Screenwriting : Remembering my first writing experience by Zee Risek

I have writing credits on four different series, but 95 percent of my career has been as a drawer (a guy that draws, not the kind you put your socks in), not a writer. Even in my capacity as a character designer and storyboard artist, I still have to read the script and break it down. As a character designer I have to analyze the script and make list of all the characters to be designed. As a storyboard artist I obviously have to read the script so I can storyboard it and plan the shots and camera angles. My point is, I have read a lot of scripts. And most of them ain't great. I remember on one production, every time a new script came in, we (the character design and background design teams) would read the script to make our lists. This resulted in my fellow designer and I spending the next hour complaining about the script. Every once in a while the script was fine, but usually there was something for us to bitch about, something we thought made no sense, or something we thought would have been better. The other people in the studio, especially the producer and director, were not pleased that we were openly criticizing the scripts. They just wanted us to shut up, make our lists, and draw the characters. They preferred people that put on fake smiles and did not think critically of the scripts. And I could tell the other people in the studio were uncomfortable, thinking "These guys are openly, and loudly, trashing the script? Are they nuts? Do they want to get fired?" So one day, while at lunch in a little bistro, I said to my coworker, "Instead of us complaining about the scripts, why don't we just write one? We'll write it the way we want, the way we think the show should be." And so we did. We wrote it during lunch breaks, at that bistro table, in about 4 days. And when we showed our script to the producer and director, they loved it. When it came time to produce and work on our episode, everyone in the studio approached us privately and told us it was the best episode of the series, and that they were super excited to work on it... and they were. Usually everyone goes about their work in a rather ho-hum kinda bored manner, but when we were making our episode, the other character designers, the background designers, the prop designers, the clean up artists, the art director, everybody was super energized and enthusiastic. And that was the most rewarding part of it, seeing animators excited to do their jobs and eager to contribute and add ideas. It was great. That was the first script I ever wrote that got produced. That was the only episode we got to write on that show, the creator/head writer wrote all the others. He hated us. I think he recognized how good our script was. Needless to say, we were not brought back for the next season, he made sure of that.