7 minutes too short
So–how long is a 7 minute short? Well, truthfully, it’s 6 minutes and 40 seconds (we need time for title cards and credits!) Fred Seibert is flexible on many many things when it comes to the production of an Oh Yeah! short, but the length of the cartoon is something he will not bend on! If we get a pitch board that takes up all four walls of our room, and takes 30 minutes to pitch, chances are it’s longer than 7 minutes. The trick to knowing if your board is to length? Time the dialogue. If you were to stopwatch only the lines of your characters, it should time out to no more than 5 minutes. This leaves room for action, expressions, etc.
The past couple of days we have seen a few production board re-pitches from “Handycat”, “Mind the Kitty”, Teapot, and “Hero Heights”. After the short has been greenlit, and the artists have had a chance to flesh them out, we get a re-pitch before they record their dialogue. It’s important that the short is to length before dialogue recording because it’s a lot harder to trim (and definitely to re-write) after the actors have already recorded their parts. I would say that 90% of our creators (dare I say, all?) have had to cut out precious panels from their final storyboard for the sake of time. If any of our show creators would care to post on what favorite parts they’ve had to trim, please enlighten us!
So as we approach the holiday season of excess–keep in mind that there is a lot of fat being trimmed at Oh Yeah! Cartoons. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving everyone!
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On December 10th, 2005 at 12:00 am
Hey Cartoon Kids!
Yeah; I too am guilty of having a lot of stuff in the storyboard that need to be hacked out. We all love our precious stuff, but we need to “murder our darlings” as Chuck Jones has said to me on many occations when I used to pitch shows to him. It’s better to have too much good stuff than not enough. If you have a ton of good funny cartoon stuff and remove half of that, you still have a half a ton of funny cartoon stuff. Now that’s not too bad, is it? I know we all hate to get rid of all that good stuff we love, BUT, the audience will never know what you took out. Only you do. They won’t know what’s missing. Save it for another cartoon. That never works for me. I find that when I get to a gag that’s similar to one I killed in another cartoon, it turns out better than the first time! Perhaps the situation hones that gag into a more powerful gag. It’s case by case.
I have found the pitching process good for streamlining my cartoons. You need comments from people who haven’t been sitting in the creative chamber with you, while you board. I’ll talk about pitching and boarding more in another blog entry next week. I’ll also talk more about our “internal” animation time clocks we all should have.
This will all be part of a series I’ll talk about from my animation experience.
Thanks, and we’ll talk soon.
I wish everyone the very best on their shorts! It’s all fun and all good!
We make cartoons for God’s sake! How great is that?!