Guide to plan a show with Kitty

Hello internet! I'm Kitty/Runy and I'm a 17yo that likes to make and plan cartoons, and this is my little guide on how I make my projects!

Note: I've never finished one yet but that's because I'm too lazy to actually finish it and I start other projects instead, but I always follow these steps that I'll reveal to you here, I hope it'll help you making your own projects!

1. Find an inspiration and your theme

Want to start a show but you don't even know what it should talk about? Find or use a subject that you find interesting! It could even just be a concept or a picture that inspire you. Take inspiration from it, study how it works, for example, if you want to make a show about a Mafia Family, study everything on how mafia works to make it as accurate as you want it to be without having people saying that it's bad rep or that it sucks. Even when you start your project constantly research and look for inspiration, you never learn enough and can always find fun facts to make it better. Of course it's easier if your subject is fictional, since you can add your own personal opinion on it and still keep it interesting and your bit or reality. I don't recommend entirely making everything yourself, it can easily get confusing, for you and for the viewers. Always have an inspiration you can have as beacon. Build a concept from this. I call a concept a summary of what you want to happen in the show.

Exemple from one of my projects: it's not supposed to be funny. it's a tragedy. it's supposed to be comforting the disturbed, relaxing maybe, it's supposed to be mindful. it's a Memento Mory. It's a story about a computer that wish to travel the world and make friends. in a world infinitely endless where two being being in the same place at once seems impossible. it's a story about a lonely lost soul that gets to live the most wholesome life in a simulation inside the simulation. someone that doesn't know how the world works. someone that doesn't tell the bad from the good. someone that learns. something that learns. In the end, nothing was real. the imminent threat of complete erasure, rewrite, will not stop it from it's happy ending. even if doesn't look like one, it felt like one. it'll die and everything it made will die with it. live.

It's short and explain well your vision and objectives

(Extra personal step)

Find friends that are willing to work with you! I PROMISE it's way easier to work on a project if you're more than one person on it, you can all keep each other in check or give each one a role if you are enough! I also personally tends to make a discord server to keep everything organized and give roles to easily know who does what.

2. Make characters

People might not agree with me, but I think making the characters it one of the most important thing and should be taking care of first after finding the theme of your project. It's also my favorite part and I sometimes take my inspiration from unused OC. Characters can define your entire world, you can start creating them now and their lore as well but change it later if you wish. Make sure your character actually fit in your world. Start making the relationships, how each character see each other or if some characters doesn't know the existence of others. Build their personalities. Don't know what type of characters to make? Well, take a character you really like and write out why you like them, do the same with a character you hate, you can't always make lovable characters! To keep a world interesting and your audience interested make complexe personalities or make characters you are sure people will hate! It's diversity ^_^ also remember to give them personal goal: being a nicer person, stopping being submissive, idk stuff like that. Your character might not know what their goal is until when they achieve it.

(Recommended extra step)

Make a lot of art, already start imaging places they could be in, interaction between each other, concept art or official art, be creative! Oh, you're not the artist? It's okay, you can also write out interaction you think might happen if characters meet or find if they something! It helps building the characters personality relationship

3. The story

My second favorite part, start writing what you want to happen in you story! But make sure to always keep your theme in mind to not go too out of character. Write out the final objective, what you want them to achieve at the end. You are the writer and have full power over the characters, you can choose to make them fail, but instead they earn character development and achieve their personal goal, or the can win, but an unfortunate events cut then and they continue the course a bit longer before reaching their final objective (that could've changed at this moment) exemple: At the beginning of the story the characters look for a treasure, they go on their journey to find it but the antag steal it, the characters find another treasure more or less valuable, and earn character development.

I guess it's good idk I can't write good stories lol

4. Write your lore

Ouch, this is the difficult part, the lore. Once you have your characters and their personalities, you can find connection between each of them and imagine what happened to them in the past to make them behave the way they do. A character has depression or PTSD? What happened to them? Two characters hate each other? Why? Did they knew each other before or do they remind each other of another character they dislike for good or personal reasons? A character is mean? Why? Always question everything! Even your places! A place is in ruined or abandoned? Is there a reason why? Somewhere everyone avoids or is infamous? There must be a reason! Links everything piece by piece, the extra step is here to help you build it too!

5. World building (optional)

The most difficult part in my opinion, unless you take inspiration from real life, when creating a fictional world you need to build everything, fauna, flora, society, weather and biomes, you can take a step further and imagine biology, how the creatures work, make SCP -like entries and studies on the things in your world. Of course you don't have to do all of that, but make sure that the world your characters live in make sense to the story and characters. For example if your characters are anthropomorphic animals living in society, what do they eat? Do carnivores and herbivores eat the same thing? Find inspiration from other popular medias, other cartoons, movies, games, books. You always will need a reference for world building, I fear.

6. Script

Once you have your story written, your objectives and goals of each character for their personal journey, you can start writing a few script. For a pilot or just a canon interaction. It doesn't have to be in order. If you have a script idea for an event in the middle or at the end WRITE IT BEFORE YOU FORGOT! you can also place it later and apply changes if needed. Don't hesitate or fear to change your script if you feel dissatisfied! It's YOUR project, take your time. If you try to go too fast it might just be terrible. Rewrite as much as you need.

7. Idk I've never been this far

Find people to help you with the music (or find free use songs) and voice actors (or voice act everything yourself) it might be the most difficult part if you're shy and/or don't have any money, but there will always be people happy to help just for the fun, not for money. I can't tell you how to look for these people because uhhhh I already have a team composed of my friends to help me out, but maybe look and post on Reddit, TikTok, or any other medias where you think you can be seen easily.

Okay that was it ^_^ this was made out of boredom and I might edit this later to add more details, don't hesitate to ask me if you didn't understand something, or if you want to help with one of my projects make sure to take a look at my strawpage!!

Published by ✮⋆˙Small_Grain_of_Dust˙⋆✮