Shows We Did Make

Hana’s Helpline.

No show is easy to finance, but Hana’s Helpline was one that immediately drew support from a range of broadcasters.  It was a preschool show about an Agony Aunt duck, Hana, who helps little animals out with their problems.  Hana has a couple of eccentric helpers, and a son who she is in danger of neglecting.  

This show is still being shown on Channel 5’s Milkshake block, sold extensively internationally, and won several major awards.  It generated a small amount of publishing and licensing merchandise but, sadly, this never took off.

There are several reasons why we were able to make this show.  I list these in no particular order:

·      It was a concept that was easily understood.  I have talked before about the notion of high concept and the importance of being able to explain it in a sentence or two.  The title of the show makes it clear what it is about.  A helpline, where little animals ring in for help.

A German couple had sent us a number of stories through the post, together with some rudimentary illustrations.  We liked the stories because they had a sense of humour and also an emotional warmth.  The story that struck me the most was about a bat that was having trouble hang-gliding.

We needed to find some sort of linking device for these stories.  We had learned from past mistakes that stories that had a different protagonist in every episode would not build up a following.  We needed to have some strong characters who appeared in every episode, who our young audience could become attached to.

My colleague, Andrew Offiler, came up with the idea of a Helpline, and we started to create some characters to form the backbone of the series.

·      It was clear who the target audience was, and that the idea was suitable for that audience.  This was a show for 4 to 6 year olds, and was about the sort of problems that children have when they first have to engage socially with other children, i.e. at nursery or school.  The stories revolved around having to fit in, being different, being left out, having body odour, etc.  Because we were using animals, we were able to give more serious issues like bullying, disability, etc. a soft, usually humorous spin.

These were stories that spoke directly to our target, who were either just starting to go to school, or in nursery.  We consulted Childline to find out what sort of things our Agony Aunt should say, and Barnado’s about suitable storylines.  We wanted to do one about a child with a father in prison, but this went too far for Channel Five.

The Agony Aunt herself, who was originally called Holly, but was later renamed Hana, worked in an office with two other characters, also clearly adults.  To ensure the audience had at least one regular character they could identify with, we gave Hana a son, whose role was often to get to the bottom of the problem and to bring out Hana’s emotional side.

The use of children to voice all the children’s parts gave the show an authenticity and an emotional directness that would not have been possible had we used versatile adults voices.

·      The design was warm, attractive and original.

We had at that time a head of production, Simon Quinn, who had a long track record in the business, and who has since gone on to work on some major feature films. Simon had started his career at Filmfair, who made the original series of Paddington Bear.  He suggested that we took a similar approach to that series and use a combination of 2D backgrounds and fabric puppets.

I was giving a talk to students in Wrexham at more or less the same time, and noticed that one of the students, Bekah D’Aborn was making a stop motion film and had designed some attractive and very individual fabric puppets. We asked her to design the characters for the series.

The combination worked well.  The 2D elements gave us the possibility of extending backgrounds with the use of compositing, and made prop-making very simple.  The fabric characters, with their very obvious stitching, gave a warmth to the characters.  The whole look of the show was attractive and original, and has been copied by others since.

 

·      We had the right sort of track record.  This is not essential, but it helps.  Hana’s Helpline followed two successful series, Hilltop Hospital and Fireman Sam. The first of these had won a BAFTA and was a top rating show, constantly outrating Bob The Builder.  It was very much an international show which was made in coproduction with a French company, Folimage, and the German public broadcaster, ZDF.

In the UK, Hilltop Hospital was for ITV, and is still shown on CITV.  Nevertheless, our shows seem to have a strong appeal to public broadcasters in Europe.  I believe this is because they are full of humour, yet deal with serious subject matter.  Fireman Sam was a fairly blatant attempt to explain simple health and safety matters to young children.  Hilltop Hospital was about reassuring children about illness and its treatment.  Long after the series went out we still got calls from parents seeking out episodes on everything from kidney transplants to wetting the bed.

Hana’s Helpline was about asking for help, and involved both trivial and serious subject matter.  The fact that we had already shown that we could treat serious subjects with warmth, humour and understanding reassured broadcasters.

·      We had a terrific trailer.  It does help, though it cost a fortune. 

The trailer did everything we had hoped it would do.  It put across the idea clearly.  It showed off the design and style of the animation.  It was emotional.  It was funny. It was a very good indication of what the series would be.

