small as that. Maybe there's a visual or an image that you've always thought of. Or maybe you thought, oh, it'll be funny if these characters do this. Or maybe you've thought at the coolest part of the story, my character will do this. That can be a great place to build off of a story idea. I have this little idea. Let's just take this and run with this. I've got an episode page. I put it in a few of the episode ideas from before. But let's put this final episode in and let's come up with a full episode together. A way that I made it very easy for myself is because I made the best cartoon every episode can be the best blank. Maybe think about the idea that you came up with. Maybe there's a way to take the basic idea that, oh, maybe there's something that the characters want to do, something the characters want to become, different situations that the characters want to get in. We have this idea of all these characters have huge brains. Maybe, let's say, maybe they're the best students. We can come up with a beginning and a middle and end to the story. How do they get into this? What happens to make a turn of that story? Then how does it resolve? For instance, let's just say the best students, it's like Quaz and Cyclopsbird want to learn. They need to become the best students and know everything. That's their motivation but how did they get into it? Let's just say they decide to take a class and learn new skills. Then what's the turn on this? The new skills they learn aren't enough and they decide to take all of the classes in the world. This is the middle of the story. It takes something from the setup at the beginning of the story and puts a little twist on it. The setup is maybe that they want to learn and become the best students. The twist is that they feel like it's not enough so they take every class in the world. Now we want to go to the end of the story. The result of the twist and a resolution. Say maybe the result of doing that is their brains get overloaded with knowledge and they can control things with their minds. Then what's the resolution? Maybe that's going to be the climax of the story. How do we resolve that? They have a crisis upon knowing too much about the world and decide to watch TV and forget everything they learned. Now, I don't know if your story is as flipping as this. Maybe your story is something that has a little more pathos or action or adventure or humor, but basically, you just need those three pieces. Part 1 is the beginning, it's your setup, your layer of the things that happened in the story, what the characters want to do, and how they do it. Part 2 is the place where things get deepened in the story or there's a twist on it, or maybe has an unexpected result on the thing that they wanted to do at the beginning. Part 3 is the climax, this is where you're going to put the image that you wanted to draw originally. Then you need a conclusion, a way to wrap it up. In this show, which is going to be something that's a little episodic, I think a wrap-up is bringing your characters back to where they started from, but showing that they've changed along the way. That's how you write a quick story synopsis. If you've got writer's block and you're not really sure where to go with the story, I think a good thing is to maybe go back to your character's page. You have those characters set up, you know what they're like. Maybe there's something about the characters and how they would react in the setting that could give you a good idea. For instance, maybe because this is the thing about learning we say, oh, maybe where the place they're going to take the class is set, gives the plot a different relevance on what they're doing. Go back and keep reviewing the things that you did earlier. Think about the characters, their point of view on the world. Think about the world and the things that are unique about them and how they affect the characters. Those will create great jumping-off points to come up with a story for those characters. Then if you're still stuck, I would say just put it down, go take a break. You can always come back. You can also talk to your friends about, hey I'm trying to write this story what would happen? Getting a second opinion on what would be funny to happen in a story can often lead to a lot of great creative energy. Remember that the whole point of this is communication. By sharing those ideas, the sooner that you come up with full stories and you'll be able to incorporate into your idea. Now that we've got a few stories, let's set up a series arc and see how your characters grow throughout your idea. 7. Series Arc Page: [MUSIC] Maybe your idea isn't an episodic idea. Maybe you came up with a whole series, with a whole story, with epic characters, and battles, and backstabbing, and conclusions, and exciting moments. That's a page that I like to call the series arc page. Arc is basically a way to take the characters from beginning to end throughout several episodes. Let's just say we have the characters that we came up with that we've been using, Quaz and Cyclopsbird. And we can talk a little bit about how the story all comes together. We can also talk a little bit about what the main engineers for those stories, what is the thing that keeps the stories going? This is similar to creating those individual episode ideas. Except now we're not talking about one episode, we're talking about an entire series. I broke this down. I think the easiest way to do that is to break it down into a group of paragraphs. I've already written the first two. The first two, it's similar to what we did before. But this is going to be like, where are they at the beginning of the series? What sets up the things that they do every day or every episode? Then what's the big change in the series that maybe starts to change the characters? I wrote down here, at the beginning of the series, Quaz and Cyclopsbird are steadfast in their journey to be the best at everything on earth. Each episode is about the two of them throwing themselves wholeheartedly into new disciplines. That's an example of a story engine. Say your story is about, I don't know, treasure hunters. Maybe their story engine is they find a new treasure map every episode, and they have to track down a new treasure chest. That's an idea of a story engine, something that keeps the story going from episode to episode. You'll probably notice this the next time you watch your favorite show. What are the things that animate the characters? What do they want? What are they constantly going after? How does that create stories for them? To go on with the arc description, you can throw a wrench into that description, maybe while they're doing all of the things that result from their story engine, there's also a twist on that. Maybe there's something that's tracking them through all of those episodes. We already said like these two aliens have rivals. Why don't we just make sure that the audience remembers? I say, they are pursued by Booba and Dinkoff, two rival aliens, who want to also be the best. Through several episodes, they both attempt to be best at everything on earth and use their enthusiasm to get to the top. Then we move into the center of the story, the big change. Now that you have your characters, you have the story engine, you have what they do from episode to episode, and you have set up a conflict, a good way to set that up to go somewhere else is remembering that a good escalation on a story begins with but or therefore. That way you can say A happens but then B, or A happens therefore B happens. That way, the parts of the story are always feeding into another. The thing you don't want is, and then, because that means that your story is just a sequence of events that isn't really informing from one to the other. Here I've got suddenly, which is very similar to therefore. Therefore the humans on Earth put together the pieces. They mistake the rivals Booba and Dinkoff for