To everyone that became a founding member last week - you are all absolute legends. As someone who makes their living as a freelance artist, time between full time work can be years. As I develop new show ideas, your support helps me eat, pay my rent, pay for health insurance etc. etc. and so forth. So thank you from the bottom of my heart.
IT’S MY BIRTHDAY WEEK!
And in honour of the complicated feelings surrounding birthdays, if you become a founding member of Slow Motion Multitasking this week, I will send you a signed drawing of Susie wearing a party hat and holding balloons:
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Our journey through the pitch bible continues in part 3 of 4!
Before we get into it, let’s take a moment to pay homage to the great Aaron Sorkin, and subsequently the rest of this pitch bible:
“Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” – Aaron Sorkin
Aliens
The aliens were stolen from here:
And the Dolphins from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide:
"Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons." Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
Here are the aliens in the original pitch bible:
and here is their final iteration:
Editors Note: We are just focusing on the pitch bible for now but each faction of characters will have their own post regarding their series development, lore and suggested episode compilations.
Talking Food
The talking foods on the island were originally ghosts:
The food eventually got it’s own episode in season one, entitled Popular Banana Split
Title card by the brilliant Aleks Sennwald
The Moon
Our sweet moon didn’t stray far from his origins:
but he did used to have more of an entourage, including:
and Rainbow, who is a shot for shot remake of my youth:
I know I said last week Betsy was my favourite character in the pitch bible, but permission to change my mind. I forgot how much I love Shark:
and Pool Ghost + Noodle:
The Door in the Floor
One of my favourite books is A Widow for One Year by Jon Irving. It starts out as a story about a children’s book author living on the East Coast, and within the novel they include all their children’s writing, and it is bonkers incredible. The fictional authors most popular children’s book was titled ‘The Door in the Floor’ and the subsequent movie adaptation went by that name. I knew in my heart I could never actually include a character called The Door in the Floor if the show was picked up, but I did have a character that went by that name in the bible. They only had a one line descriptor:
Q + A
Next week will be our final deep dive into the pitch bible including but not limited to Yetis, Baby Teeth and The Monster Under the Bed. In the meantime, if you have any questions regarding the pitch bible or the pitch process in general, please leave them in the comments below and I will do a Q + A post soon… maybe in video form, which I imagine will be a little like this:
Thank you to everyone who is reading along with this journey. It’s fun to revisit this weighty document.
It's always fun to read about the influences behind the work. John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany" is one of my all-time favorite novels and one I reread every couple of years. But I never read "A Widow for One Year," so I just ordered a copy on Abebooks. One of the things I always loved about Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" was the dozens of story outlines for Kilgore Trout's supposed publishing history, and Widow sounds like an Irving take on that premise. These pitch book stories are so much fun!
Question for Q&A (insert waving emoji)
How does one prepare to pitch a story bible for animation versus a live action series with confidence - especially when locations, characters, technologies, lore, etc. to those not involved can feel *wacky* or out of the *ordinary* ?
One of the things I love about Summer Camp Island is how wild, incredible, and creative the characters and locations are but how grounded each individual episode feels, even when we are dealing with magic, a literal blue moon, and a talking pajama top. I'm curious how you get that across in a pitch for a series!
(very rambley response)