Story-boarding for SpongeBob
Aesthetic of the narrative in SpongeBob (Nickelodeon’s creative identity)
Stephen Hillensburg: One of the things I always felt was, [we should] try not to do a lot of topical jokes or refer to the human world. I wanted to create the idea that Bikini Bottom is an isolated world that SpongeBob inhibits; a simpler place that you just escape to.
Coleman: If you look at the stories in a lot of the early episodes, they’re very, very simple, and that requires strong characters to carry them through, beat by beat. So it’s a testament to how great those characters are that they can pull it off. It’s not just a strong of gags for 11 minutes—there’s a real emotional underpinning in the series, especially in the early episodes.
The stories not only establish the relationships, but they establish a simplicity in the storytelling, a variety in visual techniques. Episodes like “Ripped Pants” [season 1] which is one of my favourite episodes, were full of surprises. It had surprises in the type of story. Where other cartoons might have had loftier storytelling ambitions, here was a story on a very small scale about a character trying to connect with other characters around him, and he just had this vulnerability and sweet emotion. That story, which we’ve seen before, was told in a way that was never told before. Then to have a musical number at the end, with the funny backgrounds, kind of gave a glimpse of things to come.
The narrative is mostly storyboard driven and visual (something that was becoming outdated)
Hillenburg decided early that he wanted the show to be storyboard driven rather than script driven, an approach that required artists who could take a skeletal story outline and flesh it out with sight gags, dialogue and a structure that would strike a balance between narrative and whimsy. While the writers came up with the premises, the greatest burden fell on the two-man storyboarding teams that worked in tandem on each episode.
Sherm Cohen writer, storyboard artist and director, 1999-2005: For each SpongeBob episode, the storyboard team starts with a bare-bones story premise that covers the basics like the setup, the complication and the ending. The board artists are expected to flesh it all out and add lots of gags and silliness.
Eric Wiese:He would hash out premises and outlines with the writers. They would act as the blueprints for the storyboard artists to work from. I felt like I was living out what had been described to me from other older cartoonists at comic book conventions who had worked on classic cartoons from the ’40s and ’50s.
Collaboration process on narratives
Drymon: One of the ways he would inspire stories was to write nouns that interested him on a note card and hang them in his office. He felt just having the word in his eyesight would get his mind working. [Merriwether] took this idea and made it into a writing exercise. We would all write 10 nouns on small pieces of paper and put them in a hat. The hat would be passed around and you’d have a minute to scribble down an idea based on the noun you drew. It would almost always start a discussion, and we wound up getting a lot of episodes out of it.
Osborne: I was in the writers’ room with Steve, Derek, Merriwether and Mark O’Hare. The meetings would start, but we would just sit around talking about things that happened and funny things that happened to us when we were kids. It wasn’t like, “OK, let’s get to work!” And someone would start laughing at something and would say, “Oh man, we’ve got to make an episode out of that!” And we’d start trying to figure out how to craft a three-act structure around it. And we’d have all these ideas that never went anywhere up on the wall, and I’d look at those a lot.
http://cartoonician.com/the-oral-history-of-spongebob-squarepants/
