Powerhouse CEO Brad Graeber talks pitching animated shows with visualization students
The art of storytelling and character-building and how they connect to successful pitching was the focus of an Oct. 28 discussion by Brad Graeber with visualization undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts.
Graeber, who earned an English degree at Texas A&M before joining the visualization program in 1998, is CEO of Powerhouse Animation, an Austin-based creative agency that works in television, film, games and advertising. The company began in 2001 and has grown to include a branch office in Los Angeles. Among Powerhouse’s projects are Netflix shows “Castlevania,” “Masters of the Universe: Revelation,” “Blood of Zeus” and the original production “Seis Manos.”
The 47-year-old shared stories of his path to becoming an animator, going all the way back to third grade when that was his answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
Referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hour rule” to develop true expertise in a subject, Graeber explained how storytelling takes repeated practice.
“It’s just as much of a learning thing as learning how to draw or learning how to do programming,” he said. “You have to put 10,000 hours into learning about what characters do and how that goes. You have to put your 10,000 hours into reading and thinking about characters.”
Developing story lines can lead to unexpected places, Graeber said, including with existing intellectual property. He conjured a scenario in which someone pitches an animated project based on Dig Dug, the 1980s video game that featured a character going underground and inflating monsters until they explode. It sounds like a bad idea, he said, but then the brain starts playing with it.
“What was that dragon about?” he pondered. “That’s kind of weird. And is the protagonist really the protagonist of Dig Dug? Or is he the bad guy? He’s going into the ground, and these monsters aren’t hurting anybody. They’re just living in their homes, and he’s going in and he’s blowing them up, inflating them until they die. That’s the bad guy. And the next thing you know, you have the whole story arc built out in your head about something you thought was a real stupid idea. It’s just because of immersing yourselves in these things and thinking about them differently.”
Graeber emphasized developing fully realized characters in creating a show or film pitch over the temptation to dive into world-building. Though it’s fun to consider what role religion or economics would play in an expanded universe, he said, there’s not enough time in a typical pitch to get into such matters. As a prime character example, he pointed to a pineapple under the sea.
“SpongeBob SquarePants, probably one of the best-defined characters of our time,” he said. “I could tell you: SpongeBob received a package, but it’s not addressed to him. And he doesn’t know if he should open it or not. And you could write that because you know what SpongeBob would do. That’s what drives shows — characters are defined enough to where writers can come up with scenarios for them to live within and everybody is going to know what they’re going to do.”
When creating a pitch, Graeber advised the students to be well-versed in distributors’ structures and genre classifications to identify the proper people to target. Pitches are typically done via Zoom, he said, and last 30 minutes, with a little more than half of that going to the actual story pitch. That translates to 15 to 20 minutes trying to convince someone to invest millions to make a show, he said.
Two important questions to consider when making a pitch, Graeber said: Why me? Why now?
For the former, it’s not about the work being autobiographical, he said, or tied to gender or race. But the pitch must show authenticity and establish why the person pitching is the right one to warrant investing in the project, he said.
And with the latter, timing is essential, Graeber said, especially with the slower pace of animation compared to live action. It’s important to have something to say, he said, rather than just thinking a concept is funny. He referred to two hit live-action shows as examples that have current relevance, without being overtly political: “Andor” on Disney+ and “Yellowstone” on Paramount.
Success ultimately comes with the people you surround yourself with, Graeber said, and he defined animation as a team sport. With a staff of more than 200 people at Powerhouse, he emphasized the beauty of collaboration.
“My favorite thing about working in animation, and one of the things that excites me so much about your new school, is being able to work with people who are experts in things,” he said. “That is so fun. You want to be around these people who have all these talents. I don’t know much about music, but man do I love that part of the process. Find those people. Find that team.”
