Nath Milburn’s "The Magic Hour"
This blog is part of our ongoing series of Creator stories, "The Day I Knew I Made It."
The day I knew I made it was the day I got a pilot with Nickelodeon. And as you may have guessed, this opportunity didn’t just fall on my lap — the journey started many years prior.
To start things off, I graduated from the Savannah College of Art & Design in 2011 with a major in Motion Media and a minor in 2D Animation, but I’ve been dabbling in animation since 7th grade, back when Adobe Flash was Macromedia. Upon graduating college, I moved to Atlanta to work for Adult Swim. It wasn't until two years later when I got let go that I really started looking for something new.
Before being let go, I had gone back to Savannah and sat in on an old class I took when I was a student there. The students were doing portfolio reviews with a Nickelodeon HR employee from the New York studios, so I ended up talking to him for a while. He later sent me an email, but it wasn't until I got laid off that I decided to contact him and take a last-minute trip to NYC and see if I could find work there.
I had emailed the Nickelodeon executive, hoping to get a response in time before I had to return home. I’m not sure how many days I spent in NYC, but I interviewed, dropped off resumes, and couch-surfed all over town. This was the second time I did this within a year. The first time was the least successful, resulting in me waking up in the hospital, sleeping on the street under a staircase, deciding to give up alcohol, and returning home more broken than before! BUT that experience made me treat the second trip to NYC a little more professionally.
While waiting for people to respond to my emails, I'd sit in coffee shops trying to think of an animated pitch for Nickelodeon so I would have something good to show. They didn't respond until I got back home, but that gave me extra time to polish my pitch. A writer friend and I put together a pitch based on me being a twin growing up as a latchkey child. My girlfriend (now wife) and I were going to visit her family for Thanksgiving around that time, so I responded to Nickelodeon asking to meet that same week. I had a pitch meeting the day before Thanksgiving break!
After preparing my pitch, my girlfriend and I drove up from Atlanta. Our car broke down halfway into the trip, having to get towed the rest of the way, but we rented a car and made it in time. This was to be my first time pitching to a network in person. I had my own song and dance planned out, which by the time you're in there and your nerves kick in, everything goes out the window. You often have to improvise. I'm a very introverted and shy person, but luckily I've only frozen once during a pitch.
Surprisingly, pitching cartoons can often be a fairly relaxing meeting. You sit on their couch in their office, no one is in suits, and you mostly chit-chat for a while before diving in. People pitching cartoons rarely have agents, managers, or are celebrities — they just like artists and meeting new people for the most part. And I learned that if you’re going to pitch a cartoon, you should go the storyboard route instead of the design route. It'll help you a TON for people taking you seriously.
I left the pitch feeling good and got a short pilot out of it. We had a few months to make it and they gave us $30,000. I went back home and started the pilot after Christmas. We pretty much did everything but the voice-over, which Nickelodeon did on their end. We had a small team of friends and made the short with Flash, Photoshop, and After Effects. Unfortunately, the pilot wasn't picked up.
"The Magic Hour" by Nath Milburn and Andrew Melzer
That said, if you do get a pilot, keep your ego in check. Don't make an animated pitch just for pitching’s sake. Make one that connects to you, one that you'll want to do for a long time. If you're just doing it to get a show, then don't bother. Also, you don't need to be that creator who got a show right out of school. Get some shows under your belt, climb the ladder, get experience. Your crew will be happier for it. You'll know how the pipeline works.
Try to work in as many departments within the industry as you can so you know what everyone goes through. So many creators only know the storyboard route and nothing else. That can lead to a lot of clashing heads. And just remember, it's just a cartoon, It should be fun. A good rule of thumb is to remember that whatever you're seeing on TV is usually two years in the making. If there are a lot of fantasy cartoons, then the studios probably have non-fantasy cartoons in the making or are looking for more non-fantasy cartoons. Timing, luck, it all plays a factor. And don't give up! Enjoy the ride.
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Note From Tongal: "How I Got and Made a Low Budget Nickelodeon Pilot" is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tongal. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
