WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:02.540 --> 00:00:05.810 What makes a good cartoon pilot episode, an episode that is meant to get a series funded? 00:00:05.810 --> 00:00:10.040 I’ve been watching recent pilot episodes and until now none of them were striking enough 00:00:10.040 --> 00:00:11.040 for me to feature. 00:00:11.040 --> 00:00:15.800 That’s when I saw Final Space, which you can view for yourself below. 00:00:15.800 --> 00:00:22.580 This is one I recommend seeing before you watch the rest of this video. 00:00:22.580 --> 00:00:27.110 Off the top of my head I can’t think of a time I’ve ever seen such a perfect blend 00:00:27.110 --> 00:00:29.860 of drama and humor in an American cartoon. 00:00:29.860 --> 00:00:35.770 I’m relieved but also unsurprised a channel picked up Final Space; in fact, the only six 00:00:35.770 --> 00:00:39.910 companies that would listen to a pitch from an independent filmmaker in the first place 00:00:39.910 --> 00:00:43.890 all got into a bidding war over the rights to air the series. 00:00:43.890 --> 00:00:45.980 Yes, Final Space became a TV Show. 00:00:45.980 --> 00:00:47.860 It’s coming out in 2018. 00:00:47.860 --> 00:00:51.520 So what it is it that sets Final Space apart from other cartoon pilots? 00:00:51.520 --> 00:00:57.980 I mean, it may be obvious if you’re a connoisseur of these things, but let’s try to list the 00:00:57.980 --> 00:01:01.650 elements out, starting from the least important. 00:01:01.650 --> 00:01:05.000 This sounds self-defeating coming from an animation channel, but I’ve said it before 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:09.020 and I’ll say it again: art and animation is important enough to be on the list, but 00:01:09.020 --> 00:01:10.450 it’s not that important. 00:01:10.450 --> 00:01:15.680 There’s a standard of quality the pilot should meet, but I’ve seen pilots with amateur 00:01:15.680 --> 00:01:17.970 looking art that got picked up. 00:01:17.970 --> 00:01:24.909 Art is always something that can be changed after a pilot gets serialized: usually it 00:01:24.909 --> 00:01:28.050 improves compared to the pilot but sometimes it’s worse. 00:01:28.050 --> 00:01:34.200 Due to studio budgets, a pilot with purely amazing animation as its only leg to stand 00:01:34.200 --> 00:01:39.549 on won’t go anywhere because funding something like that over multiple episodes is too expensive 00:01:39.549 --> 00:01:45.580 and takes too long for the artists to make. 00:01:45.580 --> 00:01:48.640 That said, the animation in Final Space clearly makes the cut. 00:01:48.640 --> 00:01:52.780 It fits the current cultural taste in animation look and feel and it’s something you could 00:01:52.780 --> 00:01:56.580 consistently produce in a studio at a reasonable cost. 00:01:56.580 --> 00:02:01.000 I’m guessing that while every episode of the series may not have extra pizzaz, like 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:06.090 this 3D depth of field on the characters with focus blur, the characters and overall art 00:02:06.090 --> 00:02:11.299 style will be pretty much the same. 00:02:11.299 --> 00:02:16.439 Voice acting kind of falls in the art category too, but it really depends if the director 00:02:16.439 --> 00:02:21.069 intends the voice actors to stay the same if the series gets made, or if it’s okay 00:02:21.069 --> 00:02:25.829 to cast new people. 00:02:25.829 --> 00:02:32.530 The next big headline element is the concept and the world. 00:02:32.530 --> 00:02:36.659 As far as we see in the pilot for Final Space, this really isn’t that original, quirky, 00:02:36.659 --> 00:02:37.659 or interesting. 00:02:37.659 --> 00:02:43.379 It’s, you know, your standard Science Fiction world: spaceships, aliens, cool technology, 00:02:43.379 --> 00:02:46.310 strange anomalies like temporal worms. 00:02:46.310 --> 00:02:50.849 Often you’ll hear that having an original concept, or a new twist on an old concept, 00:02:50.849 --> 00:02:53.480 is critical to a good cartoon pilot or pitch. 00:02:53.480 --> 00:02:56.379 I don’t find this to always be the case. 00:02:56.379 --> 00:03:03.260 Otherwise we wouldn’t have the forever eternal popularity of high school dramas, high fantasy 00:03:03.260 --> 00:03:08.040 worlds, personified animals, all of those big, overarching concepts that’ve been done 00:03:08.040 --> 00:03:10.110 a million times over. 00:03:10.110 --> 00:03:15.449 While it can be beneficial to have an original gimmick, it’s not really necessary. 00:03:15.449 --> 00:03:17.469 Final Space doesn’t have one at all. 00:03:17.469 --> 00:03:22.300 Nothing happens that screams out to me, wow, what an original idea! 00:03:22.300 --> 00:03:26.879 Sometimes you’ll see an animation that has a cool concept you get excited about, but 00:03:26.879 --> 00:03:32.359 as you watch it your excitement dries up into a shriveled carcass of depression. 00:03:32.359 --> 00:03:36.469 This happens when a pilot falls short in the next two areas. 00:03:36.469 --> 00:03:38.389 Starting with writing. 00:03:38.389 --> 00:03:43.519 Writing means not just the script, but the story, pacing, and overall tone of the pilot 00:03:43.519 --> 00:03:44.519 episode. 00:03:44.519 --> 00:03:49.099 The existence of humor in this hopeless situation is a result of good writing in Final Space. 