Research and Planning 12: Our Animatic

We will follow up our work on a storyboard by creating an animatic. An animatic would be used in professional film making to lay the foundations for the structure of the film. We have decided to create an animatic; not only to replicate the process used in the industry, but to give us a better idea of how our opening sequence will look. We will be able to test the transitions of each shot, the amount of time each shot lasts and how the shots fit together with the script. A storyboard will be helpful for a lot of this, but an animatic will allow us to create a replica of how our real sequence should look.

Originally, we had created sticky notes for our credits. However, we feel little need to keep these in our animatic as it would be easy enough to replace these with better titles using Adobe Premiere Pro. We will also able to add our actor credits over different shots to see how we should space our titles within each shot. It would be very difficult to do this in a storyboard, which is another reason as to why we believe producing an animatic will be beneficial.

After producing our animatic, it is clear that it was very helpful to us. We have been able to recognise different problems that we may face during our test shoot which were much more difficult to spot on our storyboard alone. One major issue we discovered was that we have a lot that we want to tell in our story but the brief only gives us two minutes for our sequence. Our animatic has helped us to cut down the length of our sequence, which would have been troublesome if we discovered this problem when editing our test footage.