The Original Freaky Stories Pitch Bible

Here's the original 2 page pitch document that I used to sell Freaky Stories - or "Urban Legends" as it was known at the time. This isn't the actual document - the "original" original was printed on a heavy newsprint stock - from a dot matrix printer. This is a revised version from about a year later. The images were photos of airbrushed paintings that I did - pasted down and color photocopied.

The original intention of the series was that individual artists would be assigned stories, that they would produce in their own styles. There would be no true animation in the series. It was going to be advanced animatics and technical animation with a voice over narrative.

The voice over narrative was all that remained in the final production. We did the pilot as I intended, but it became very clear that we couldn't hope to find enough artists with a unique style, who could produce the work we needed to make it work. There were some who came through brilliantly - but when we got the series order, we had to go with conventional 2D animation.


As for the writing - it was very bare bones - just enough to tell the broadcaster what the series would be about. The animatronic puppet hosts, Larry & Maurice as well as the setting of Ted's Diner all came along later in the development process.What amazes me most about the original pitch - is how much I didn't know about writing.

Although I'd been in the animation business for over 10 years at that point, I hadn't written anything since high school - other than business letters and a few short stories. By "a few", I think they're listed above in my pitch document. My only technical writing knowledge came from this high school example - "Three Passions" from the Introduction to Bertrand Russell's autobiography:
It was Russell's 5 Paragraph Essay structure that I followed (loosely) - probably the most useful thing that I ever learned in my life. I think that aside from the English Class in which I learned this - the rest of my High School career was a waste of time - well except for that big explosion in Mr. Brett's Chemistry class...