R & P Post 12: Our Animatic

After creating our storyboard, the next task was to visualise our ideas – this was achieved through an Animatic. An Animatic is a storyboard in the form of a video, with still photos replacing the action drawn on Post-it notes and put into a sequence on Premiere Pro along with music, a voiceover and basic titles. As such, our group felt that producing an Animatic was extremely useful to envisage our ideas much closer to real-life than drawings on paper, and helped us realise whether our sequence was not only within a sensible time frame, but also to see if it were practical to film, adhering to the brief and creating a sense of continuity between shots, for instance if the framing of certain shots was too jumpy or completely different from our initial ideas. It also enabled us to cut our shots to our chosen music track for the first time, which naturally is not possible with a paper storyboard.

We took photos of our planned shots and edited them
 into a basic sequence on Premiere Pro- an Animatic

In hindsight, creating an Animatic was certainly very helpful as it helped the group quickly spot the flaws in our original plans, for example with one of our master shots which we had to frame as an XLS, as opposed to shooting from a bird’s-eye view. Additionally some of the timings of shots were far too long, and the Animatic allowed us to adjust the length of shots accordingly. However, in my view one negative of the Animatic was perhaps that it didn't fully allow us to see exact timings of action, and had we produced simple videos blocking our action rather than still images we could have refined our sequence much more precisely. 

Our completed Animatic. Please click above to view,