Animation Guild

Fall 2019

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D E PA R T M E N T 29 KEYFRAME "I like my scripts to read as if you're seeing the episode in real time, beat by beat." Writer Duane Capizzi whose credits include Carmen Sandiego (below), Transformers Prime, The Batman and more. FALL 2019 29 BEAT BY BEAT The greater the mayhem quotient, the more carefully orchestrated a scene needs to be. Greg Johnson, a writer and producer who has worked on several Marvel animated movies, is accustomed to deploying a large group of X-Men or MCU heroes into a giant battle, all the while remaining confident that the audience can keep up and stay engaged. With a multiple-character battle, the beats need to be meticulously built into the script, Johnson says, so that if Captain America throws his shield, we can both see where it lands and track the characters over on the side. As a writer, Johnson says, he makes sure he knows where everybody is and where they will end up so it doesn't look like "Armageddon on the page." "You don't leave in the middle of something that makes it look like our hero is going to die," Johnson says. "You resolve that little piece of business before you cut away so when you cut back, they can still be trading punches because that's how you left them." "For me, the ' timing' of a successful action sequence is something more than just technical—it's something that begins on the script page and follows through the storyboarding and directing process," says Duane Capizzi, a writer and producer on Carmen Sandiego. "I like my scripts to read as if you're seeing the episode in real time, beat by beat. Successful action sequences are orchestrated—they should rise and fall, have tension and release, not unlike music." Image courtesy of Netflix

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