# - Backstory Posts

[angelinthefire]

First of all, neither Amanda Overton nor Christian Linke were animators, they're both writers.

Second of all, the quote that you're commenting on answers your question. The writers and animators worked *together* at the animatics (rough animation) stage to refine the script. This is similar to scripts being reworked during shooting in live action, which happens all the time. When the actors actually get into the scenes, they find out that something doesn't work, or that a scene needs something else. Sometimes the writer is on-set and makes changes, but sometimes the director and actors work on it together. Sometimes actors ad-lib even. Editing is another stage where the script can change in live action film and TV. Things can be cut, beats can be inserted, the order of things can be changed. That's also the stage when the need for reshoots comes up. Point being, it's normal for a script to undergo changes in the process of being made and for actors, directors, and editors to all bring something different to it.

If you're interested in reading more about the process of making Arcane, I posted more extracts here.

Obviously animators are a huge team. The play the role of production design, cinematography, costuming, acting, etc. But it's not the job of the writers to keep them all in line with the same interpretation of the script. That’s the job of the director, and ultimately the showrunner, not the writers. This post is talking about the writing process. Everybody working on a film or show should be bringing their creativity to it and thinking about it actively, not just following orders. That's how you get the best outcome. But in the end, it does all go past the showrunner, which is true for Arcane as well. Everything ultimately does get signed off only the showrunner.

In addition, it's not unheard of for people working on the same film or show to have different interpretations of it. Actors for example can come up with their own backstory for their characters, and play their role with different kinds of subtext, and the director doesn't even necessarily have to agree with the interpretation as long as it gives a good result on camera. This is a bit of a reverse case example, but in Ben-Hur, famously, screenwriter Gore Vidal, director William Wyler and actor Stephen Boyd, all interpreted the relationship between Messala and Ben-Hur as gay. Charlton Heston, who played Ben-Hur, did not. He was not even informed about it, he heard nothing about this until after the movie was made, and he was adamant that Ben-Hur was not gay. Did Heston's interpretation of the character prevent the director from getting the performance he wanted? I don't think so.

I also think it's frankly wild that you think ambiguity in storytelling is automatically a bad thing. Or that debates between fans on the meaning of things is automatically a bad thing. I've thought for a while that arcane critical fans really need to watch more film and TV of high artistic quality and broaden their horizons, but now I'm actually saying it. You need to watch more art. You think Hex!Sky is too ambiguous, try watching a David Lynch movie.

Hex!Sky is exactly the type of thing that *should* be ambiguous. The audience *should* be forced to think about the degree to which Viktor is being manipulated or acting of his own will. The story would be so much less engaging and interesting if you were told explicitly one way or the other. Like, think of how many different interpretations of Hamlet there's been, there's different interpretations as to whether the ghost is actually Hamlet's father or not. For lots of great pieces of art, there's debates over interpretation.

(I would also like to see a source for your quote because this fandom loves to take things the writers said out of context and play broken telephone with them).

"And you can't replace all the dialogue with wacky clips" - good thing they didn't do that then. What are you even talking about?

Just thinking about this bit from The Art and Making of Arcane:

Animatics are another key stage, when the storyboard essentially begins to move and an episode's rhythm emerges. Amanda Overton pointed out that just because a script is sent to Paris, that doesn't mean it's set in stone. 'Another reason Arcane is so good is because we're able to do a lot of rewriting in the animatics,' she said. 'In Season 1, probably Episode 5 is the closest from the script to the animatic. There was a constant question of "How can we tell more story or the same amount of story in less time?" We came up with a lot of creative fixes and spent a lot of time in the animatic stagee rewriting and crafting things to make sure it worked.'

And how you get people saying "the animators added so much that wasn't in the script." When what it sounds like is that there was stuff in the script that was then cut out at the animatics stage because that information could be communicated more efficiently visually, and that the writers worked with the animators to achieve that.