It sounds like the plot of a rom-com: A successful animator, living the dream on the West Coast, suddenly packs up his life and moves across the country for love.
As if his life was scripted, Chris Perry traded in storyboards and pixelated dreams for a chance at a new beginning—and ended up on a path that would expand his talents to include teaching, writing, and filmmaking.
“When I [moved] to the East Coast, the only way I could continue doing creative work in film and animation was to do it myself,” Perry explains of the era before remote jobs. “I embarked on making short films and in that process did a 20-year self-study where I learned about writing and directing in the context of short works.”
Perry’s nascent animation career started in 1994 as a Programmer and then Technical Director at L.A.’s Rhythm & Hues Studios. He later moved to Pixar, working on titles like A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story 2. Then, after moving to Massachusetts in 1998, he made a career pivot to higher education and began teaching Media Arts and Science at Hampshire College.
He quickly found the existing screenwriting material to be lacking. “Books written for other academics tend to be dry, thick, and dull,” says Perry. “There was plenty of literature about three-act structures and outlining your pilot script, but ultimately when students were asked to put words on the page and write actual scenes, they were left without much of a guide.”
“You don’t really know something until you’ve taught it because [teaching] forces you to boil down what might just be instinctive in your mind.”
Perry joined forces with friend, playwright, and fellow professor Eric Henry Sanders to co-teach screenwriting classes that emphasized specific techniques for crafting captivating dialogue and building reader engagement. “This is where the ideas for [our] book were born,” says Perry. “You don’t really know something until you’ve taught it because [teaching] forces you to boil down what might just be instinctive in your mind.” Before this, he says, “I’d wake up from a dream and [just] write a short film based on the dream I was having.”
The process of writing the book forced Perry to be introspective about his creative process for the first time, and in 2022 SceneWriting: The Missing Manual for Screenwriters was published, in collaboration with Sanders. In some ways, the challenges of screenwriting, and those the authors encountered during the writing process, echo those faced by every animator: Unlike the unique magic an actor’s performance or transportive set design can lend to a scene, “there’s very little serendipity in animation,” says Perry. “Generally speaking, it doesn’t show up on the screen unless you put it there. And I think the same is true with a screenplay. You have a blank page, and the only marks that appear on that page are what the writer chooses to put down.”
Another challenge was figuring out what tone to strike with the book. “A book on screenwriting can take so many different forms,” says Perry, citing classics like Story, Save the Cat!, and The Writer’s Bible. “There are all these different ways you can present yourself as a teacher.” So, Perry and Sanders set about creating a complement to those earlier works, narrowing down their scope to specifically focus on crafting good scenes.
Having returned to L.A. in 2019, splitting his time between the coasts, Perry is now a Supervising Director on Nickelodeon’s Max and the Midknights, where he is able to follow his own advice. There are plenty of examples in SceneWriting of well-written scenes from animated TV shows and films. Among the many: “Even if your characters have wonderfully specific, relatable, and achievable goals, you won’t have a story if they can get what they’re after without a struggle. If a grandfather and grandson team can simply carry the Mega Seeds off Dimension 35-C without having to painfully smuggle them past intergalactic customs, you’ve lost the magic of Rick and Morty.”
As for the reason Perry and Sanders don’t draw a distinction between live action and animation in their book, they believe that writing for each is the same. “When we’re talking about good writing,” Perry says, “it transcends media.”
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