His next lesson came on the 2012 stop-motion animated Frankenweenie. Inspired by a live-action short film a young Burton had made at Disney in 1984, Frankenweenie is a dark, but playful tale in which children discover how to make their dead pets come back to life.

His work with Burton has taught August the importance of thinking bigger when it comes to his responsibilities on a project.

“Tim treats everybody who works with him on a movie as a professional who’s fully responsible for his or her job,” says August. “In writing a movie that Tim is going to direct, I very much write it like the department head in charge of writing. I’m looking for what I can do that will help Tim make the best possible movie.”

This mindset influenced his approach to writing the film.



I’m looking for what will get him excited about shooting this scene



“I’m looking for what will get him excited about shooting this scene,” says August. “That’s a great perspective to be able to approach as a writer because I’m not writing for some imaginary director; I’m writing for a director whose taste I know and can somewhat anticipate.”

This department head mindset also played itself out in a series of brief, but productive, meetings August had with Burton.

“You don’t have long meetings with Tim,” says August. “You have very short, very focused sessions where you describe what you think you can do. He gives you feedback and guidance on what’s important to him. And then you just go off and do it.

“Our meeting for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was an iced tea at a hotel. I described my relationship to Roald Dahl whom I’d written to in third grade. Dahl had written me a postcard back, and I still have that postcard.”

August continued about Burton, “I described the general arc of where I saw the movie going and he said, ‘Yes, do that.’ That was the extent of the conversation. Once you know what’s important to Tim, you’re off and running.”

The importance of thinking like a department head was especially vital to August’s work on Frankenweenie because of the added complications of writing an animated film.

“In animation, what would normally be the process of production is this multi-process of the story department,” he explains. “The story department is taking my script and figuring out shot by shot, scene by scene, how everything is going to fit together and they’re doing these illustrated story boards to figure everything out.”

But that process requires more collaboration and flexibility than a live-action film might.

“Sometimes, the process of storyboarding reveals new possibilities,” says August. “In Frankenweenie, I’d written a very complicated chase sequence. As they started to break it into boards, they found funnier, smarter ways to do it.

“Writers coming from live-action often bristle at animation, because so many more people have their fingerprints on the story. You’re constantly being challenged and second-guessed, or forced to rethink something that isn’t working in pencil tests. But with great collaborators, you can end up with something greater than any single person’s vision.”

One of the biggest challenges August faced in writing Frankenweenie also contributed to one of the biggest lessons he learned from the project – the value of knowing where your story is going before you start writing.

“I only had three weeks to write it,” says August. “That’s all the time I needed because I knew what the story was like. I knew exactly what it’s like to be that boy with the dog. I had my own dog who was sitting at my feet as I was writing it, and I could see the whole story from his perspective.”

In some ways, his experiences had come full circle as he once again was able to draw on those lessons he had first learned when his professor asked him to write the last 10 pages of his first screenplay.

“By knowing where the movie is going to end, you can make some much smarter choices about how you’re doing the middle and the beginning,” says August. “If you’re planning a road trip, you have to know where you want to end up. And then you can take really fascinating ways to get there. But it’s important you actually get to the place where you’re trying to go.”

It remains to be seen where August will take audiences next, but it’s clear he’ll continue to learn valuable lessons along the way.