The four vital elements of an animated series bible

A animated series bible must include the following four elements:

The World

A bible lays out the time and place of the series, including important locations that are an integral part of the show. As part of the world, a bible might describe significant vehicles and other hardware to be used on a continuing basis.

In writing the bible for Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies I described the nursery in which the babies lived, including such key elements as the bookshelf, Rowlf’s piano, Piggy’s vanity, their cribs, and the window seat with toy drawer. All of these elements were key to the environment and designed to allow the babies to play out stories within the nursery.

The Characters

A bible should go into detail about who the characters are, including their backgrounds, their goals and motivations, their emotional tone, their look and dress, and perhaps most importantly, how they relate to other characters within the series.

In the Muppet Babies bible each of Jim Henson’s characters had to be described as toddlers. What would Kermit be like as a baby? How would Piggy’s total self-absorption manifest at four years of age? What kind of jokes would a baby Fozzie tell? And how would the familiar interrelationships of the grown Muppets translate to little kids? All of these had to be determined and described.

The Stories

Perhaps the most important thing the buyer wants to know about a series is whether it will yield a lot of good stories. Thus, a bible contains anywhere from a half dozen to an entire season’s worth of story ideas. These are not full stories, but usually springboards, which are just a paragraph laying out the beginning, middle and end. Stories in bibles need to be excellent examples of what episodes will be like and must show how all of the elements of your series will come together.

The Format

There are basically two parts to a series format. The first part deals with the content of the show. What is the series about? How do the characters work into the stories? What is the theme of the series? Is it comedy? Action-adventure? All of these questions and more need to be answered.

With Muppet Babies, for example, the format described how each episode would begin in the nursery where the babies would find themselves facing some problem. Through a succession of independent story elements, each imagined by a different Muppet character, the problems would slowly be confronted and resolved. The theme of the show was imagination. We wanted to show how wonderfully imaginative kids can be, and how they can solve their physical and emotional problems through imagining possible outcomes. This theme also bled over into the second part of the format, which is context.

Context is not the setting (which is included under the World), it’s the artistic and physical form that the production will be set in. How long are the episodes? Will it be cel animation, paper cutouts, or CG? Is music an important part of the show? If so, how? What is the age of the intended audience?

After integrating all four of these elements into coherent whole you should have a workable animated series bible.

(Jeffrey Scott has written over 700 animated and live-action TV and film scripts for Sony, Warner Bros., Disney, Marvel, Universal, Paramount, Columbia, Big Animation, Hanna-Barbera and others. His writing has been honoured with three Emmys and the Humanitas Prize. He is author of the acclaimed book, How to Write for Animation. To work with Jeffrey visit his website at www.JeffreyScott.tv.)

Read other articles from this series:

#1 The difference between live-action and animation writing

#2 Tools of the Trade

#3 It all begins with a premise

#4 The secret to developing your story

#5 Finding the scenes that MUST be there

#6 How to write an outline

#7 How to easily transform your outline into script

#8 A brief introduction to script writing

#9 How long should your scenes be?

#10 How to (and NOT to) edit your writing

#11 How to write description