‘Surely I should get a script credit, shouldn’t I?’ Creative, consultative and collaborative script development: The Oil Kid

This article explores the script development process in the pre-production of The Oil Kid, a collaboration between the Oil Museum in Stavanger, Norway, oil industry sponsors, a production company in transition, and a political activist upon whose memoirs aspects of the script were based. The article addresses the idea of how such collaboration works, and how each of the voices represent themselves as the project develops. As will be revealed, these voices are often in competition and have vested interests in how the final script emerges, suggesting that the scriptwriter is often cast as the mediator of such interests and responsible for maintaining creative integrity, political balance, social focus and economic viability. In this case it was required that the scriptwriter constantly be asserted as a particular role with specific skillsets, which was often overlooked when the project’s collaborators viewed the expression of an idea, an intervention about narrative or the provision of technical information as an act worthy of a script credit. The article thus asserts the distinctiveness of the scriptwriter as part of the production process in animation, not merely as an inherent and implicit ‘recorder’ of the script development process, but more significantly, as its key pragmatic leader and facilitator.