Of course, getting a show off the ground is not the same as making it a success.  We changed a few things.  Holly got changed to Hana because S4C, the Welsh language channel, which was an important partner in the series, wanted a name that would work in Welsh and English (and German).  We brought in different voices to those in the trailer, including Arabella Weir and the instinctively funny, Boyd Clack, not to mention a host of young children culled from schools and drama workshops.

Above all, we introduced several different potential areas for conflict.  There was the child with the problem that needed to be solved.  There was a team of bungling helpers in Hana’s office who, though always well meaning, got it her way and messed things up. There was Hana’s son who constantly reminded us and Hana that she had responsibilities as a mother, a role which often was in conflict with her work.

We used a variety of experienced and new writers, and had no trouble finding 52 stories.  We could have continued with many more, but because the merchandising did not take off, that was not going to happen. 

Shows We Never Made - 3

Of course, there are shows that don’t make it for reasons which have nothing to do with how good they might be.  We developed a show called Telemania with an Israeli television company, Noga Television.  They had created some animated characters for a rolling programme, and wanted to develop a series to bring them to a wider audience.

We loved the characters and the design, and came up with an idea for a comedy for 8 – 10 year olds. 

Atlanta, Sprout and Felix are the biggest stars in the world.  They live in a mansion that is a kid’s paradise, where even their parents wait on them. Wealth, fame, and the adoration of millions are theirs, and the effect on their lives is devastating.

Our heroes do all those things you expect from stars, only more so.  They host their own tv show, release chart-topping records, star in their own movies, win awards, open events, etc.  Everything they do, from walking the dog to brushing their teeth, is a photo-opportunity.   Not even the lavatory is safe from fans and paparazzi keen to witness every moment, however intimate.  They even have their own pet stalker, Kevin.

Much of the humour centred on the enormous ego of our main girl character, whose selfish obsessions drove the plots.

At the time, Fox Kids really liked this show, and gave us some development money.  We brought in some young comedy writers to help us, and came up with some seriously funny scripts.

By the time we delivered them, though, Fox Kids was in the process of rebranding itself as Jetix, a channel that was not very interested in comedy, especially if the lead character was a girl.  Jetix was a channel that wanted to provide action-packed adventure stories for boys.

Having developed the series to suit a particular channel, only to find it no longer existed, it was then hard to revise the series, and reposition it with other broadcasters.  Although we had coproduction interest from broadcasters and studios overseas, we were unable to find a UK broadcaster and failed to get it off the ground.

Another idea of ours, I suspect, was ahead of its time.  As a studio, we keep abreast of what is happening in the world of children’s literature.  Some years ago, soon after its publication, we read The Big Pets, a book by the brilliant American illustrator, Lane Smith.  We thought it extremely imaginative and ideally suited to children’s television.  We optioned it, and, with the help of the author developed it and made a short trailer.  In the process, the title was changed to “The Night Children”.

This was met with antipathy that bordered on the aggressive.  Broadcasters were quick to reject it, upset by the “experimental” nature of the design, which they thought would not appeal to young children.  This was the element that had attracted us in the first place.  The project faltered and stalled.

We felt slightly vindicated when, soon after, the same author, Lane Smith, became art director of the movie adaptation of James And The Giant Peach.

Shows We Never Made - 2

 

Are We There Yet?

Some years ago we developed a series about a girl in the back of a car who, like most children on long car journeys, was bored.  She was surrounded by the sort of toys you might find in a car: a nodding dog, a cute alien character stuck to the window with plastic suckers and a long fabric snake.  When the girl says the words Are We There Yet? she is suddenly propelled into a fantasy world inspired by the view outside the window, where she and her toys have an adventure.  If it’s raining, she might be plunged into a submarine adventure.  If she is passing large cooling towers she might be transported to a kitchen where a giant is cooking in some extremely large pots.  It it’s night time she might visit the moon.

We thought this was a good idea, mainly because it was a situation that everyone could recognise.  To make it interesting, and as a respectful nod to Disney’s Alice  series from the 1920s, we designed it as a combination of a live action girl with 2D characters and backgrounds in the fantasy sequences.

