Notes
Given on 5th February at UCLAN Brooke Building
Sam Morrison (no date)
Available at: http://www.theevilgenius.co.uk/html/watch.html (Accessed: 14 February 2016).
As his website says: http://www.theevilgenius.co.uk/html/what.html, Sam Morrison is a writer, director, animator and illustrator. He's worked for Channel 4, Aardman, Nexus... writes on award-winning shows such as Peppa Pig and many others, as well as developing board games, live-action sitcoms, writing commercials and numerous other things. He's a very busy person, still quite young, but who has had a long, varied and quite prestigious career.
We had the pleasure of having him lecture for us as part of the MA visiting practitioners lecture series.
This was a very different to talk to the one given by Claire Norcross. It included a lot of animation and is therefore difficult to summarise in a straight-forward way, but the following are the key points I took from Sam's informative, animated ramble along his career journey so far:
- Sam's career has been very varied and he has had to adapt in order to keep work flowing. He could be doing commercials for Ikea on one day and then writing for a hit TV show the next.
- It takes resilience and determination to keep going in a very competitive industry.
- Sam keeps a diary and has found this very useful and good to look back on.
- A lot of what has happened in Sam's career has been unplanned - he said, "things have just happened in a weird organic way". I like the idea of this...
- Sam's inspiration comes from novels, reading, gaming, other animations...
- Sam doesn't directly 'own' a lot of his work as he is often writing up other people's ideas. This is an interesting situation to be in - and I guess it similar to being a designer but not making stuff yourself, although usually the designer does get credited with owning the 'product'. Clearly it doesn't work like this in the world of TV and film writing.
- Sam keeps lots of projects on the go - and says this is a useful position to be in (even if they are just small projects) as it means that you have something to say when people ask you about current work, rather than having to say.... um... nothing...
Pitches and requirements
Similar to Claire, Sam mentioned how requirements and pitches vary so much depending on which company you're working for at the time. He said that sometimes he just gets an email with a vague idea and he has to build a story around that. On other occasions, he gets a very prescriptive detailed description of exactly what the story needs to be about. Some companies have a head writer who provides the outline and it's Sam's job to flesh it out and write a full script. Companies vary, too, in how much interaction they want with their writers once the writing begins: some just let him get on with it until it's done and others require regular updates and make frequent changes to what he's written.
I guess this happens in many fields of creative practice where requirements can be so subjective. There is a great deal of skill in being able to interpret requirements precisely - and this saves a lot of time (and money usually) later.
When asked, Sam gave the following good tips for pitching for a brief:
- Can you sum it up in one sentence? Be prepared to do that, because you might have to!
- Rehearse what you are going to say.
- Remember that, provided you can explain things well, you don't have to have models, prototypes, etc. (Perhaps this is more so in world of film/animation)
- Despite best-laid plans, sometimes you can get so far along with a brief and then the client may decide to pull out - or completely change their requirements. You have to either be prepared and go with this - or be prepared to pull out yourself. Keep an open mind.
One unexpected bit of information from Sam's talk was about Google's low-tech VR device Cardboard which I've now read a bit about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cardboard. Had never heard of it! (Surprising considering I work with 100s of geeks in my day job!)
No comments:
Post a Comment