Animatic

So here is the animatic that I was talking about earlier. 

As you can see, it’s just like the storyboard but with movement. This is the reason why I created the storyboard with layers. So it would be easy for me to move the individual elements. It may not be clear why anyone would want to do this step, especially if the final piece is going to be in 3D but I think it’s important because it allows me a chance to see if the story moves along in the way that I expect without spending so much time building complex models. It’s much easier to work out certain things at this stage and, if I need to, I can cut out certain sections that I don’t think work as well and put in others very easily. The time I spend on this stage is minimal compared to the other stages. Some of the cuts may look a little odd, but they represent the camera swinging around to a new location and not a jump cut.

Even though the animatic is not that impressive to look at, there are still a few technical things that I’d like to talk about that made my job a little easier. 

One of the things that I used a lot was something called expressions. For those that are not familiar with it, expressions are a way of making changes, over time, with math. I know many people that do what I do who thought they would never need to know any math if they stuck with art as a career. Unfortunately for them, they were wrong. The good thing is that a lot of the math that is needed is pretty basic and formulas can be found everywhere on the internet and in books and also in the software itself, making life easier. For my part, I used an expression that made objects wiggle. It wasn’t that important for the animatic, but I figured that if I have to look at something, I want it to wiggle.

Another tool that I used was something called a mesh deformer. In After Effects they call it Puppet Tools, but it’s still basically a mesh deformer. What it does, is it takes an image and breaks it down into small triangles and then you place handles wherever you like to control the image. Again, I didn’t push the boundaries here but it adds something to the elements that made it more interesting for me to work on.

For me, these early stages tend to be a little boring but they are necessary to get the final animation close to what I want it to look like.

Once all of the animation was done in After Effect, I brought those animations into another program, called Premiere Pro, that is made to edit video more effectively. I was able to play and re-order all of the sections of animation and get the rough timing for the entire animation. So all together, it comes in at just under two minutes.

The next step for me is to create the pre-visualization or pre-viz. The pre-viz is another preliminary step but is more involved and will be in 3D. Again, the pre-viz will feature a lot of bad animation, but is very helpful. You’ll see when it gets posted.

More to come.