R+P Post 13: Our Animatic

We decided to do an animatic so that we could see any flaws in the current iteration of our opening that either we didn't pick up in the previous plans of our opening, like the timeline and storyboard, or possibly flaws that we couldn't pick up because of the static mediums we were using up to this point. It would also be the first time we saw our opening in video format, with all the different components working together live.

Our finished animatic. This post will describe why we created it as well as how we created it. Overall it was quite a useful thing to do for a number of reasons. Click to play.

First, we took one lesson to shoot all the shots needed as still photos, using our storyboard as a guide. We decided to shoot it in a classroom, without the full range of props and so on, to save time. We had a dilemma that other groups didn't, namely our large group of characters, but we simply had people play multiple characters while wearing slightly yet noticeably different clothing to signify who they were.

Then we recorded all the lines at the specially set-up microphone computer, doing different voices for each of the characters to further set them apart. It was a very short process compared to doing a full video, which was quite beneficial as the animatic was supposed to be a quick test to ensure everything was going well.

Next was the edit, which was the most time-consuming part. Thus, we created an edit schedule to split the editing time fairly between us while making sure we finished by the deadline.

The animatic editing schedule. It made sure we all knew when we had to come in to do some editing, and allowed a lot of time so that we would easily make the deadline. It let us choose slots when we had free time, such as at lunch or during free periods, and organised us all on one master copy so that we would have less chance for mistakes than across three copies. Click to enlarge.

The editing itself went quite smoothly. We worked in logos, titles, camera movements (with visual indicators) and basically everything we would have in the real version.

At the end of it, we had learnt that our opening actually did work quite well as a video- stuff that was harder to plan on the previous documents, such as the opening logos and the music, were able to be reviewed, and we learnt that they worked well too. 

However, some of the shots with the Officer didn't flow very well, especially in terms of the zoom into the Detective as the Officer leaves, so another thing we learnt was that we had to change those to be more natural, which we did as soon as we were done.