00:03:49.099 --> 00:03:54.169 It would’ve been very easy to have too much humor, which kills the drama, or to have too 00:03:54.169 --> 00:03:59.089 much drama, which would change the tone of Final Space into something very dark. 00:03:59.089 --> 00:04:04.889 Weaker writing in pilot episodes has a few obvious hallmarks, one being lame jokes, and 00:04:04.889 --> 00:04:06.689 another being bad pacing. 00:04:06.689 --> 00:04:11.360 It’s more common these days to see a pilot that tries to cram too much into the small 00:04:11.360 --> 00:04:17.410 time limit (hyperactive pacing) than it is to see too little (sloth pacing). 00:04:17.410 --> 00:04:21.430 When writing specifically for a pilot, you have the interesting challenge of deciding 00:04:21.430 --> 00:04:26.280 where to start your story, and how to do it in a way that will maximise audience interest. 00:04:26.280 --> 00:04:27.620 Remember, this is a pilot. 00:04:27.620 --> 00:04:30.090 It doesn’t logically have to be episode one. 00:04:30.090 --> 00:04:34.380 It could be in the middle, or the end, or a prequel. 00:04:34.380 --> 00:04:41.850 Imagine Final Space, same story, but instead of starting here, it starts here. 00:04:41.850 --> 00:04:45.930 Simply by doing that you lose the hook in the beginning. 00:04:45.930 --> 00:04:49.960 Great writing doesn’t always need a lot of dialogue to communicate. 00:04:49.960 --> 00:04:56.050 An excellent example of this is the nuance of the very last line in the Final Space pilot: 00:04:56.050 --> 00:05:03.310 you save Mooncake, you save the universe, you save Quinn. 00:05:03.310 --> 00:05:05.690 Think about the order of that list. 00:05:05.690 --> 00:05:09.050 Quinn is more important than the universe. 00:05:09.050 --> 00:05:14.220 Didn’t need to explain anything, just needed to write it in that order with the right voice 00:05:14.220 --> 00:05:15.440 acting to back it up. 00:05:15.440 --> 00:05:20.880 That’s the type of power you can have with one sentence when you know what you’re doing. 00:05:20.880 --> 00:05:26.430 But the first, the first, and the absolute most important thing, is character development. 00:05:26.430 --> 00:05:30.950 I don’t care what the quality of your pilot animation is, the voice acting, the editing, 00:05:30.950 --> 00:05:35.450 the way you cut your story together, none of that matters - none of it! - if I don’t 00:05:35.450 --> 00:05:36.960 care about your characters. 00:05:36.960 --> 00:05:38.160 We’re human. 00:05:38.160 --> 00:05:42.670 We want to see stories about people and personalities like us, different from us, we want to see 00:05:42.670 --> 00:05:44.960 them struggle and succeed and fail. 00:05:44.960 --> 00:05:45.960 We want imagination and magic and reality and that raw essence of what it means to have 00:05:45.960 --> 00:05:46.960 to live on this terrible planet. 00:05:46.960 --> 00:05:50.660 So when you begin your story at the low point, when everything has fallen apart, you grant 00:05:50.660 --> 00:05:55.470 the audience such a wide field of vision they see all of it: the successes, the failures, 00:05:55.470 --> 00:05:58.910 the flashback on life, glimpses of the bonds between people. 00:05:58.910 --> 00:06:00.270 We want to know more. 00:06:00.270 --> 00:06:04.220 We want to see if Gary can fix this and what he’s going to have to sacrifice to do it, 00:06:04.220 --> 00:06:06.360 or whether he’s doomed to fail. 00:06:06.360 --> 00:06:11.240 And with all the other pilots I’ve watched that didn’t get turned into shows, making 00:06:11.240 --> 00:06:16.240 the audience love or hate the characters in fifteen minutes or less is always the failing 00:06:16.240 --> 00:06:18.250 point. 00:06:18.250 --> 00:06:23.160 The animation may be amazing, the character design pleasant, the voice acting stellar, 00:06:23.160 --> 00:06:27.880 the concept unique, but in the end, are you drawn into the story? 00:06:27.880 --> 00:06:30.500 Do you need to keep watching? 00:06:30.500 --> 00:06:31.680 No. 00:06:31.680 --> 00:06:32.860 Why? 00:06:32.860 --> 00:06:34.970 Because you haven’t made a human connection with anybody. 00:06:34.970 --> 00:06:41.180 It’s like being stuck at a party where everyone around you is horribly boring. 00:06:41.180 --> 00:06:45.290 Some people will argue that a pilot episode with incredible art or a unique concept could 00:06:45.290 --> 00:06:47.580 draw people in as well, and I agree. 00:06:47.580 --> 00:06:51.610 Those elements alone work great for short films and stories that aren’t meant to be 00:06:51.610 --> 00:06:53.130 episodic. 00:06:53.130 --> 00:06:58.751 But if you think about every book series,TV show, or comic that you love, it’s because 00:06:58.751 --> 00:07:01.800 of the characters, what happens to them, and what they do. 00:07:01.800 --> 00:07:06.850 Characters, writing, concept, and art are the elements of a good cartoon pilot episode. 00:07:06.850 --> 00:07:12.000 As to what makes a successful pilot, as in a pilot that results in an entire animated 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:17.610 series getting funded, I’m not a network executive, so I don’t know precisely. 00:07:17.610 --> 00:07:26.190 But hey, if you know a network executive who’d like to come on Scribble Kibble to talk about 00:07:26.190 --> 00:07:53.180 what they look for in a pilot episode or pitch, send me an email!