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Storytelling Like Mad

If I wanted to play catch-up with the recent CalArts graduates, I would need to spend months or years teaching myself late at night, after each stressful workday. That would mean setting aside storytelling. I would have to quit writing novels, cold turkey.

I couldn't do it.

Well, no problem, right? I had skills. I could go indie and make my own original films, right?

So I went and bought custom plug-ins for my animation software. I wanted to be able to automate lip syncing, and I would need my characters to have a wide range of facial expressiveness. I sat down with my lawyer friend and co-wrote ten episodes, and argued about the wording of legal contracts. I recruited theatre students to do voice over work, to bolster their demo reels. I persuaded a college faculty member to let us record in the professional sound booths, late at night, after the students went home. I found volunteers who would help me animate. And I set to work.

Let the truth be acknowledged: Creating ten seconds of professional animation is HARD WORK. Creating more than five minutes? Ha. If you value quality animation at all, then you are sacrificing a heck of a lot, in terms of your time and money. The creators of South Park knew what they were doing when they animated their pilot with childish paper cut-out puppets.

I also inked a few pages of a graphic novel adaptation of my work, before I realized that writing novels was simply much, much, much faster than drawing them at a professional level of quality.

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Look. There are storytellers who make a successful transition from one medium to another. I know writers who have adapted their original stories for film, or for theatre, or for a musical opera production. Some of those gained critical acclaim. Some went viral on YouTube.

I am one degree of separation away from animators whose original short films won recognition and opened doors for them. Jorge Gutierrez, my classmate from CalArts, won an Emmy for his 3D animated student film, and from there, he co-wrote and directed a major feature film by 20th Century Fox, The Book Of Life (2014). He also created the animated show El Tigre. Another one, Pendleton Ward, created the animated show Adventure Time after his CalArts student film got noticed by a major TV network. I can think of quite a few original show creators who launched their careers with a short student film, or who worked their way up a corporate ladder at Cartoon Network or Disney Animation Studios.

I know of at least three animators who did create their own indie feature films, telling their own original stories. It took each of them 5 to 20 years, plus volunteer help, but hey, it was a labor of love, and they got it done. As far as I know, none got picked up for major distribution, but a couple did become underground viral sensations on the internet.

There is no reason to remain boxed into one format. There are so many ways to tell a story.

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I believe that storytellers have a driving need to tell a story in any way they can. Some may tell it orally, to an audience of friends. Some have an affinity for a certain medium—like film, or drawing, or musicals, or anime, or manga, or writing—and they feel they can best express stories in that medium.

Writing is the simplest path. You don't need to hire a staff or buy expensive equipment.

However, the easy entry factor comes with trade-offs. The sheer number of books published every day means that it is all too easy to get lost in the noise. In contrast, films and games have relatively fewer competitors. You automatically gain a larger audience. A blockbuster film or hit TV show will out-earn the biggest best-selling novel of the year.

I still yearn to see my original stories in a film or visual format. I haven't quite given up on that. But for now, I've selected writing as my chosen medium, and I acknowledge the trade-offs.

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Storytelling changes hearts and minds. It is at the core of our humanity. We know it was big in ancient Greece, ancient China, ancient India, and other ancient civilizations. Myths and legends are a uniquely defining part of every culture. Cave paintings from 30,000 years ago hint that storytelling was big during the Reindeer Age, when humankind was hunting woolly mammoths.

The ability to feel compassion towards other living beings, and to communicate practical insight and wisdom, is (more or less) the very definition of sapience. Perhaps storytelling was a key evolutionary factor that separated behaviorally modern humans from our earlier hominid ancestors.

I think it's no wonder that everyone is drawn to some form of storytelling, whether they are fans of a TV show or listening to a podcast or playing a video game or reading a novel.

[External Link: Harpy Gee web comic. This is a shout-out for my friend Brianne, who is an amazingly good storyteller, on top of being a director at Cartoon Network.]