The Real Secret Show – How To Make An Animated TV Series
Skwigly
Keith Miles attends the Tony Collingwood/Andrea Tran master class at this years Bradford animation Festival to bring back some great tips on ‘How to make a TV series’
Right, listen. No, come closer because I am going to tell you a secret. Not just any old secret. Not just how to turn base metal into gold or how to get a plumber out at the weekend. Oh no, much bigger than that — I am going to tell you how to create an animated TV series. Yep, I told you it was big.
The reason I can tell you this is because I have attended the Tony Collingwood/Andrea Tran Master class at this years Bradford Festival. A packed auditorium (they needed to move the venue because of its popularity) of the keen and the creative and..well..me, waited with bated breath for the secret to be imparted. Tony Collingwood, one half (although I couldn’t say which half) of the very successful Collingwood O’Hare company and Andrea Tran, their design guru, have a track record which matches any in this country. Their intelligent and beautiful looking pre school hit ‘Yoko Jakamoko Toto’ has won awards by the satchel full and the antics of rug like aardvark with attitude have been seen around the world.
So where does Tony Collingwood suggest we start? Well funnily enough we start with the idea. Obvious, you cry. Not so, I snap back faster than a falling anvil.
To create a TV series you must first ask, ‘Is this idea enough for a series?’. Perhaps it is simply a good single film or perhaps it is really just one stunning gag. Tony Collingwood feels that there are two sources for any animated idea. They are from either an existing cartoon strip, book etc or they are that rarity, an original thought.
Once the idea has been hatched (or pinched?) the next step is to look at the format, because from the format everything else (characters, script, the lot) will spring. Tony Collingwood says we should view the format as we would for any game. ‘If the rules are too restricting, he says, you’ll only play it once’. That is to say, focusing on the kids market, the format must mean that the little tinkers are surprised again and again.
This formatting hurdle was faced by Collingwood O’Hare when they successfully animated the Dennis the Menace cartoon strip. The cartoon strip gave them no real format to tell the stories in an animated way that would engage the target audience. Mum, Dad, Pie Face and Walter existed as characters but there were no real authority figures for Dennis to rail against on a regular basis. So Collingwood O’Hare created them. In the comics Dennis had no real reason to beat up Walter, he just did. Collingwood O’Hare created a sugary sister for Walter and therefore a tension and therefore a conflict and therefore permitted violence.
After the format or the pattern of what will happen week in and week out has been fine tuned, a rough bible is created. Even at this stage it is not necessary that any hard and fast characters are created. They will come in due course.
In Yoko the underlying theme was to be a celebration of life and friendship. Only once a lot of formatting groundwork had been done could they start to think about characters and the format had already dictated that it would be the conflict allowing minimum of three.
Even at this very early stage they brought in the composer Roger Jackson and a lot of the character design and the style are driven by the music. In the early discussion on Yoko, back at the formatting stage, they knew that they wanted a fairly sparse backdrop and designer Andrea Tran opted for a very colourful, New World look. Character designs were taken from Latin American culture and inspiration was taken from objects as diverse as beads or woven rugs.
On the Yoko animation they opted for a 2D cut out because that fitted well with the original design concept and format. The medium has to convey the ‘tone and mood’. As Tony Collingwood says, this is like ‘casting an actor’. By choosing this medium they were also able to keep the animation in house (yep, you heard me) and therefore retain control of this carefully planned look. Thus, in Yoko, they created a fairly unique look although they always had to remember that it would have to be a world with references readily familiar to children of the target age group. Always remember who this is aimed at.
Only at this stage did they start to put some scripts together. Only by such a careful format and design first approach were they able to produce a 52 part series with such a small number of characters.
With any words of wisdom there is always a sense of, as Basil Fawlty would put it, ‘bleedin’ obvious’. Key to Tony Collingwood is being focused on the target age group. He sees many ideas pitched with no great notion of the age group suitability. These are primarily from twenty somethings who do not pay heed to a children’s audience (this is the world that Tony has inhabited for many years) and do not sustain for an adult audience. He calls this his ‘coffee table theory’. That is to say, you would end up with a product which is too dense and complex for children but yet would not be engaging for an adult to pick up for long.
So what of the latest Collingwood O’Hare offering? ‘The Secret Show’ is aimed at ten year olds who, since Tony Collingwood last produced animation for this age group in the 1990s, have grown into a more sophisticated sense of humour.
With ‘The Secret Show’, the first point of course was the ‘idea’ and in this case they wanted to create a throwback to the classic 1960s series such as Man from Uncle. This time, in the format and design, they looked at sharp, angular designs such as those created by Saul Bass for the Hitchcock posters. The style and humour meant that they did not want a highly animated look. The medium that lent itself to this was CelAction 2D.
The structure or pattern had been laid out early in the formatting process. At the start of each episode the spies ‘steal’ airtime from a cute granny and her fluffy bunnies. In this way the ten year olds delight in seeing pre-school viewing being ‘trashed’.
As with Yoko, Roger Jackson was brought in to do the music at the very early concept stage. In this case he chose very cheesy ’60s Hammond organ music.
The audience at the Bradford festival was mightily privileged to see the pilot of ‘The Secret Show’. It is a master class itself of this kind of animation, witty, engaging…well you get the idea. Except, in a piece about how to create a TV series, here’s the payoff. Successfully viewed at Cartoon Forum, ‘The Secret Show’ has still to be picked up. It will. It has to. It is far to good not too. I have promised my ten year old daughter!
The point is that even as respected an outfit as Collingwood O’Hare with a potential series as obviously a winner as ‘The Secret Show’, still have to go through interminable hoops. Tony Collingwood explained how many of his ideas have floundered because they tick all the boxes except the one marked ‘merchandising’.
We will get the adventures of Victor Volt and Anita Night on a screen one day but even for the best it is a tortuous process. Until then you really have to ask if you have the stamina to keep developing your pre-school TV adventures of a junior taxidermist? Of course you do.
If you have not been put off, Tony Collingwood has one last secret to impart. If you go to the Collingwood O’Hare website (www.collingwoodohare.com) and click on the ‘a’ of the ‘Entertainment’ heading you will unlock a treasure trove of downloadable scripts and series bibles. Goodies that will inspire you to keep going with ‘Brad: 21st Century Taxidermist’. Hurry though, they are only on the website for a week!