Yesterday, Syracuse Alum Rob Edwards came to speak to the Intermediate 3D Animation class. He's the screenplay writer for The Princess and the Frog, and has worked on other movies and shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, In Living Color, and Treasure Planet. He had some great stories and his answers to our questions were very useful and relevant to any field, not just writing for animation. It's very evident why this man has been so successful and why he's such a good comedy writer, he's a master communicator!
As a graduating senior, the story of how he got started was most interesting to me: he said that he got lucky the summer of his sophomore year and got a job as a production assistant on a movie in Los Angeles (he was a film major), then the next summer he got a job as a joke writer. He had written one comedian's act, and everyone loved it so much they all started coming to him for jokes, by the time he returned to SU for his senior year he was a big shot, and he'd already made some good connections in L.A. He also said that he started pretty early writing various screenplay writers he admired, asking them for advice or if he could contact them when he eventually moved to L.A. and he said quite a few wrote back and told him to keep in touch! It's always amazing what persistence can get you.
Something I thought was very interesting was his reasoning for working on the new Disney princess movie. When word got out that Disney was making a new princess movie, letters poured in from women arguing that the damsel in distress message should not be told to little girls anymore, that they were single and successful and happy and that they didn't believe the Prince Charming fairy tale was beneficial for girls to hear anymore. Rob said that The Princess and the Frog was made for those women. The princess in this story is just a regular girl, facing all kinds of obstacles and trying to be independent, with a dream of owning her own restaurant. He said she was the girl who was on her way to being that women who was cynical of romance and fairy tale endings.
What's great was how this story matched his own story of meeting his wife. He didn't tell it in detail, but suffice it to say he kind of "rescued" his wife financially, and he sounded just like a modern-day Prince Charming! So if anyone were to write the modern Disney Princess movie, it would be him, a believer of the classic "magic" that Disney represents. : )
A few more points that were interesting for art students and more:
-When writing for a scene, think about "what action is this action interrupting?" This guy had an astounding sense of what was boring and not boring. I can't say I have that talent myself, but it really was fascinating to listen to someone who does.
-"Tell your audience how to watch your work...maintain your shape," and eventually your audience will catch on and know why certain jokes are funny or why a certain moment is moving. This is really interesting to think about while watching anything. I've had a recent Office binge and so I thought back about how the awkward jokes were hard to get used to at first, and it is kind of a language of pauses and references that you have to learn to understand before you can fully appreciate it.
-When watching a movie, "look at the scenes that move you, and figure out why." He said that if he was writing a scene that needs to push a button in the audience to make them cry or laugh, he watches scenes from his favorite movies and dissects them to figure out how they do it. For The Princess and the Frog, he said he looked at It Happened One Night, and worked on the concept of characters falling in love once they learned to love the things they first hated about one another.
It's been a crazy week. But hooray for Friday! Have a great weekend yall.
