Animatics 101

An animatic is a rough animated preview of your storyboard to see the timing and how your animated scenes will cut together. Before you can put together an animatic, you need to have a storyboard that tells your story visually in a correct cinematic format.

Animatics can be used to test commercials before they are made into live action or animation to see if a test audience responses to it or not. They can be used in Feature films in the form of Pre-Vis sequences allowing a Director to pre-plan his shots to see if a sequence will cut together before shooting the real thing. And especially for animation students, to help them figure out the timing of their storyboards and figure out if the scenes will work or need to be revised.

Animatics don't have to be fancy. They just have to be used to make sure each scene has enough time to be shown to keep the story flowing along. If the pacing is off, either too fast or too slow, those panels must be re-timed and a new animatic must be re-edited.

The animatics below had several revisions in the beginning, so don't think by simply making an animatic of your storyboard that it will turn out perfect on the first try. Most of the time you are trying to figure out not only the timing of each panel, but the pacing of the scenes. Do they begin to get faster? This is a way to create tension in a scene, especially with an action scene. Or do they slow down the pace, by showing a scene longer, followed by another one.

Here are two versions of the same animatic where you can see a revision was made to help present the story more clearly. (Please let me know if you can view the previews below or if you see nothing.)

arcillaanimatic1.0 from Toondini on Vimeo.

  

Andrew Arcilla's project shows a ghost attempting to scare a sleeping child who wakes up mad at the ghost, not scared. The ghost is now scared of the child and tries to escape as the child is seen about to throw a pillow. As the ghost is fleeing to a door that is stuck shut, we cut back to the kid with the pillow, then back to the ghost's struggle with the door.

arcillaanimatic2.0 from Toondini on Vimeo.

In this version, the cutaway to the kid with the pillow has been removed, to keep the focus on the ghost's frantic struggle to get through the door. By removing this cutaway, the pillow becomes a surprise when we see it from the ghost's point of view.

Here's another animatic by Yongkang Wu. which has a few things in it which can be revised, but all in all it works pretty good so far... Its a work in progress. Do you understand what is happening in this animatic?

Yongkang_ Final Animatic from Toondini on Vimeo.

Please let me know if you can't view this and I will fix the problem before I continue.