Inside Disney’s Animation Secrets: How Brandon Violette Crafts Stories That Come to Life
Ashley
So, let’s just talk about quickly your writing process. So, you’ve got this writer’s room, but you have credits of writing, you know, you’re just going to pitch ideas, you come up with outlines in the writer’s room, then the writers would take it and actually script out the pages. Maybe you can describe this process. What do you get in the writer’s room? And then when you go to your office and start cranking out script pages, what do you actually have to begin with?
Brandon Violette
So, the writer’s room gets together for the story breaks, and so that’s when you, like we’ve seen on TV, put it up on the board, and it’s act one, act two, act three, and it’s typically ABCD beats or ABC, just those important beats, and you map out the story. And so here’s the structure of it. And it’s really, you know, the hero’s journey, even in kids’ television, it’s okay, here’s, you have the midpoint, the escalation, you have the low point, you have, okay, now here’s the returning with the elixir, you know, the very end when the kid who successfully did that hard thing goes back to the playground and says to his friends – Hey, I remember I was going to go do that. Well, I did. And here’s why it was so cool. And so, it’s a kid version of the hero’s journey. And then, and then we’re pitching out gags and things like that, that, that to take into the script when it’s time for that. So, then the writer of that episode leaves with the story grid, and some joke gags and things like that, that we talked about for them to then adapt into a premise. And that could be a page summary of an episode beginning, middle and end, just this is now for the network, it goes to the network, we get notes back, okay, great. They’re like, we like this, change this, make sure to emphasize this, then it goes to outline a couple pages now. And the outline resembles more like the story break grid, where it’s like, okay, act one, ABC, ABCD, however many major beats you have, and each one’s about a paragraph. So, you’re getting a little more detailed into each of those important moments, goes to network, go, yeah, network, you get notes back, and then you go to script. And then from there, you’re adapting your own outline into a script. And, and that’s when you you’re cranking out those pages.
