If you’ve heard other interviews with me, there will probably be nothing revelatory. But it’s amusing to hear how fast we both manage to speak. It really sounds like we’ve been artificially sped-up, but it’s just a lot of caffeine.

I have been tossing around an idea for an animated feature film. I have a ton of notes, character breakdowns, beat sheets, outlines, etc., etc. Now its just a question of putting it down on the page. My question is fairly simple and straight-forward: Am I wasting my time?

I’ve read that writing specs for animation should be avoided, as the big animation studios typically take pitches, ideas, and submissions internally. Is this the case?

I know you are credited on Corpse Bride and Titan A.E. I’m assuming those were both work-for-hires. But what do you think about specs?

– Jack Mulligan

Go ahead and write it. It’s very unlikely that an animation spec will get sold and produced, but remember, that’s not the only goal of writing a spec. You write specs to get your next job, and if you can write a great animated spec, do it.

Both Titan A.E. and Corpse Bride were rewrites of movies already close to production. In both cases, I didn’t need to write at all differently than live-action. There were small semantic changes — in animation, you number for sequences rather than scenes — but when reading the script, you wouldn’t necessarily know that it was going to be animated rather than live-action. So don’t freak out about some special formatting you see in a printed script or guidebook. Just write it like a normal feature.

Last year, I had a meeting with Disney Animation, in which they talked through all of their upcoming projects. It’s clear they really develop in-house, and aren’t searching the town for new material. And I suspect that’s true for all of the majors.

But the animated spec you write could be a great sample for live action, particularly if it showcases comedy and set-pieces. If you write Shrek, you can write funny, and someone will want to hire you.

ONE PAGE OF A PROPERLY FORMATED SCRIPT = APPROX. A MINUTE OF SCREEN TIME.

I know one page of say a battle can last five minutes whereas one page of quick dialogue my last ten seconds if the actors talk fast… So my question is, is this rule true?

Has your 120 page script been a 2 hour movie or was it more like 90 minutes?

My main reason for asking this is I want to make my own low-budget movie. And the best tips I get say keep the script 90 pages or shorter. And to make it a play (dialogue heavy, one location).

However, from my short film experience and being an editor, I saw a 90 page script of a friend be only 55 minutes when edited. And I know Kevin Smith’s CLERKS was 164 page script, but is only a 90 min movie because of the dialogue.

So, how can I find an accurate length of the movie before I shoot it. Or should I have a 130-page script if I want to make my own feature? How do the big boys figure out if there’s enough actual screen time on the pages?

– Matthew Kaplan
New York City

Your instinct is right: the one-page-per-minute rule of thumb doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. True, most screenplays are about 120 pages, and true, most movies are around two hours. But the conversion rate between paper and celluloid is rarely one-to-one .

That’s why when a movie is in pre-production, one of the script supervisor’s first jobs is to time the script. She or he reads through the screenplay with a stopwatch, estimating how long each scene will play, then adds up the total running time. Generally, they go through the whole script twice, averaging the times.

How accurate is the script timing? Well, that depends on how well the script supervisor has factored in the director’s style. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain featured long, contemplative shots of the heroes herding sheep, which another director might have dropped altogether. But generally, the script timing is in the right ballpark.

Although a script supervisor has more experience, you can time a script yourself. My advice would be to read the dialogue aloud, while trying to pad for non-spoken moments. It’s easier with some scripts than others.

As far as my own films:

Go was 126 pages, but came out at 103 minutes — without any major scenes left out. It wasn’t play-like, but the pacing was quick.

Big Fish was 124 pages, and 125 minutes long. To my recollection, only one significant scene was omitted, so the page-per-minute rule came close.

Both Charlie’s Angels movies went through so many drafts during production that an accurate page-count is impossible. But the first drafts were around 120 pages. The original film was 98 minutes; the sequel was 106. The pacing was obviously quick.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: 128 pages, 115 minutes.

Corpse Bride: 73 pages, 76 minutes.

Is the ending a happy one for Victor?

The way it plays, it seems as though it is intended to be a happy ending for him when he winds up with Victoria, but from the audience’s perspective, I‘m not sure we see evidence that he would be happier with Victoria than he’d be with the Corpse Bride. The inclusion of the scene where Victor connects with the Corpse Bride while playing piano with her is of course necessary to propagate the plot, but seems to indicate that he’d be just as content living among the dead as he would be with Victoria.

– Rob
Los Angeles

You point out one of the real challenges with Corpse Bride. Generally in a fairy tale like this, you’d be really clear about which woman the hero is “supposed to” be married to at the end.

