Pitching an Animated Show
Pitching an Animated Show
What is the process?
So recently I went on a long rant on twitter (what else is new?) about this phrase: “Why don’t you just make your show at [studio X]?”
Here’s the whole thread:
The gist of it is that it’s just not how jobs work.
Making a TV show or movie is a job, just like working a register at a gas station or cooking back of house or being a car salesman. All of these jobs require you to apply and do an interview. If the company likes you will be given a job offer. Obviously, there are different prerequisites for each job (though not as many as you’d think) but that’s the basics of any job.
So how does one go about getting the job of running their own TV show at a studio? By pitching your show to them!
Before I get into it, here’s some terminology to know:
General Meeting - This is a meeting where you just hang out with executives for half an hour to an hour. You basically just talk, shoot the shit, and try not to look like a crazy person. This is a good time to talk about the culture of the studio, what sorts of shows they’re looking for, what they’re currently making or have in development (so you don’t pitch them something similar to what they already have) what you can offer, etc. This is the meeting that will get you to the initial pitch.
Pitch/Initial Pitch - This is the job interview. You go in with your materials and explain the concept of your show.
Network Pitch - Pitching the stuff you’ve worked on with the creative exec to the network execs (explained below).
Pitch Packet - This is a packet that has all the basics of your show and all the selling points in it. It’s usually full of pictures, characters, story points etc, (more on this explained below).
Logline - A single sentence that sums up your entire concept. Single sentence. Can’t reiterate that enough.
Leave Behind - Usually this is just the pitch packet again, but it might be some interesting piece of art or something related to the show. Absolutely not a necessary thing, might even be considered annoying, but some people are gift-y types of people and if this is the kind of thing that fits your personality, go ahead and do it!
Tone trailer - This is a small (I suggest a maximum of 30 seconds) trailer that feels like the show you wanna make.
Greenlight/Greenlit - The show is now a GO! Money is flowing/about to flow and it’s time to staff up and start production on it! You’ve got a private office with air conditioning babe-y!
Kinds of executives:
Creative/Development Executive - These are the execs in charge of looking for new material. These are the people you’ll meet in the general meeting and the people you will likely be going back and forth with creatively until the show gets green lit. When I worked at Cartoon Network, one of the creative execs told me they heard about 400 pitches per year, so there’s a fun/terrifying fact for you.
Series Executive - These are the executives that are in charge of a show after its been green lit. You might see one of them at an initial pitch meeting, but it’s not super common. They’re more likely to show up at a network pitch, but even then it’s not guaranteed.
Network Executive - These are the people that will actually green light your show. They’re above series execs and creative execs. You and your creative exec are working together to impress the network execs and to get them to say “Ok, this person isn’t crazy and they’ve got an interesting, sellable idea that fits in with our company’s vision, let’s make this show!”
Every network and studio has different amounts of these executives and they often have slightly different roles or titles, but this is generally how the responsibilities work out.
The Process
So what exactly is the process to get to the greenlight stage? Let’s run through it all! Note the usual: This is all in my experience, every studio is different, I’m a cis white male who went to college and grew up with supportive parents, etc etc. You know the drill.
How do I get my foot in the door in the first place?
I don’t know.
This is always the most difficult question and the answer is completely different for every person I’ve ever met. College helps, but isn’t required. Knowing people helps, but isn’t required. In the end, if you don’t have the skills, those things won’t do anything for you anyway.
The one and only commonality I’ve found between every person who was trying to get into animation was that they were already doing it by themselves in the first place.
Usually they were making comics, writing, illustrating, or animating stuff for themselves. Putting in the work and time for almost a decade doing odd jobs, attending conventions, selling their work, etc. This usually led them to meeting someone interesting. I know multiple people on Regular Show were hired because JG liked their personal comics, same with Adventure Time. Those people were already just doing their thing, then kinda fell into it. I hired people myself because I saw their work on instagram and thought it was cool. For the most part, it’s about you doing you and promoting yourself where people who might hire in that area will see it.
One of the easiest ways to get to the rest of the following steps is to already be working in the industry somewhere so you’re not a completely unknown variable knocking on some company’s front door. Studios will always trust someone more when they’ve already been working with you on something. This is the same in every company and every kind of job though. It’s not often people hire someone from outside a company to be in a managerial position, if they’re smart they’ll promote from within.
So I can’t help on how you get noticed in the first place, but I CAN go into a little more detail on every other part of the process!
