A couple weeks ago, Eren from the Film Annex team asked me to write a blog about writing film treatments to help kids understand how films are developed. I realized that the process of making the blueprints for my previous films did not always involve writing a written treatment of the film. Writing a treatment was something that I would only start to learn and use in my later films.

As an animation filmmaker, much of my early development work came from creating images based on an idea in my mind. Sherry, like the Drink is based on a poem that I wrote as a tribute to my mom. But before I even knew that I was going to make a film called Sherry, like the Drink, I was simply coping with the passing of my mother the year before. I had been doing a lot of reminiscing, and during those times, it seems that I wrote the first two lines of the poem from the film by accident. It was summer, and I was heading back to my college apartment, and these two lines that described my mother just popped into my head.

"There once was a woman, who's laughter could summon, smiles on faces full of frowns,"

 "There once was a teacher, who's kids loved to greet her, and play with her on the playgrounds,"

As I thought about these lines, I had a cute and simple image of an iconic, sort of a logo styled character representing my mother up against a simple flat coloured background. It just seemed really cute and appealing and simple enough to make as an animated film.

As I continued to try to see this image, the third line of the poem came to me, based on something my mother used to say for people to remember her name, the phrase "Sherry, you know, like the drink." or sometimes she would say "like the wine."

"Her name wasn't Shirley or Shelley as many would think, her name was Sherry, you know, like the drink!"

And I had an image of this animated character of her toasting a wine glass.

Once I had those opening two lines, and the final line of the poem, with imagery to go along with each verse, I realized that the essence of the beginning and the end of the film was there. I just needed to write the rest of the poem and I would have the rest of the film.

I eventually wrote the rest of the poem, and sought out to search for and create the images that I saw firmly in my imagination. So I made my own workbook or sketchbook made of different types of paper and went about searching to put the look of the film down on paper. Below you can see the evolution of that process.

This became the actual final text of the poem and the film.

I started out sketching with pencil crayons.

At first I was thinking of the characters more in terms of silhouette.

I still like the character running at the top left corner. That was basically how I would run as a kid. And there's a guest appearance of the character from my friend Lillian Chan's Sheridan film Obert Egan Invents the Smile at the bottom right corner.

Here I tested out the feel of an image with acrylic paint.

Animators traditionally use a lot of blue pencil. In this image there are a few seeds to ideas that made it into the film. The top right corner shows the start of an idea for the girl who flies through the air after sliding down a slide on the playground. There's also the starting of the idea of question marks in regards to the character's name at the bottom.

Started to test out the look with watercolours.

Here the potential look of the film starts to become much more appealing to me. I especially like the version of Sherry's character at the bottom left.

A rough layout of the city that lights up.

Trying to solidify the design of the character more. Also getting the idea to have the "ha ha ha"s visually float through the air.

Starting to figure out head rotations and how the eye blinks will be animated.

More watercolours for mood.

Starting to finalize the character line up.

Here I was working out ideas for the second to last scene.

I tried doing watercolour washes on thick watercolour paper, and then cut the silhouettes out and cut the windows out. The image didn't quite turn out as I wanted it but it still gave some kind of a feel.

Back to pencil drawings and watercolour.

With these last three watercolour images, I felt that I had found the appealing images that were representative of the three lines of the poem that I initially wrote. They became the basis for the creation of colour storyboards. I edited those storyboards into my animatic.

My advice for kids would be to try writing poems and associating those poems with images and use it as a starting point to create a film.

Here is the final version of my first animated film Sherry, like the Drink.