Douglas Wood Quotes

In terms of writing characters or stories, at least initially, there's no difference between live-action and animation. A good story is a good story, whatever the medium.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

Coming from the world of animation, every single line counts; every single gesture counts. You put thought into every single one of those things and the way a frame is composed.

Once you've established where you are, you go to the character and elaborate on expressions and action.

The nice thing about animation is that you can realise your inventions without understanding all the hard theory.

Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now.

You know it's my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.

A lot of the time in animation is spent getting the story right - that's something you can't rush.

Animation had been done before, but stories were never told.

Animation is incredibly difficult - much like doing a giant sweeping fantasy novel.

For me, animation is the caricature of life. It's something that we create, from the ground up.

I think I can speak with a degree of authority... today, the biggest driving force of movies is pace; God help you if you try to put in a scene that is about character and not plot.

Because TV is mostly close up, it has to be fast. And because it has to be fast, you don't have time to explain completely, by a sequence shot, what's happening between people. So instead of experiencing what's happening, say, when a couple is dancing, dialogue is used to explain.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

I wrote on a show called Johnny Bravo when I was at Hanna-Barbera.

I think with animation there's a certain freedom that you're given. You don't have a thought at the back of your mind, that worry that you'll have to cut and go back to the top of the scene. You're not working with anyone else from the cast. It's just you.

I like films to be complete in their written form.

What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.

I'm a big fan of pantomime storytelling, being an animator.

In television writing, you want to hear what the characters say as opposed to giving them something to say. It's the same with the cartoons.

I love the idea of animation just because it removes the actor from the character, and you can be anything. I've been devouring 'Adventure Time' and 'Archer.' I'd love to get my hands dirty on either of those shows.

The storyboard artists job is to plan out shot for shot the whole show, write all the dialog, and decide the mood, action, jokes, pacing, etc of every scene.

I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters - to make them personalities.

I don't write shows with dialogue where actors have to memorize dialogue. I write the scenes where we know everything that's going to happen. There's an outline of about seven or eight pages, and then we improvise it.

I always wanted to do an animated movie. I find it to be incredibly liberating as a way of telling a story.