Animation Development: From Pitch to Production by Levy David B

Author:Levy, David B. [Levy, David B.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: 2010-02-15T22:00:00+00:00

I’m Dying to Do a Short with Dave Levy

Some months later I invited Fred to be a guest speaker at my SVA animation career class. He was a galvanizing presence, challenging everyone in the room to make choices. If they wanted to work on hits, he said, they had to move to L.A. and work in the center of the industry. In the next breath, he taunted me for staying in New York City despite all the advice he’d previously given me against it. Fred was only half-kidding. At one point Fred was challenged by a student who felt New York could become a full-blown rival for Hollywood production. “Then go do it,” Fred said. “I believe you can do it if you set your mind to it.” Ironically, a few months later, this student moved to Los Angeles.

Frederator was looking for thirty-nine new shorts, and Fred encouraged everyone in the class to pitch him. Then he said, “I’m dying to do a short with Dave Levy.” As I started to turn red, Fred poked me in the shoulder and said, “Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m serious.”

On the subway ride home I was electrified. I started browsing through the undeveloped ideas in my head, but nothing came. When I got home, I told the news to my wife, Debbie, and we developed a short centered on the idea of two weird kids at school who also happen to be rivals and next-door neighbors. We chose a couple of historical figures as the blueprints for our protagonists: Teddy Roosevelt and Annie Oakley. I whipped up some placeholder designs for Teddy and Annie and we beat out a story together over the next few days. Once we had a script in place, we hired storyboard artist Otis Brayboy to create a pitch board. One of the peculiarities of Frederator’s pitch process is its insistence on looking at pitches in storyboard form only. Development executives aren’t asking for a full-fledged production board drawn in a clean line with every shot carefully depicted. Instead, their ideal pitch board is a rough, simplified storyboard, maybe thirty three-panel pages long.

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