The General Meeting
The general meeting is a meeting with a development exec at a studio. Every studio has someone who fills this role, from tiny 5 person studios to massive billion dollar companies, and none of them should be overlooked. It’s basically a meeting where you hang out, drink some water, eat a cookie, and talk about your lives and artistic philosophies. It’s very self indulgent.
While they talk with you, they’re trying to learn the answers to these questions:
Are you trustworthy?
Can you, someone they just met 10 minutes ago, be given millions of dollars to produce a show?
Do you seem like your know what you’re talking about?
Are you the kind of person they want working here?
Do you seem easy to work with?
Again, can you be trusted with millions of dollars?
What styles of stories can they expect from you?
If they had to spend every day working with you, would they want to do that?
Do you seem like someone they could put on stage at comic con and wouldn’t fuck up their messaging somehow?
God, please, can you be trusted with millions of dollars???
Meanwhile, you should be seeking the answers to a bunch of questions yourself:
Do I trust this company?
Does this person come across as a human being, or as a salesman trying to move up in the world?
Do they seem like they have the same ideals and end goals that I have?
What other work have they released in the past 3 years or so that I liked?
How long is their development process? A very long average time can mean they’re indecisive and will make you jump through a lot of hoops and your project may end up nothing like you originally envisioned. A very short amount might mean they barely care about their projects or that they won’t give you a lot of support if they greenlight it, so you’ll have to be more self reliant.
What kinds of projects are they currently looking for? Four-Quadrant? Family movies? Adult? Horror? Television shows? Movies? Shorts? Mini-Series?
This meeting is not a pitch, but it can turn into a soft one. It’s not a bad idea to have a couple of your stories in your back pocket, just in case the conversation happens to go near a subject you’re already thinking of pitching on. “Oh you went fishing last weekend? I actually have a story about some guy who is caught by fish and breaded and eaten.”
The Pitch Packet
Ok, you had a general meeting and now they emailed back and said: “hey that was fun! We’d love it if you came in and pitched sometime. Maybe on that thing about the guy who got eaten by fish? haha! Don’t be afraid to reach out! - Brandy”
Cool, but now you realized you don’t actually have a pitch for that guy who got eaten by fish, just kind of a lot of disparate information in your head.
The pitch packet is where you put together all the pertinent information that’s been swimming around in your head randomly and put it into a presentation of some kind.
I always make sure my pitch packet can fit onto 8.5” x 11” paper with a 0.5” margin, stapled at the top left like a packet a teacher hands out. I also make sure that if it’s printed off in black and white it won’t look like shit. You have no idea where these pitch packets are going to go, who is going to end up reading them, or how they’re going to read them. It might be going to some old man somewhere that only reads pitches on paper (me). There might be some intern that has to make the copies quickly and they choose a random printer and it’s the black and white printer. You have no idea, so try to make it something that won’t be too messed up if someone else messes it up.
When making a pitch packet, I think of it like using the inverted pyramid structure found in news articles. The basic premise of the inverted pyramid is that people have very little time, so they need the quickest and most important info first. If that’s interesting to them, they can keep reading. If not, they’ll move on or come back later.
The inverted pyramid for journalism looks like this:
Remember, these execs are seeing about 400 pitches per year. That’s an average of 1.6 pitches per day if you include vacation time and only working 5 days a week, so they’re a little busy and they need the broad brushstrokes.
The packet/presentation should include:
The idea of your show - What’s the logline? What is the rough idea of the show and who are the characters? Where does this take place and why is it important to tell this story right now?
The inspiration of your show - All stories are about humanity, so how does this relate to your own humanity? Show a little vulnerability here. “My grandfather was once eaten by a fish, so I thought it would be good to show what that sort of thing does to a family.”
The characters - Who is the main character and a couple of the tertiary characters. I would say, don’t fill this section with more than about four or five characters, otherwise it can start to become too much information for the exec (who just learned about this project 5 minutes ago) to hold in their head at once.
Some locations - Where is does this world take place? If this is a fantasy series of some kind, it’s important to have at least a rough rundown of a couple locations and their importance. “This is Fish City, it’s filled with fish that deep fry and eat people. This is the camp for the Antifry, fish that refuse to deep fry people and eat them.”
Your themes - So now the execs have a rough idea of your characters and what the world looks and feels like, now what sorts of stories are you going to be telling there? What kinds of themes are going to be popping up in this world? Themes aren’t actions or goals, themes are conceptual. Grief, capitalism, displacement, power, etc. High school english class level stuff, no need to get deeper than that.
Some example episodes - How do those themes manifest themselves into stories? I would say try to describe each episode in less than three sentences. Give the overall plot arc here as well, but remember to keep everything general. This section shows the executives that your idea has legs and can come in many forms (perfect for TV).
