Aaaarggghhnimatic

POSTDATED - 22/03/12

Over the Wednesday and Thursday I have managed to rack up 19 hours work on finalising an animatic to be ready for shooting starting on Monday the 26th. Up until this point making an animatic had had been more or less a waste of time, because we hadn't settled on most of our locations. I did end up re-using some of the drawings from an animatic I had started earlier, but the drawings from Symond's Yat ended up being useless. The final animatic here is fairly rough, being limited by the images that we took and the length of the final film, but it works as a guide for the live-action filming.

Doing this project has taught me a lot about communication and working in a team. Having to explain my ideas to the film crew was helped a lot by my ability to draw, something that they are unable to do and so usually make do with a written shot list. By converting the animatic into a visual shot list we are quickly able to know exactly which shot we're talking about.

That said, I have realised that an animatic for a special effects film definitely requires a dedicated storyboard artist for a film of this length because of the constantly changing shots in consideration, especially if there were more special effects. As it is the number of animated shots is fairly limited to give myself an achievable workload and I was struggling.

Anyway, here's the animatic on a passworded vimeo account, so I won't have any problems with submitting it for festivals, hopefully. The password totally isn't widdershins1001.