Here is an extract from the Bible:

You know the situation.  We’ve all been there.  You’re stuck in the back of a car on a journey to a place you may or may not want to go, and you’re bored.  You’ve tried the Gameboy, but it gives you a headache.  You’ve played “I spy”, you’ve counted telegraph poles, and that’s just made it worse.  These are two of the most boring games in the world and now you feel even more bored than ever! Added to which, you’re not the sort of girl who will tolerate being bored for very long.  It’s not that you’re hyperactive or anything, but you’re an imaginative kid and you have a will of iron.  There’s no reason why you should have to put up with a future that seems to hold nothing but the sight of the back of your parents’ heads and the world flashing by outside.

The nodding dog on the back ledge agrees.  Especially when you’re going over speed bumps.  But the alien stuck to the window just grins stupidly, and the felt caterpillar in the side looks so… well, floppy and useless. 

You know you have to do something, but what?  There’s something bubbling up inside you, and you’ve just got to let it out!  Then you hit on the question .  It’s not that it winds up your parents, though, perhaps that helps.  It’s that this question changes everything. It brings your toys to life, and propels you into a world fashioned entirely by your imagination.  So, with a glint in your eye, you ask:

Are We There Yet?

We wrote a couple of scripts, made a trailer, and took it to the Cartoon Forum, where the response was underwhelming.  We liked the project because it gave us unlimited scope for fantasy, because the combination of live action and 2D was attractive and, at the time, unusual, and because it was a classic situation that children all over the world could sympathise with.

Later, we realised that it was not really a concept for a series at all.  It was a concept for an introduction and ending to a story but there was nothing inherent in the idea that would generate conflict.  Fantasy stories about a girl and her toys who tangle with an octopus, or escape from a giant’s cooking pot do not need to start with a girl in the back of the car.  We found ourselves writing stories that had little or no connection with car journeys.

Children’s stories should start with a bang.  There is nothing duller than watching someone else looking bored and, however much we might empathise with the situation, this was not going to make riveting television.  Although the concept provided a catchy way of getting into the stories and we came up with characters for the toys that provided both humour and conflict, we had problems coming up with a device to get us back into the real world.  If something happened to bring the girl back to reality before the fantasy story could conclude dramatically, e.g. arriving at the destination, or a comment from a parent, then the viewers would feel cheated.  If the fantasy story was allowed to resolve satisfactorily, then there was no real point in returning to the dull reality of the interior of the car.

Even the technique, which we thought attractive and interesting, was a deterrent to overseas buyers.  As soon as you have a live action character, foreign buyers get nervous about dubbing costs and ask whether lip-sync can be achieved credibly.  Cultural differences come into play that do not apply when you are dealing with animation.  Children from different countries dress differently, whether the major clothing brands like it or not.

So we didn’t get anywhere with this project. Since then we have taken more care to ensure that the concept itself generates enough conflict to drive storylines.  I believe that the characters we came up for this project could generate the dramatic narrative we required, but this had little to do with a bored girl in the back of a car.

Learning From Your Mistakes - Shows We Never Made

1. One Giant Leap

It is a truism that we learn a lot more from our mistakes than from our successes.  Everyone should be given the opportunity to fail because only then do you learn what you need to do, and discover what you are made of.

We have always had a healthy development slate and a decent success rate but, along the way, there have been ideas that we have nurtured and become attached to which have not made it. I want to share some of these in a series of case studies so that you can avoid some of the errors we have made in the past.  To you, the objective reader or viewer, some of these mistakes may seem very obvious but love is blind and creating any animated show needs passionate involvement.

One Giant Leap

trailer

We have a very open-minded approach to finding ideas.  We come up with some ourselves, of course, but also systematically read books written for children and adults to see if they can be adapted for animation.  I remember a colleague of mine from Scottish Television sent me a pre-release copy of Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, asking whether I thought it could be adapted as an animated tv series.  By the time I replied saying yes, it looks interesting, the rights had already been sold.  J K Rowling had a lucky escape.  She could still be living in poverty!

We also get ideas sent in the post from the general public.  My colleague, Andrew, reads them religiously and replies politely and generously.  Most of them seem to be written by people who clearly never watch animation on television and whose idea of what appeals to children is often vague and old fashioned.  Occasionally, though, ideas arrive that capture our imagination and that have an emotional appeal.  Our series, Hana’s Helpline came originally from a series of stories sent through the post.

One Giant Leap was also sent through the post, and was the creation of a couple who had no connection with the entertainment business.  I seem to remember he was a criminal lawyer.  Like the best of ideas, it was very simple.  Neil Armstrong takes his teddy bear with him on the first flight to the moon, and loses it. The teddy bear gets stranded and has to find his own way home. 

