Applied Animation: Creating the Animatic

We had already created a LAV video but were advised that to better go about understanding exactly how to create our animation that we should make an Animatic.

To do this, as a group we recorded all the scripted dialogue in the uni sound booth. Both Matt and I had acted a lot for not only our own animations but other peoples too so were very comfortable with acting out the roles. Particularly since we were basically playing fictionalised versions of ourselves. It was for this reason that we came up with idea to do a bit of ad libbing. We had done this before, mostly for the purpose of messing around but here we felt it was important to insert acted clips and real clips of us actually having a real conversation. I felt this would make the animation feel a lot more natural and real.

Now we're alright actors, but there are certain things that are very difficult to act, for example it is very difficult to act real laughter so we decided that real conversations would be a good thing to have in our animation because at the end of the day it is about two mates making an animation and we wanted it to feel as much like that as possible.

Using the dialogue clips we recorded, Matt edited the clips together to construct essentially what was the final audio for our animation. I put this tidied up sound clip into the animation and placed in the storyboard.

With this completed it was now easy to understand the timing of our animation and how long exactly each scene should last.

Looking back I wish I had developed this Animatic sooner because I knew how much easier it would be to develop the animation with this blueprint. I had already started animating by the point of putting together this Animatic which does demonstrate poor project management.