Quaz and Cyclopsbird and move in to attack them. Our main duo feels terrible. They were just rivals, but they didn't want to put them in danger. This puts us at a place where our main characters suddenly are a little off balance. They're not sure what to do. Then we're also introducing an element of danger into the story. Now we have to move on to the ending, which I think is good to start with finally. What do we know? We have these characters that tried their hardest to be the best at everything and get new skills and discipline. They have enemies that are under attack that are now becoming their friends. Let's put all those things together. Finally, Quaz and Cyclopsbird realize that they should work together with their former rivals. After all, they are both aliens and they should work together. Now, in that wrap-up, you maybe want to come up with something that calls back to an earlier part of the story. That way, it'll feel nice and round. What's something we know about them? They learned all these different disciplines. Let's say that now that they've got all those skills. Now that Quaz and Cyclopsbird have a ton of skills, they use those new skills to save their friends. We see the return of all the things they learned throughout the story in a grand culmination action sequence. That brings back the main thing that we know about them, that they want to be the best at everything. We see that the characters changed and they accepted some higher calling. I think that's a really good overview of how to put that together. Of course, you can do yours differently. But think about the story that you want to tell and come up with a beginning, middle, and end. Now, it doesn't have to match all of the episodes you've put together. Maybe once you write this, you might want to go back to your older episodes and start seeding things in. Like maybe now that I've written this, I want to create episodes where we see that their rivals get captured or an episode where they realized they should work together. Now that you have your story ideas, let's put it all together in a final package, with the final touches, the cover art. [MUSIC] 8. Cover Art: [MUSIC] Now that we have all these pieces together, what's the last thing we need? These are like final touches. You need to tell your audience a little bit something about yourself, but you also need to tell them about your show. That's why I like to make a little comparison page. This is usually the last page in the pitch, just to give somebody a little bit of information about what your shows like, what the tone of the shows like? How it will feel from episode to episode. Say, I want to tell somebody that with the inspirations for my show was show A and show B. I'd like to do a Google image search for one of the shows that is my biggest inspiration and grab some graphics from it. Let's call that show A. Any comparison page I'd say, it's find the thing that's unique about your show, maybe your show reminds people of show A but with the humor of show B. Then you could say, the best cartoon is like and then you put your graphic for show A and say with the humor of show B. That way if someone wants to know what the tone of your idea is, you can refer them to other stuff. I know that it sounds really crazy to have your original idea compared to something that already exists. But it's usually a really quick way to get someone to understand what your show or what your idea is like. That's also really helpful if you're ever working in the corporate world. Because people would like to know, hey, what was successful about this idea before. The other thing you could put on this page, is maybe just a little something about yourself. Maybe you could draw like a self-portrait of yourself. Take that and throw that on that page 2 and maybe write a little blurb about yourself. I think it's always good to include something personal about yourself in something like this, because people really do need to see where you're coming from. Say you're writing a story that has something to do with your ethnic background or maybe it has to do with a certain experience you had. You might want to put that up at the top so people can understand what you're talking about. Like say for instance, your idea is a show about mountain climbers and you got that idea because your mom was a mountain climber at the very beginning you say, Hi, I'm your name. I've got so interested in mountain climbing because I come from a strong background of mountain climbers. You can say, I've been creating comics for years and this is now my newest idea, or I've always wanted to create a show about blank. It's also good to put it in a little bit of background information about yourself, like maybe where you're born or an interesting fact about yourself. I've never been to space. Then you can wrap that up with like a little bit of detail, that helps the reader understand where you're coming from. [NOISE] Now that you have all the other pieces put together, we can talk about putting the cover on the front of the pitch Bible. The cover is a really important piece of data because it lets people know that you've already created a full world. It gets people interested in what it is. You've already gone through, you've created all your characters, you've created your world, you've created your map and you know, like all the different things that you need to show. For a cover what I think is really important is have your main character's front and center. People really want to know who is this about. Don't try to hide what your main characters are. I also like putting a little bit of information about the setting. Here as you can see the whole planet Earth, the city that they're going to be in. Then I like to add some of the secondary characters, maybe around the center of the characters. Put them at the back or around the sides. You can see how the secondary characters feel about the main characters and how they react to them. Then finally, I like to put the title maybe really big in a very legible place so that you can understand what the name of the show is. I choose maybe the center top of the image. Once you have that, you can finally now go to the very first page of your pitch bible and paste your cover in. Now remember this cover is going to be the first thing that somebody sees. You want it to be able to explain everything about it in a quick view. Now that we have that, we have all those pieces put together. We've got the cover, we've got our log line, and our description. We've got the characters. We have the setting and the description of the setting. We have some episode ideas. We have a series arc and we have some comparisons to other things and a little bit about yourself. You've got your pitch book. Basically what this now lets you do is share your idea with anybody else. If you have a friend who wants to know what your idea is, or collaborator who wants to understand how they can help you with your idea you can show it to them. You can also show people your idea just to get feedback. Maybe they have ideas on how to make your show better. But what's important is that you have a way to share that. That doesn't require you sitting in front of somebody for an hour or two saying it, word vomiting it to their face. [MUSIC] It's good to have something that you can carry around. The minute somebody asks you, what's your brilliant idea, you can show them your pitch book. [MUSIC] 9. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Congratulations, you made it. You now have the perfect way to share your idea from the setting to the characters, from the logline to the series arc, you now have a fully formed idea. I really hope that you'll share what you made in the project gallery below. I'm especially hoping that you'll look at the things other people made too and get ideas. It'll be awesome to form collaborations and friendships from the things that you create. Thanks so much. [MUSIC]