We loved this.  It was an emotional story but had a lot of potential for humour.  Using the creator’s idea, we wrote a half hour script.  Our astronaut takes his childhood teddy along with him as a lucky mascot on his trip to the moon.  He drops it, but no-one notices except his other childhood toys, long since abandoned, who, watching the news footage, notice something fall onto the moon’s surface.  They build their own rocket and mount a rescue mission.

We were in two minds whether this should be a one-off special, or a series.  One-off specials were notoriously hard to finance even then, when money could still be made from home entertainment formats, and we hedged our bets, creating ideas for a series that involved the teddy bears of other famous people.  We wrote a series of storylines involving Ghandi’s teddy bear, Houdini’s teddy bear and Elvis’s teddy bear.  We imagined that this series could have an educational subtext, introducing children to events in history.

This was a mistake.  Animated specials are shown on holidays and usually aimed at a family audience.  They are shown at times when parents might sit down to watch the television with their children.  Making One Giant leap as a series at that time would mean that it would be shown in the afternoon when children come home from school, and would necessarily be targeted at children aged between six and ten.  Typically, series like this are watched by children without their parents.

We took this idea to the Cartoon Forum, and presented it to a host of children’s broadcasters from all over Europe.  Reaction was at best lukewarm.  Despite some supportive comments from other producers (the late John Coates said it was the only trailer at the Forum with an emotional story), broadcasters were largely critical.  Children are not interested in history, they said.  Teddy bears are for babies, not for 6 – 10 year olds.  Is it in black and white?

Some of these comments still rankle.  Series like Horrible Histories show that children are interested in history if it is presented in an entertaining way.  We later went on to make a show which mixed live action footage with animation about adult celebrities and their teddy bears.  I have to concede, though, that even if children still cherish their teddy bears at the age of ten they may not be willing to admit it.

We had made two mistakes.  We had pitched a series for young children rather than a family special, and we had got the look of the film wrong.  If we were appealing to the target age group for a children’s series we should not be featuring a teddy bear so prominently.  If we were going for a family special the whole thing needed to be more colourful and lively.  Our trailer wasn’t in black and white, of course, but the faded news footage and the lack of colour on the moon meant that the trailer looked monochromatic.  This was not helped by our manipulated black and white photos of historical with their teddies.

You can make shows for a family audience about toys coming to life.  Toy Story shows that.  But Toy Story is awash with colour, and though some of the toys are clearly for very young children, none of them are what you would describe as cuddly.  Toy Story also has a great script.  We were very pleased with our script, too, but unfortunately we couldn’t get anyone to read it

Character in animation

I have written previously that one of the uses of dialogue in animation is to express character.  As in all movie writing, it is so much more interesting to come up with visual ways of doing this.  Film, and animated film in particular, is a visual medium, and good film writing should aspire to express plot, character and emotion through pictures and action.  Films without dialogue can, of course, seem strange and uncomfortable.  We need dialogue for realism and punctuation.  When used for subtext or humour it can pack a powerful punch.

Some years ago, I went to Robert McKee’s excellent story seminar.  He made some observant comments on creating character through action, and used as an example the opening scene from The Drowning Pool, which features Paul Newman as Ross MacDonald’s famous detective, Lew Archer.  Archer wanders into his kitchen in the morning looking rough, and searches for some coffee.  Finding none, he looks in the bin, where he finds a used filter with some black sludge at the bottom.  He brews up, and knocks back the coffee, ready for the day.

This kind of characterisation is probably too realistic for animation, which relies on exaggeration and illusion.  One of the first things we do when developing a series is to come up with walk cycles for our main characters.  I studied movement at the Laban studio, and was once given an assignment to stand in a crowded railway station and observe how different people walked.  I then had to imitate these walks, carrying my weight in different parts of the body, using different dynamics in the way I swung my arms or lifted my feet.  The way you move expresses something about your personality and when I imitated someone else’s walking style I began to understand what it felt like to be that person.  This was a technique I used later as a professional actor.

I am not suggesting that you can write this. In animated films animators do the acting.  Good animators understand the value of observation and imitation.  They draw their inspiration not just from observing people going about their business, but also from the exaggerated mannerisms of mime and silent movies. The advantage of animation is that it is not bound by realism.  Animators can play around with timing, place limbs in positions that would normally not be physically possible or create walks with multiple legs.

