Creating An Animatic...

As a group we have been working to create our animatic; this would allow us to envision accurately what is to happen when it comes to actually shooting the final piece. It acted as a 'moving storyboard' of sorts. It was of paramount importance that our animatic looked like the real deal, as if we had really put our efforts behind it. In retrospect, this has helped us as a group as we now have a united vision of what it is we are producing, as opposed to a mash-up of four different peoples version of the same thing. The animatic allowed us to sort out our sound, both diegetic and non-diegetic. For instance, we recorded our dialogue and put our soundtrack over the top of the piece. The following is our animatic...



How did we go about making our animatic? :-
Having created our storyboard (with the appropriate detailed notes), we then took shots of each frame on a camera. Next, we uploaded our images to Adobe Premiere Pro- which suffice to say I feel a lot more comfortable using- and then we put these in chronological order and gave each 'shot' the appropraite time length that it would have in the final finished piece, if that makes sense. Next we recorded our script on a recording device, and then this was dubbed over the top of the images. We also put Massive Attack's 'Teardrops' into the montage sequence, and the tone and atmosphere of that song worked really well with our animatic. Finally, we added in effects such as the zooming on shots etc. and added the necessary transitions. This took a lot of time to make but its given us so much more confidence moving into filming.

What have I learnt from our animatic? :-
The animatic has been an important stepping stone in the film-making process; its the first time our thriller-opening has actually felt real and fully-formed. Also, the animatic has helped us to identify mistakes, mistakes that we hadn't identified at the storyboarding 'step'. For instance, we were aiming to have a shot-reverse-shot between the news interviewer and the prime-minister, but then we realised this wouldn't maintain a sense of realism that was necessary to this section of the opening. The animatic has also reinforced our confidence in our ideas; for instance, I was really pleased with the ambient music selection as opposed to the more cliched, pounding dubstep we were thinking of using. Moreover, we felt the montage sequence in the animatic worked well, and the script was precise yet also realistic-sounding.

Overall, I'm really pleased with how our animatic has gone. The final step before shooting, we now have a clear picture of what we're doing, and it feels as though we only now have to translate what we've made in the animatic into real life, rather than having to be spontaneous and make most of it up on the day. In fact we've already done part of our shooting (the PM's scenes, and of course I'll make a post on that), with the bulk of our work to come on Saturday. With the animatic now done, I now feel confident and ready to shoot...