Any other pertinent info - This is just where all the other stuff goes. Do you have a twitter account that has been talking about the best deep fried recipes for humans for the past several years and has 100k followers? This is where it goes! Have interesting ways to make this into a massive product line? Pop it in here!
See how it’s kind of an inverted pyramid of info?
Most important stuff at the top that is easy to latch onto: What is the show? Who is in the show? Why should this show exist? Then onto the next stuff: Where does this show take place? What sort of thing happens in the show? Then onto the last bit with other bits of information.
Remember, when it comes to finally making your show, you don’t actually have to do any of the things that you write in the pitch packet.
The pitch packet is merely a sales document to describe the feeling you’re going for and roughly what sort of thing to expect. Yes, it has characters and episode ideas and things like that, and yes, you can go in depth on them if someone asks, but at this point your only goal with it is to get them to buy the show. Then, once it’s actually bought, that’s when you can start gettin into more nuance with your characters, eliminate or beef up storylines, or even completely change the concept altogether. Remember, before Regular Show was about a raccoon and a blue jay taking care of a park, it was originally going to be about a human zoo.
The pitch packet’s only purpose is to sell the feeling of the show. That’s it.
The Pitch
You now have a pitch packet and a meeting set!
The meeting then gets moved to three weeks later. The day of the meeting comes, and then it’s moved again to two weeks later. Then it happens again and they keep saying “Sorry for moving the meeting! Something came up, thanks for your patience!” and you keep saying “It’s no problem!” even though it is a problem and you’ve been dying of anxiety for almost two months and obsessing over how many exclamation points you should be including in your reply emails.
The day somehow finally comes and now you have to pitch, so here’s my advice on pitching:
Pitch to friends - Pitch it a couple times to different friend groups. Let them come into it with as little knowledge as they can so you can get their most exec-like opinions. This also helps you anticipate questions. It’s possible that you want the execs to ask certain questions, so this is a good way to make sure they’re asking those questions and not something that has nothing to do with your project.
Have your own notes - Bring a sheet of paper with the outline of the pitch just for yourself. The worst thing you can do is have a presentation up on the screen and just read it word for word. We’ve all sat through that, it’s boring as hell, and a pitch is basically you putting on a show. So just keep some notes for yourself and go off of those, not word for word what’s happening on screen. This is a great place to remind yourself to include small anecdotes or asides about your project. Personally, I usually have a bunch of images that I show onscreen, some notes for myself to talk about the imagery, then the pitch packet with all those images and everything married together is actually something I leave behind at the end.
Be yourself - You know how it’s super normal to make up a story in your head and then tell it to a bunch of people in a conference room in California who have the ability to give you millions of dollars to make that story a reality? Try to forget that that’s what’s happening and that what you’re doing is the wierdest, most insane thing ever. You’re just hanging out with some friends you haven’t seen in awhile! Actually, more like your parent’s friends, don’t wanna get too comfortable.
Write down questions - When they ask questions and give light notes, write them down. It’s respectful, even if you think their opinion is duuuuuuuuuuumb as hell. However, it still lets you know where they’re coming from, and that’s information you can use on your next pitch with them or with another studio.
Tone Trailer - If you have a tone trailer, you can play it here. I’ve been working on a project lately that I made a tone trailer for, specifically because it’s such a super intense and fast style of show that I wanted people to feel what I was going for. So I edited together a trailer made up of footage from other shows and threw some music on that I thought fit the feeling I wanted. This has been one of the best tools I’ve had when I’ve gone into these meetings over zoom, so it’s something to keep in mind.
At the end of the meeting, you can leave a leave behind. I personally don’t really do this, but I know some people do. The only thing I leave behind is the pitch packet. I usually bring a copy for myself that has notes on it, a copy for each person I know is going to be there, and then I have two extra copies in my bag just in case.
Also, bring your own water bottle. They’ll probably offer you water, but man, it’s not gonna be enough. Just bring some.
Contracts
Wow, can you believe they bought the idea?? Well they did!
You’re probably not going to actually start working on it for another 3-6 months because it has to go back and forth between lawyers arguing about tiny percentages on random things you’ve never heard of. Don’t have a lawyer? Then get one.
Don’t you DARE sign the first thing they put in front of you.
