His Heart Project Rejected by the Network - In Brandon Hoàng's Own Words

 Foreword

A compilation of Tweets from Brandon Hoàng (Former Creative Executive turned Writer) on a pilot he co-created with Hans Tseng (Art Director for Bee and Puppycat) from 2019-2020 for Netflix Development that ultimately got rejected in the end. Brandon has done two long threads explaining his complex thoughts of rejection that are so insightful that I wanted to compile them into one real blog post (You can never kill the blogger!). I also wanted to give some more context, so I took a few more of his Tweets about his series to put it all into perspective.

Prologue

July 15, 2019

Hans Tseng and Brandon Hoàng has just submitted their first draft of their animated show idea script to Netflix. Brandon had high hopes for it. They would ultimately spend a year in Development at Netflix with their potential series.

Brandon: "Hans Tseng and me submitting our first draft to the network. I can't wait to see this boarded, oh god... it has to be boarded..."

"I gotta do some visdev on the environments and monsters..."

"-Hans sexting me"

Two Months Later...

"Hans: I don't think we're asking for much if our show gets greenlit.

me: Not at all.

H: So what if we want to develop toys? Both soft goods and high end resin figurines?

me: And a top-down RPG?

H: Or a side-scroller beat 'em up to coincide with its premiere?

me: Legitimate asks."

Three months later....

"Thumbnail pitch for our project has been scheduled for mid-January!!

And that pukey, deep-in-your-guts, pre-pitch feeling all of you board artists always complained about? I get it now.

Hans, It's been a joy collaborating with you. We cranked out a pilot that still makes me laugh and feel all the feels. You’ve put your soul into this and it shows with every stroke of your cintiq pen. You love these kids as much as I do. I hope that the Netflix big wigs do too"

Three Days Out from Network Pitch (Pitch Rehearsal)

"I'm not a superstitious man but driving back from Hans’s thumbnail pitch for our animated project - I didn’t hit a SINGLE red light.

Only. Green. Lights.

Shout out to Jen Bennett, Kiki Manrique, Serena Wu, Efrain Farias, and Stephanie Gonzaga for sharing their time, their notes, and their support! 

Still riding that high. You guys are the best!"

Jen: "You're both amazing! I love this world you've created, and I want more NOW."

Kiki: "So incredibly amazed & impressed by all the hard work and care you both put into this pitch. I'm keeping all my fingers crossed for you!"

Serena: "You and Hans's project is so deserving of the praise it has gotten -- I feel privileged to have been able to sit on it at this stage and share my enthusiasm for it with everyone else in the room last night! Let me live in the world you guys have created!!!"

Netflix approves of the thumbnail pitch, gives the green-light for a 22 min. pitch animatic. Production starts in April with the help of Brandon's dream studio Flying Bark providing the storyboards.

"Hans and I just had our very first production kick off and I gotta say it felt pretty damn rad." 

Two months later in June, the pitch animatic was finished.

"Hans Tseng and I just wrapped our final animatic pitch for our development project - a love letter to EarthBound. We were incredibly lucky to get our dream studio, generous voice actors, and a cadre of powerful artists.

Thanks to everyone who cheered us on. Now we wait."

Three Weeks Passed..

The network ultimately rejects the show from getting greenlit at the one last final step of Development. Hans and Brandon are told this via one simple phone call. Brandon had many thoughts about this and took to Twitter following the rejection.

"I’ve been reading posts wanting creatives to post more about failures along with their successes to show that the journey to a final product isn't a smooth straight shot. If it helps anyone else out there, I’d like to share my most recent stumble with you. And I need to grieve the only way I know how - to post my feels in a public forum (true blue blogger since 2007). Netflix officially passed on our animated series. I’ve only posted a few times about our development deal. When you “sell” a show and it gets thrown into development, it’s hard to talk about to your friends, family, and colleagues because it’s not really REAL yet. Maybe this is the Viet side of me coming on strong - we don’t celebrate successes until they are tangible (and even then we rarely celebrate). Development is not for the faint of heart. It’s a long, long process.