At the start of the movie, it seems pretty straightforward: Victor meets Victoria, and both of them are surprised how much they like each other. Corpse Bride seems like a monster when she first appears, but is quickly revealed to be funny and sweet. She’s rotting, but not rotten.

As we worked on the story, Corpse Bride kept becoming more and more likable, to the point where we started to wonder exactly the question you ask, “Shouldn’t, maybe, Victor end up with Corpse Bride?”

The solution wasn’t to diminish Corpse Bride, but rather to beef up Victoria. Over the drafts, we made sure to give her more initiative (such as escaping the mansion to plead for the Pastor’s help) and make her situation more dire (the wedding to Barkis was a surprisingly late addition).

Through it all, we never wanted to back away from what was unusual about the story: it’s a love triangle in a kid’s film, and you’re sort of rooting for all three characters.

Corpse Bride’s decision to stop Victor from drinking the Wine of Ages (added in the last draft) is less about saving his life (after all, death isn’t so bad) and more about seeing herself in Victoria. It goes back to want-versus-need. Corpse Bride wants to be married, but what she needs is to free herself from her self-imposed curse. While we’re deliberately unclear about the exact cosmology of the afterlife, the Land of the Dead seems to be a kind of goofy Purgatory. Her transformation at the end would seem to be the next step in the process of life.

But is it a little wistful? Yeah.

And I wonder if that lack of clearly happy ending limited the upside to the film — which I have to say, performed much better than any movie called “Corpse Bride” could be expected.

But I wouldn’t change it. To me, it’s nice to be able to show kids a movie where everything resolves well but not perfectly. I think it’s more honest to show that you can be happy and sad at the same time.

Corpse Bride

Last night, I spoke at USC’s 466 class, which screens a different film each week. At the Q & A afterwards, host Leonard Maltin talks with someone involved with the picture, often an alumni. I used to be in the class, so it’s bewildering to realize this was my sixth 466 (after Go, Charlie’s Angels, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Big Fish, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

In many ways, this was the easiest of all the classes I’ve spoken at, because with this film I don’t have as much of that please-please like it I beg you instinct. I feel much less ownership of Corpse Bride than the others. Don’t get me wrong — I’m proud of it — but working in animation is inherently much more collaborative in terms of story. For starters, I was the third writer to work on it, after Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler. Then there’s a whole department called “Story,” whose job it is to figure out how to convert the screenplay into storyboards, and along the way, a lot gets changed and rearranged. Altogether, it’s much less “my” movie than the others.

But it was a lot of work.

Often, I’d get storyboards from London for scenes that were about to shoot, and would have a day or less to tweak the dialogue before an actor would record the needed lines. Whenever I visited the stages outside London, most of my time was spent watching the scenes already shot, and discussing with the rest of the team how to handle this moment or that. At absolutely no point could I get precious about things needing to stick closer to how they were written. I was there to help, so I helped where I could. I felt like a craftsman rather than artist, and that’s fine.

Reviews so far have been really good, so here’s hoping it gets a good reception. A lot of people ask me, “Isn’t it too scary for kids?” Not really. If your kids like Halloween, they’ll be fine. It’s never gory, and the Land of the Dead stuff is pretty light and breezy.

Corpse Bride article in Script magazine
New, longer Corpse Bride trailer up

Script magazine

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.

I have mixed feelings about the new trailer. Visually, it all looks great. This one shows a lot more of what makes the animation so distinctive. For instance, pay attention to Corpse Bride’s veil, how it flutters and flows. Then remember that this was all shot one frame at a time. Creating the illusion of continuous movement was incredibly difficult, and they did it incredibly well.

I’m not crazy about the voice-over. The rhyming doesn’t really work for me, and the announcer is the same guy who does all the stuff for the WB Network (“Tonight, on an all-new Gilmore Girls, Rory blah blah blah”). It feels too much like a featurette for my taste. I would have suggested stopping at the shorter, funnier teaser. But that’s just me.

See it here.

Corpse Bride trailer up

Corpse Bride is the second animated movie I’ve worked on, the first being Titan A.E.. Unlike Titan, which was a combination of traditional and computer animation, Corpse Bride was done with stop-motion animation like Tim Burton’s earlier The Nightmare Before Christmas. The artistry behind the animation is painstaking — each frame you shoot is pretty much the way it’s going to be in the final film.

From a writer’s perspective, there’s not a lot of difference between writing for animation and writing a normal live-action movie. Where you feel the difference is in production and post. In “normal” movies, it’s not too hard to re-arrange a scene, or change a line of dialogue in editing. With this technique, there’s less wiggle room. Once the shutter clicks, you’re pretty much locked. In some ways, that’s liberating. It means there’s a lot more attention to the details from the outset.

The movie comes out at Halloween in the States. (I’m not sure about the rest of the world.)