I put that last sentence as it’s own paragraph because it’s that important. A normal entertainment lawyer is going to do it, usually, at no upfront cost. The industry standard is that they get 5% of whatever the gross of your pay is. Here’s a quick reference on normal prices:
Lawyer = 5% of gross
Manager = 5% of gross
Agent = 10% of gross
You will also have starting union fees and quarterly union dues. Unions are also sometimes called “guilds”, which I didn’t know until I moved out here. WGA is the writer’s union, SAG is the screen actor’s union, DGA is the director’s union, and Animation Guild is the animation union. Unions sometimes get a bad rap due to various outdated stereotypes, but the benefits that come with them are worth it. Also, a union full of artists has a slightly different culture than, say, a union full of taxi drivers or teachers. Every union is different.
Development
They’ve officially bought it! Haha those executives are so stupid! Why would they buy a dumb show about a bunch of fish eating fried people? They don’t realize that you’re not very smart at all and you’re just making up a bunch of bullshit!
Oh no… wait… you’re not very smart and you’ve just been making up a bunch of bullshit and now they actually expect you to accomplish something... Now what???
Well hopefully, all that time waiting for the lawyers to go back and forth has given you a little bit of a breather to see what you actually wanna make.
This is when you start working with your creative exec and begin to get…
Something to keep in mind here is that you will always get notes. Every exec has a boss, and their boss expects them to be involved in the process somehow. Even if that exec thinks you’ve created something perfect, they’re still going to have notes, because the studio system is incentivized towards it.
You’re going to go back and forth changing and unchanging your pitch for months based on the tastes of the creative exec you’re talking with and based on the “new direction” the studio decided to go in midway through whatever it is you’re making. Note, the “new direction” will happen once every 8-14 months, so depending on where in the cycle you happened to have landed, you’ll end up having to change your project more or less often.
When I was working on Infinity Train, I was explicitly told over and over “you need to make this Y7, the studio is only producing Y7 stuff right now…” and I said no, because I knew that by the time the whole process was over it would be like a year from then and they’d probably be trying to make older kids stuff again because all they were picking up right now was young stuff. That’s exactly what happened. Trust what you made and the spirit in which is was made. It was picked up for a reason at some point, so as long as you’re still keeping the soul of it intact, it’ll be fine and if they don’t pick it up you won’t hate yourself.
Development is the part of the process that is actually the most difficult, because how many different ways can you make a character “likable but flawed”? You’ll shift it one direction, then they’ll want you to change it. Then you’ll move it towards what you thought they said, then they’ll ask why you changed it. Sometimes they’ll completely forget they ever gave you a note or asked you to answer a certain question and it’s the most infuriating thing in the world. This is, unfortunately, just how it works.
The upside to this is that by the end of this process, you’re going to know EXACTLY who your characters are, because you’ve basically thought about them nonstop and had to do so much reworking over and over again that you’ve thought of every version of them that has ever existed in every alternate universe and timeline to find out which one is the one that works best for this story.
This is also why it’s good to have some experience working in TV before trying to pitch your first show. You’ll have built up a lot of experience and learned how to quickly come up with new solutions to character or story issues that can all be really overwhelming if you haven’t done it before.
Remember, the exec you’re dealing with WANTS the show to succeed. Your success is their success. They also are spending a lot of time talking up the project to other execs, because they want it to succeed. You coming in for your final pitch and it being awful reflects poorly on them, so it’s just gonna have to go back and forth until it feels good to all parties. When it never goes forward and you keep circling on it for years, that’s “development hell”, which every day often feels like anyway.
Network Pitch
This is usually the final pitch before the green light. You’ve worked together with the creative exec and now it’s time to pitch it to their boss/es, the network execs, who are the people with greenlight power. This pitch goes exactly the same as the pitch from before, but it will include all the new stuff you’ve worked on with your creative exec. Hopefully, your creative exec in the room is helping out and answering questions where you might flounder. Your success = their success.
Ever after…
That’s it.
You might learn of a greenlight in that room or several months later. There might not even be an “official” greenlight, it could just slowly start moving into production.
If you’re greenlit, they’re going to check in on your project all the time and you’re going to have to pitch the execs quite often and do their notes again and again. We pitched every episode of the first two seasons of infinity train multiple times. It was very discouraging because most of the time people in the room were just confused, but eventually they learned to trust what we were doing and let us just sort of do what we were gonna do. Once you get that trust, it’s *chef’s kiss*.
Production is obviously a whole other subject to get into, but I hope this at least lets people understand a bit about what the actual process of pitching a show is.
That’s great, but it doesn’t actually explain why show creators don’t just go to another network with their idea…
There are lots of reasons. The most obvious reason is that if your show has already been picked up for development by one studio, it’s theirs until the contract expires (if it ever expires).
The other reason that people don’t always think of is this: the industry is not a monolith.