Colin Heck recently posted a fantastic thread about the precarious balancing act your brain needs to maintain in order to survive. You gotta put some of your soul into it (after all, why should an executive care about your characters, your world if you don’t?), but you can’t get too attached because, well… the chances of it actually getting made are slim. Think of the greenlight process being like a towering stack of sliced swiss cheese, layers stacked upon layers and each individual slice rotating at their own pace. At the top of the tower, you line up a pencil and drop it through the holes. In order to get that greenlight, the pencil has to make it clear through without bumping up against a single slice of cheese. Each slice of cheese is a different variable (Did the executive you pitched to see value in your vision? Did their entire team agree? Did their boss? Did their boss’ boss? What’s the climate and the timing of the Network’s needs? What’s the Network’s current slate? Etc, etc, etc.) That’s how damn near impossible it is.

Greenlighting a show is very similar to getting a manuscript sold. You go through the exact same flaming hoops and levels, hoping that your pencil will make it through unscathed. Editor, the buying team, the boss, Acquisitions, Profit & Loss, Marketing… they all gotta love it and believe in it. Some of my manuscripts have gotten passed on at various stages - remember, you have to get through all the rings!

Thankfully, this isn’t my first rejection so I have built up some-sort of armor (see: a loose, 1940s football helmet, an old oven mitt, and a baseball catcher’s chest protector with stuffing coming out) But a rejection on something you put your heart into will always come with that very specific bitter sting. And this rejection stings a little worse than the others, I suppose. I think it’s because we were so damn close. We could practically hear the trademark Netflix “daDUM”. We were literally at the last step. And then with one very awkward phone call, it’s over.

I wish I could say that with every rejection it gets easier. Did I mention how hard it is? You fall in love with your characters - you’re protective of them like a mother tiger guarding her cubs. Your brain goes wild imagining what adventures you’ll take them on...what stakes to throw at them -- waking up in the middle of the night to scribble down ideas for a season finale or a bit of dialogue that will both crush the hearts of (and hopefully inspire) your viewers.

Our Supervising Producer told me, “You won’t get over this one for a while. It’ll take months.” He also went on to say it was one of the best pilots he’s ever worked on. So that made me feel a little better! Once the call with the exec team was over, I called Hans to try and make sense of things. 

“We left it all on the field, didn’t we?” I asked, my eyes stinging, on the brink of tears.

“We did. This is the show that not only we wanted, but needed as a couple of POC kids, the sons of immigrant parents. Don’t forget that.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Thanks for being my partner through this. You’re the best Hans. Love you.”

“Love you too, Brandon.”

I gushed my gratitude on a previous tweet thread, but there’s no better time to repeat that sentiment. It truly takes a village - not only the folks on the production side, but our family and friends in the industry who cheered us along the way.

Thanks to the studio who spent long hours breaking down the budget of two seasons (yes, we were THAT close), thanks to the generous voice actors for lending us your talent, thanks to our talented animatic editor, thanks to the banger board artists for putting your hearts into each drawing. 

We left it on the field.

Here’s the thing about Asians: we don’t give up so easily. Thankfully, we get the rights back and we’ll be hitting the pavement once we recover from the wind getting knocked out of us. 

With any luck, you may hear from us again.

Lastly (I don’t think I’ll get in trouble for this), but here’s my favorite Hans drawing that encapsulates what I’m feeling right now. 

It doesn’t show the humor or the action of the series, but dammit it shows the heart. 

I love this project."

One month later...however, something out of the ordinary happens to Brandon.

"I sent the animatic of the development project to my childhood buddy who is an Earthbound fan. I had no idea he was going to show his youngest.

He requested to watch it FOUR times. A 22 min animatic! That’s crazy.

This is it. This is who we create for. Don’t lose sight of that.

We often times get so caught up in it that we crave the validation from our peers and the gatekeepers that we forget who we really need to enchant.

