Corpse Bride article in Script magazine
<img class=”alignleft” src=”http://johnaugust.com/Assets/corpsebride_small.jpg” alt=”Corpse Bride />The new issue of Script magazine has a long-ish article about Corpse Bride, interviewing both Pamela Pettler and yours truly about the story and process. Pamela, Caroline Thompson and I share writing credit on the movie, but I was never really clear who wrote what and when. From the article, it appears that Caroline wrote a detailed outline, while Pamela wrote the first real script. I was the in-production guy, who did tweaks and fixes, smoothing out rough spots and writing lyrics for a few new songs.
Since it wasn’t a WGA-covered movie — animation often isn’t, much to the WGA’s chagrin — there wasn’t a normal arbitration process to figure out who got what writing credit for the movie. Fortunately, the final credits as determined by the studio seem right to me. Again, since it’s not WGA, none of us will get residuals. Which blows. But we knew that going in.
The movie, incidentally, is great.
One of the cool/weird things about working on an animated movie (this is my second, after Titan A.E.), is that you get to see the entire movie a lot while it’s in production. Every couple of weeks, I’d get a new tape via FedEx from London, showing the newly animated scenes and the pencil storyboards for what was about to shoot, with a mixture of real and temp voices for all the characters. In all, I’ve probably seen the entire film 20 times in various incarnations.
About a month ago, I finally got to see the finished product at a test screening in the Valley. The movie is flat-out gorgeous on the big screen, with the stop-motion animation having a realer-than-real quality. It’s so sharp that it looks 3D.
But what really surprised me is that all the story tweaking we did along the way feels so seamless. You wouldn’t know that characters got added and dropped along the way, or that significant points of backstory were still in discussion midway through shooting. Or that it wasn’t always so musical.
All films, including live-action, go through major changes during editing, but with this kind of animation, there really is no distinction between production and post-production. Once you shoot a frame, it’s finished, forever. So it’s heartening to see that the nail-biting decisions paid off. It feels like it was shot from a locked, finished script. It wasn’t.
The other great lesson you learn from writing animation is surrendering your monopolistic control over every little word, the cinematic “Not Invented Here” syndrome. Moving from the page to the (miniature) soundstage means going through the storyboard artists, who often find new ways of playing a beat that you never considered. During production, a lot of my job was tweaking dialogue to match new bits of business that the artists had invented. While actors in a live-action movie will improvise, that kind of multiple-voices collaboration doesn’t happen as often. In the case of Corpse Bride, it really helped.
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September 1st, 2005 at 11:26 am
That’s really interesting, but I always wondered how you can add dialogue during production because I thought the actors had already doen their lines. Don’t the actors do their work before the animation so the animators can play off the cadences, tones, expressions, etc.?
If you’re tweaking dialogue, do the actors come back? Are they coming and going?
I don’t know a whole lot about the process so I’d be interested to see how the pieces fit.
September 1st, 2005 at 11:39 am
Any chance that either the Corpse or the Charlie scripts will wind up on the site? Would love to read them!
September 1st, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Very interesting insight into the process of animated movie writing.
September 1st, 2005 at 8:45 pm
The film looks great. And I expect it will be — I just wish they hadn’t of used the music from Nightmare Before Christmas in the trailers. It gives you the “feeling” (whether or not it’s true, which it’s not) that it’s “yet another Nightmare Before Christmas” which I know it’s not.
But I think you want it to stand alone and not harken back to the last one.
September 2nd, 2005 at 4:57 am
How different is writing script for an animation is as compared to writing script for live action?
September 2nd, 2005 at 7:34 am
Is there a movement to get animated films covered by WGA? It blows that writers don’t get residuals, don’t you think?
September 2nd, 2005 at 10:47 pm
Grazie mille John, these tidbits like crack for me – i am literally dying to see this film! i get the sense from the little snippets i’ve seen that the tone of corpse bride is similar to a nightmare before xmas, which is one of my faves!
September 3rd, 2005 at 6:23 pm
John, thank you for the inspiration…
September 4th, 2005 at 4:54 am
Wow, scripting that had to be a fun challenge, if seemingly logistically nightmarish. You already had more than enough to work with and it was just a process of making it all fit – add, subtract, tweak this and that? Or rather, was it pulling in actors, hiring new ones for constant re-do’s, more scene by scene until the final gavel? A big puzzle reduced to a smaller workable story puzzle, or rather the ‘edge pieces outline’ with everything then filled in inch by inch?
Anyways, classic dear-to-my-heart Burton, Gorey and Searle’ish gothic stop-motion style (now with Grangel’s influence). However, I would like to see something a bit more grand epic happy, airy and light, yet still dark romantic. I am visualizing a stop-motion in the form of Steamboy, where 25 shades of black is not always the primary thrust. But glad Burton not following the Disney CGI trend, as the art and the handmade form becomes lost; it all becomes a churn commodity process. But Corpse Bride sure to be on the heavy-rotational Hot Topic t-shirt rack for the next 5 to 10 years. And perhaps, dating myself, but used to be to picking up treasured material such as this, meant a visit to ‘The Alley’ in Chicago or similar, now it’s in the malls, Tiffany-era Orange Julius ones no less. ;)
September 4th, 2005 at 3:18 pm
Derek,
yes, the actors do come and go (talking of Michelangelo), even on animation series. Something like Corpse Bride would have a lot of leeway, but even a medium-budget European animation series will have the actors coming back. They record the voices in batches of 3-5 episodes, but will have the actors record pick-up lines in subsequent recording sessions if stuff gets added in storyboarding.
Also, the animators/storyboarders don’t necessarily start out with the actual voices. A leica reel (a.k.a. animatic) often features layout dialogue, which is just temp dialogue recorded by other actors or non-professionals (the director, the storyboarders etc.).
It’s relatively rare, AFAIK, for a full improv performance such as Robin Williams as the genie to pretty much define the animation and the character.
Out of interest, John, to what extent were the actors able to ad lib on Corpse Bride?
September 13th, 2005 at 2:41 am
There’s a new article in Post Magazine about The Corpse Bride, mainly talking the post production, but there is a brief mention of you, Caroline and Pamela.
November 27th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
omg iam asking for the script not frigen information on the movie i need the script because we have to get our favorite movie script for school and ive been searching and searching for it and i can never find it far out someone put the script on a webpage or iam going to scream
December 10th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
[...] Pamela, Caroline Thompson and I share writing credit on the movie, but I was never really 12 Responses to Corpse Bride article in Script magazine Derek says: September 1st, 2005 at 11:26 am Read More [...]
December 29th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
I LOVED CORPSE BRIDE FROM TIM BURTON I LOVED THE SONG TEARS TO SHEAD I ALWAYS SING THE CORPSE BRIDE I LOVED HER DREES. IS THERE A 10 YEAR OLD COSTOM OF IT?
March 25th, 2008 at 9:22 am
I love this movie very much, and that’s why I’ve choosen it as my translating project! But I could not find it’s scenario. would you please send it to me?