How to Get Started? (The first step for any story)

If you've ever had an idea for a book, film, short, a series, or a story in general and wondered "where do I even begin?", this text is for you.

Since we at Belli Studio are an animation studio, we'll guide you through the steps by imagining the first stage of an animation in a professional pipeline, but regardless of that, the process is very similar for any media project.

An idea is something vague, often confusing, or even something that keeps changing constantly over time. That's why, before any script, we need to start building a solid foundation for our story. And the document we use to do that during production is the Bible.

The Bible got its name because it is the document that establishes the rules of the series' universe. It needs to contain detailed character descriptions, the specific rules of that universe, and graphic elements that place those characters within the story.

We understand that every creator has a different way of bringing their story "out of their head." Take the example of Swampy and Dan, the creators of Phineas and Ferb, who started by drawing a triangle-headed character on a paper napkin and then built an entire universe in a storyboard that they recorded and dubbed themselves. Some people prefer to tell the whole stories in the form of books or comics and only then write what orbits around it, so they can see the universe with it already up and running. There are no rules written in stone, but utilizing proven processes will most likely help you.

Whatever your way is, what matters is having an organized document, both so you don't get lost in the process, and so you can present the story to a producer or investor (if that's one of your goals).

How can we effectively begin this development?

Here we'll bring up some essential questions that help guide the initial development stage, but we'll write another post that goes deeper into the structure of a bible on our blog (depending on when you're reading this, it may already be published), so we'll skip the formatting part itself for now.

First, understand that organizing and refining a story takes time and effort. There are no shortcuts. With that in mind, try to reduce your idea to one or two sentences. This exercise seems simple, but it's powerful: it forces you to identify the central point of the story — what truly matters in it.

With that core defined, develop your characters with slightly more detailed descriptions: who they are, what they want, and what's stopping them from getting it. Then, with the central point in hand and your characters better developed, you build the actual story: what is the beginning, the middle, and the end? What lesson will the protagonist need to learn? What obstacles will they face along the way? How do characters and conflicts relate to each other? And is this story better packaged as a series or as a feature film?

Once those questions are answered, it's time to dive into detailing the universe.

At this point, it can be very helpful to write a treatment (a prose text, usually one to a few pages long, that narrates the story in summary form, with a beginning, middle, and end, without worrying about script structure). Sometimes putting together an outline also helps: this is an ordered list of the main scenes or events in the story, functioning as a skeleton of the script before it actually exists.

So, with the main characters defined, arcs already drafted, the story's central theme understood, and a clear sense of the protagonist's main obstacles, it becomes much easier to write, and, more importantly, to write in a cohesive way that keeps the audience hooked from beginning to end.