Pitching an idea to an animation producer from the BBC

When this project was first discussed, I immediately thought of working with Ben and Will. I have worked with them before on other projects and so was hopeful that the three of us together would come up with some “sellable” ideas.

Ben had found a website by an Amerian English teacher, Richard Lederer (http://www.verbivore.com), which had a collection of school children’s humourous errors from history papers (eg, George Washington was a very social man. He had big balls and everyone enjoyed them…). We began talking about how we would present these funny lines and how animation could be used to enhance the humour. Our initial thoughts were of Terry Gilliam style cut outs, creating a collage of images. We then went on to discuss using a page from an exercise book, with scribbles and pictures appearing as the script was read as a voice over. This lead us on to thinking about having a character presenting the historical-mistakes as a 1950’s style “public information film” but concluded almost at once that this idea had been done before and been done better. The next step is to put together some images into a mood board so we can better communicate our ideas with one another.