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