Just because you happen to know who to talk to at one studio doesn’t mean you know who to talk to at another. Also, just because you’ve been working for years at one studio, doesn’t mean that another studio knows your work or is interested or willing to meet you. Sometimes, you end up just taking what you can get, going with the first opportunity of someone buying the show because it’s literally the only opportunity you have or know exists. This then puts you back into that first category where they now have the show until the contract expires (again, if it expires).
This is why agents, managers, and lawyers exist. It’s because you don’t have all those connections, but they do, so they get you in the room with the right people in the right places. How do you get an agent or a manager? You make things and they eventually find you. I got my manager because I made the Infinity Train pilot, the son of the head of the management company really liked it and showed his dad, his dad went on my imdb, got my phone number, and called me. That’s how they found me. My lawyer I got because the creative exec at CN that I was working with was like “here’s a lawyer, don’t just sign whatever the CN lawyer puts in front of you.” My agent I got because they contacted my lawyer after the popularity of the first season of the show.
All of that stemmed from making stuff. Make stuff first, other things will follow.
Q&A Car
Man, all creative activity takes stuff out of you. It’s very difficult, especially when the world already demands so much of you. I’ve had a lot of life things lately that have basically made it so I feel no drive to draw, I haven’t written anything in months, I feel like a complete piece of crap sitting around doing nothing. It’s been especially hard this time around because the pandemic has made it so I can’t do the things I normally do to recharge.
What I usually do is take a tech free vacation.
I find a cabin out in the middle of nowhere and live there for about a week. No cell phone, no computer, no video games, etc. I get there using a map. All I have with me are some interesting books and some art materials.
I know the no cellphone thing sounds crazy, but you need to do it. Completely unplug. There is so much wasted time in our lives devoted to watching how other people are wasting their time.
Once you’re out there, with nothing to distract you for days, you basically go through withdrawal. You have nothing to keep your mind occupied in those little spaces between conscious thought. The first couple of days you feel like an absolute crazy person, but usually by day 4 you kind of get into a groove. You focus on the here and now more strongly. You get really into the texture of the PB&J you’re eating because there’s nothing else to do while you eat it.
By the time you’re done, you will likely have thought of new ideas, new concepts you want to explore, done some introspection, etc. Then you come home and end up deleting facebook.
If this is all too much to do, then the other thing I do is try to find a hobby that is completely unrelated to my job in any way. My friends know that I have a million hobbies, and it’s because of this.
Here are only a few of the hobbies I’ve pursued over the past 7 years or so when trying to release my brain: piano, coding, making jams and jellies, furniture building, wood carving, sewing, model making, embroidery, airbrushing, mask making, resin casting, painting, electronics soldering, baking, clothing design, obviously the list goes on.
What this does (and it’s a much less intensive version of living in the woods for a week) is put my brain in a different space with a different perspective. It’s a very refreshing reset.
Musical Car
Today I’m adding some french electro punk, some Mort Garrison, and the featured song: Maybe the People Would be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale by Love. I apparently hearted this song long ago because it’s a fun, catchy song. However, I recently rediscovered it due to getting into the imagery of Bob Pepper, a very cool sci-fi/fantasy/surrealist artist who has done a lot of beautiful cover art. He did many Phillip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison covers, as well as the album cover for Forever Changes by Love.
As usual, here’s the link to the whole playlist.
Other News Car
Infinity Train Season 2 is now on DVD!
You can pick it up from any place you normally get DVDs! Here’s a trailer for it and a list I put together:
Also, Infinity Train fans are putting together another trend event on June 27th to help renew the show. Trend events do help the show, as they get more eyes on it, show executives that people care about it, and keep the name in the zeitgeist.
I’ll see about sending out a couple prizes to random people using the hashtag!
Caboose
I hope this all helped explain a little bit of what’s happening behind the scenes with all your favorite shows and their creators. It’s complex and annoying, but this is basically how it all works. This is also why I say things like “It’s a miracle anything gets made in the first place and it should be celebrated just for existing.” It’s very hard to just get something made! It’s much easier to just not make anything, so it feels absolutely amazing when stuff just exists.
-Owen
Have a question you want answered in the Q&A Car? Leave a comment marked with #QA or just talk with other fans here:
Thanks for the deep dive into pitching animated shows. It was really insightful and informative!
Question for you: Is it possible to pitch an animated show as a writer instead or an artist? I don't have much artistic talent so I've always assumed that I'd never be able to make a pitch to an animation studio. #QA
this was super helpful! i've been really curious about the pitching process and i'm glad you made a super long article detailing every step haha. good luck on future pitches!