One of the first television shows I ever worked on was Codename: Kids Next Door, which aired on the Cartoon Network. I wrote the springboard (initial story idea), the premise, and the story outline for a KND episode called “Operation C.L.O.W.N.” In that episode, Numbuh 2 (one of the titular Kids Next Door) fancies himself the class clown, until he runs afoul of the clown mafia, which is ruled by an imposing figure called the Clownfather. “Operation C.L.O.W.N.” first aired in 2006, and the plot for the episode was inspired by two things:

• My love of the Godfather movies (well, the first two of them)
• My feeling – when I was in elementary school – that the “class clown” in my class wasn’t really all that funny

Codename: Kids Next Door was what’s known as a “board-driven show.” You see, in animation there are board-driven shows and script-driven shows. On a script-driven show, the writer writes an initial springboard for a given episode, and then that same writer fleshes out that idea by turning the springboard into a premise, a story outline, and a script, complete with full character dialogue and fairly elaborate stage directions (aka scene descriptions). Some of the animated shows I’ve written for – such as Charlie’s Colorforms City and Hey! Fuzzy Yellow – were script-driven shows.

But on a board-driven show, the writer writes the initial springboard, the premise, and the outline for the episode. And then that outline gets handed off to the storyboard artist (and in the case of KND, the show creator and head writer) who fleshes out every scene with character dialogue and stage directions while simultaneously storyboarding that episode. Aside from Codename: Kids Next Door, other board-driven animated shows include SpongeBob SquarePants and Adventure Time, neither of which I wrote on (but you get the idea).