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If the show’s been on for a while, try to get a synopsis list of all the episodes approved or produced so far. This will save you from pitching something that has already been approved or done. Be very familiar with an established show before pitching for it. Unless told otherwise, you should come up with three to six premises to submit. Try to keep it within that range. Fewer than three doesn’t make much of an impression, but more than six is getting to be too much. Submit the written pitches as quickly as you can (these days, usually by e-mail), because you’re in competition with other writers, and inevitably more than one writer will submit similar or the same ideas.

MTV’s version of Spider-Man is an example of this. I wrote for some of the early CG TV series, all for the same production company. At the time, we wrote the scripts in a live-action format using master scenes, rather than an animation-script format. This was due largely to that particular company’s method of parceling out the art tasks without using storyboards. In most TV animation, one artist is given one act of a script to storyboard, so you can end up with three artists drawing storyboards for a half-hour show with three acts.

It became the episode “Transmutate,” and the company liked the story enough that they went to the extra trouble of creating something entirely new for the Transmutate character. ” This was usually said in comparing animation to live action. This was truer in the past than it is now, due to the increased use of CG elements in live action. It also highlights the difference between feature animation and TV animation. Features have multimillion-dollar budgets and a long development period. They can afford to pull out the stops.