It's so much more rewarding to have a kid request to watch my pilot or read my story. That's the good stuff."

A year from the date of the network rejection...Brandon thought about his loss again while on vacation.

"I was supposed to be on vacation this week -- taking some much needed rest & relaxation. To breathe. To get a break. To escape.

But there was a stubborn cloud of melancholy following me as I putzed around the air bnb (much to the annoyance of my family). Then it dawned on me: it was the one year anniversary since my animated pilot was killed.

This thread is going to be about that. Because the way I process shit is to share my internal monologue widely. You can kill the blog industry, but will never kill the blogger!

I’m used to rejection. Being a writer who has his fountain pen in both publishing and television, it’s nothing new to me. I have full manuscripts that may never see the light of day. And I’m okay with that. But there’s a term I’ve seen in publishing that I haven’t seen in television called “your heart project” -- the one that’s a piece of your soul. 

This was (is???) my heart project.

And a heart project stays with you forever. Everyone in the entertainment biz will tell you, “Ya gotta have a thick skin kid. Rejection is part of the job.” Hell, I've said it myself. If only it were that easy.

It came so damn close and with that comes a special kind of hell that only those of us who saw the greenlight at the end of the tunnel can truly appreciate. As one producer said, “I see 200 episodes. I see merch. You ever think of launching this alongside a videogame version?” Hans and I bounced in our chairs like giddy children. Then she went on to say, “I wish they would have just done you guys right and made the show...” There are nights I still wake up, sick to my stomach, unable to think about anything else. But as a Viet, I agonize over the misses, the losses, and the should-have-beens. It’s hard for me to see the good. I’m working on this in therapy.

I have a lot to be grateful about despite the outcome. I got to partner with Hans, a true collaborator whose talent I’m constantly in awe of, who fills in my blanks, and whose instincts are always right. We partnered with Flying Bark, our dream animation studio, to make an animatic. When Ian Graham told us the team of board artists that would be drawing the pilot, I nearly toppled backward in my computer chair. You wouldn’t believe me if I listed all of them. As an animation writer, the coolest thing in the world is to put words on paper and then to see it come alive in someone else’s drawings. Artists that know your characters so well, they can improvise gags that elevate the story. How fucking cool is that? We had top tier voice actors come to us at the 11th hour to help us out. Again, you wouldn’t believe me if I listed them. And I got to feel for a split second what it would be like to showrun a series. We were doing four hour production meetings, building grids of our favorite directors, board artists, and designers. 

And I’m proud as hell of the pilot. It has humor, action, and moments where the characters have to sit and really think about the decisions they made. We even had our boy character cry in a scene -- that was important for us to show. I also think about the fact that if the show had been greenlit, I wouldn’t have been staffed on The Ghost and Molly McGee. What an honor it’s been to write on this series and joke and laugh and collaborate with the crew. I hope to meet everyone in person someday! And I sold two manuscripts last year. A Young Adult and a Middle Grade. What an honor it is to be able to create for kids. IM GOING TO BE AN AUTHOR. IM GOING TO HAVE TWO ISBN NUMBERS!

All that’s to say that we’re not finished yet. I see what Fernanda Frick & Glenn Lazo are doing with RAISE THE BAR -- if there’s a story that’s important enough, you’ll find a way to get it told. Could I convince Hans to go the graphic novel route?

I wish I could show you Hans's artwork -- his character designs, his expression sheets, his key art, his color design… it would blow you away. Maybe we’ll post the pilot someday. But I have to fight that impulse in case there’s a future for it.

 A few weeks go, I had drinks with another animation writer. He took a long sip of his lager and said, “You know, I still think about your project.” It meant a lot to hear that. Because I know I’m not the only one."

Tweets taken from https://twitter.com/BrandonHoang_

Brandon Hoàng's website is at https://www.brandonhoangwrites.com/. His YA debut GLORIA BUENROSTRO IS NOT MY GIRLFRIEND and his untitled MG debut hit shelves in Fall 2022.