Script Writing For Far-Fetched!

Greetings, little freaks! Dave here. So…you wish to learn the ancient secrets of the Far-Fetched writers’ room? Many have attempted to replicate the mythical process, only for their fingers to rip off their hands and poke them in the eyes! Okay, maybe not that extreme; we can’t afford a wizard on staff anyway. Regardless, today I’m going to give you a juicy breakdown on everything that goes into the writing of scripts for Far-Fetched, specifically our pilot. Keep in mind, this is just my personal writing process and how we do things on our show. There is no wrong way to write, so make sure you work with a flow that you’re most comfortable with. Okay ready? Grab your notepad and let’s dive right in!

Before we even decided it would be the pilot episode, Ashley came up with an idea for a “Blair Witch” style short of Sesamoid trying to shoot a music video in the woods with a single camera. She wrote down a quick outline of a script onto her phone and sent it to me to see what I thought. I LOVED the idea, and we began to bounce more ideas off of each other for the short. We kept expanding the story and script until what we thought would be around 2 or 3 minutes ended up evolving into a nearly 9 minute pilot!

When it comes to overall ideas for the series, anything we come up with that doesn't completely suck I write down in our special BIG DOCUMENT. It’s currently filled with things from the very start of developing the series until our most recent writer’s meeting. We have everything from character arc plans to wacky plot ideas to monster concepts! It makes it easy to be able to pull from in the future, in case we forget something we already came up with. Here’s a look at just some of the crazy ideas from that BIG DOC.

Once Ashley and I figured out exactly what we wanted to do with the pilot, I began writing the whole thing out as an outline. This is where we bullet point the basic structure of the entire script into scene order. In my opinion, this is the most important step of the whole scripting process as it becomes your baseline for the story you’re telling. We’ll usually include ideas for scene direction, as well as any specific jokes or dialogue ideas we’d like to save for the official script that we come up with early. We workshopped the outline for quite a while, eventually figuring out all the fine details and settling on the final structure we wanted to take the script. The differences between Ashley’s original phone pitch and the final outline are abundant, as you can see here!

Finally, it became time for us to actually write out the full script for the pilot. This was the most time consuming part of the process, since we basically had to take the outline we’ve written and fully expand upon it. incorporating all the ideas together into a complete story. Admittedly, the toughest parts of writing the actual script for us is coming up with and perfecting dialogue for characters. Dialogue is a lot of fun, it just takes quite a few stabs at the vocabulary book to get just right. I remember there were a few lines we kept bouncing back and forth on right up until the end of the script to perfectly fit the character’s personalities.

When it comes to official formatting, if you don’t have screenplay software like Final Draft or Celtx, here are a few ways to turn a Google Doc into a proper professional script. First, your script should be written entirely in the Courier New font. Secondly, dialogue should always be centered on the page, not on the left. This makes it much easier for your actors to read when it comes to performing. Finally, scene direction should always be written in BOLD, but starting on the left like normal. Take a look at these pages from the official pilot script, so you can see my formatting for final versions!

Once a script is done, it usually still goes through changes during the actual production process. We tried to follow the script as much as possible, but when working with thumbnail and storyboard artists, certain scenes changed to better fit the flow of the actual animation. Also, when working with our voice actors, sometimes some lines and efforts that they improved with were so good that we ended up using those takes instead of the lines that were in the script! You have to make compromises while working with a team in order to tell your story in the best possible way.

Well, that’s about it! This process is what we used to write the pilot, shorts and all the future episodes of Far-Fetched we’re currently working on. It’s a very collaborative effort for us as creators to bring these scripts to life, but this process has yet to fail us. Okay, that’s about all from me. My fingers flew off and poked me in the eye six paragraphs ago, and my thumbs are quite tired. Best of luck, future writers!