Some characteristics are easy to express visually.  If a character is clumsy you can show him forever knocking things over.  In a live action film, he would knock over glasses of water, vases of flowers or umbrella stands.  In animation, he is more likely to knock over a wall, a house or a line of trees.  In animation, a shy character might climb under a rock, stick himself to the ceiling or disguise himself as a piece of furniture.  Animation lends itself to fantasy and exaggeration, and its characters work best when they are unequivocal and larger than life.

This is why animated films are full of characters who are stupid, accident prone or neurotic, who don’t know their own strength, who are naïve, psychopathic or gushingly emotional.  Normal people don’t cut it.  But then they seldom do.

Common Mistakes Made By Animation Writers - 6

I am a fan of the Soviet filmmaker, Tarkovsky, and particularly like his 1972 version of Solaris.  This film starts with several minutes of a man (Donatas Banionis) standing, then walking beside a stream.  As in many of Tarkovsky’s films, there are many shots that dwell on plants undulating in the water.  With no music, but only the sounds of nature, Tarkovsky manages to create an atmosphere of sadness and yearning, which is finally broken after several minutes when a car arrives.

 A riveting scene from Solaris

Don’t think you can do this in animation.  You can’t.  In the time it takes Tarkovsky to set the scene you should becoming to the end of the first act of your script.

Common mistakes in structure.

·      Keep the scenes short.  Animation writers and directors do not have the beauty of the natural world, the art of a top cinematographer or the moody charisma of Donatas Banionis to work with.  They have a series of drawings or models, real or computer generated, which only come to life when they move.  Animation is an illusion.  A single image of an animation character is simply an image, a drawing or a photograph.  Only when several of these are put together does the character come to life.  You cannot hold the camera on a single image for any length of time.

You cannot create mood in the way that life action filmmakers like Tarkovsky can.  No animator or computer programme can reproduce the beauty of a real sky or plants gently waving in a flowing stream.  Mood is created with music or with movement.  Don’t try and be lyrical, thinking that somehow the animator can create a landscape that will express what you need it to.  You’re unlikely to have a Turner, Monet or Constable painting your backgrounds, so concentrate on what you can do best in animation: action and fantasy.

So don’t make the scenes too long.  If I see a scene any longer than a page and a half (usually a minute) I start to get nervous.  Is there really enough visual interest in it to keep the viewer hooked?

·      Keep intros and setups to a minimum. Try to get into your scene at the last possible moment and get out at the first opportunity.  In live action you often have scenes where characters sweep down long stairways, exchange looks before crossing crowded dance floors, or enter boardrooms, greeting bigwigs as they go.  There are usually very good reasons for this.  We might have a shot of an actress sweeping down the stairs simply so we can see how elegant and beautiful she looks. 

      We might be establishing a sexual chemistry with a look across a crowded dance floor.  The meet and greet in the boardroom could be about characters sizing each other up, deciding who is the alpha male.  

Female beauty is difficult to achieve in animation, and sexual chemistry is even harder.  It’s going to be hard to show primates sizing each other up without full-blooded actors.  So cut out shots of people travelling, opening doors, glancing meaningfully at each other, or walking into rooms and saying hello.  Cut straight to the part of the scene that moves the plot forward.  And once you made the point you need to make, there’s no need for people to walk off out of the door, say goodbye, etc.  All this costs virtually nothing in live action, but a few seconds of somebody saying good-bye, turning and walking out of the door could take an animator several days.  If it isn’t absolutely necessary, don’t do it.

Some writers take all this on board and deliver scripts that consist of one short scene after another.  They need to

·      Pace the scenes to suit the narrative.  A good script needs to have a combination of longer scenes that develop a situation, suspense, etc., and also fast cutting scenes that are dramatic and full of action.  I have talked elsewhere about how timing in animation seems to be faster than in live action, but that does not mean that every scene needs to be short.  A well balanced script should have scenes of different lengths, none of them more than a page and a half in length.  There are few things more boring than a script in which every scene is the same length.

How to avoid making mistakes:

·      Communicate with your story editor.

·      If possible, watch what happens in other episodes of the series.

·      Revise your work.

·      Keep writing.  It’s like playing a musical instrument.  You have to practice.

The Kindle version of my new book, Ten Questions To Ask Yourself When Developing An Animated Series is now available on Amazon. http://amzn.to/RywK20 (uk)  http://amzn.to/OKN746 (us)  Act quickly and you might get it free!