How Do You Write for What the Camera Can’t Do?: Scriptwriting, Animation, & Transmedia Storytelling

How do we write for what the camera can’t do? How do we imagine and create for a medium which resists definition, is constantly evolving, and ‘is a protest against the stationary condition’? (Dragic et al, 1972: 9). How might a writer realise in the initiating instances of pre-production, what may become and potentially catalyse the illusion to life? This article considers how the means of writing may reveal insights into animation. It will particularly focus on an analysis of my own writing practice for animation for the animated short film Fallow. This story is one component of an ongoing practice-as-research transmedia storytelling project in development at the University of South Wales. This project was created to explore the specificities of a medium, transmedia storytelling and the relationships found between these through the practice of creative writing and scriptwriting. The project draws on aspects of Punch and Judy and the themes of identity, memory and perception which are explored within each story across each of the primary components of: Fallow (animation), The Pier (comic), Desistence (computer game), The Deep Machine (songs), Observance (journal), dell’ Arte (mixed media), Stain (music video) and The Quay (novel). This article discusses the process of writing for animation while considering a transmedia cosmology, and through examining the creation of the short film script Fallow what, for the writer, this may reveal about animation.