The Book of Masks Homepage

Re-Animated

Sometimes you have to get a project entirely out of your head before you're able to work on something else. I have a feeling it's going to turn out to be that way with the "Incredible Hulk" script. TBH, I'm having a hard time reading and polishing my BoM chapters—

Oh, latest now up: "Memories From Another Me"  (interactive) and "Memories from Another Me"  (public)

—while I've got this script inside my brain. Never mind writing new BoM stuff.

The script that I published as part of BoM was based on a watching of a single episode of the series. But I went back onto Daily Motion afterward and watched a bunch more, and found that my script was somewhat out of continuity with the rest of the series. I also found that both my version and the original episode didn't quite capture the nature of the relationship between Bruce Banner/Hulk and Rick Jones, at least as it is dramatized in the other episodes.

So that left me dissatisfied with what I'd written.

Then, too, I discovered that, far from being too short, my script was far too long. I did a partial transcription of an episode -- writing it out in the same format and degree of detail as I'd used in my script -- and found that it was working out to about 1 minute of screen time per page. [**] At 29 pages, my script was way too long for a 22-minute cartoon.

So I spent yesterday and today revising the whole thing. I started by shortening dialogue and tightening conversations. Then I ruthlessly chucked out a couple of scenes and radically truncated others while adding some new ones. By the time I was finished, there was little left from Michael Reaves's original script save for the Puppet Master's ability to spy on and copy people on the streets. It might still be slightly too long, coming in at 22 1/4 pages instead the 22 even that it should be at.

I've left the BoM version up, and posted the revised version as a standalone item in my Portfolio, for any that are curious: "Invalid Item" 

[**] The one-page-per-minute rule is a common one when judging movie scripts. Apparently TV scripts tend to run a little longer. There seems to be very little consensus on how long an animated-TV script should run. Many cartoon scripts are typically very detailed on shot breakdowns, which means they run closer to a rate of 2-pages-per-minute. But because I'm eschewing as much "shot" detail as possible, my script wound up running closer to the usual length.