John K. Outlining/Storyboarding

this is all straight pasted from John K's blog, go read the original for more thorough description with illustrations.

Here's the outline of Stimpy's invention
Stimpy's Invention Boards over at Asifa

The way the outline is formatted is designed to help you easily follow the story and the main events in the structure. Having headings for everything is really handy. It lets you see at a glance where every main point in your story is headed and how it fits into the larger picture.

A script doesn't do that. You can't see the structure of a script at a glance (if it even has one!) It is unwieldy and hard to follow and can easily meander off course by getting lost in random details.

Scripts are a chore to read and really hard to work from.

Some of the sequence headings in an outline have more than one scene each helping define and adding details to the sequence. Each scene has its own heading.

Seq. 6. REN DOES NICE THINGS
1) Irons BVDs
2) Cleans Litterbox
3) Cleans Stimpy

All 3 of those scenes help describe the idea of Ren doing nice things.

Note that every story detail and gag of the cartoon isn't in the outline. That's left to the director and the storyboard artist.

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John K. on Tex Avery:
n almost every cartoon, he spends the first 2 minutes blatantly setting the audience up for what the cartoon is about.
In Deputy Droopy for example, the first couple of minutes is almost pure exposition with the sheriff explaining to Droopy to guard the jailhouse and if any trouble happens, just "make a sound, any sound, and I'll come a runnin'!"
And then the rest of the cartoon is just about 2 outlaws causing trouble and Droopy making louder and louder noises to wake the sheriff.

Tex uses this same structure for almost every one of his cartoons.
His main objective once he's sure the audience knows what the cartoon is about, is to build the gags and make them bigger and crazier and faster.
Uncontrolled random craziness wouldn't be as funny if he wasn't so careful in setting up his premise in the first place.
This is also a formula well executed by Monty Python-think of the "I'd like to register a complaint." bit.

The other important point in story structure is to have the purpose build as the story develops.

(can't find stimpy's invention, here's deputy droopy)