An animatic is a simple story
board put together using a number of still images. The images are edited
together in an ordered sequence, normally with a sound track or voice over
played underneath. The function of an animatic is to give the producer a feel
of what the final product will actually look like. But it also gives them the opportunity
to work out any screen play, camera positioning, shot and timing issues and any
other problems that might arise with the story board.
There are lots of different
steps you must go through when making an animatic first you must make a story
board which is the first draft of your final product, you must then turn all of
the shots from the story board into physical copies which must be put onto a
computer as a group they then can be changed and edited so that we the
producers had a visual working idea of what our final product would look like.
To develop the narrative of
our animatic further we sat down and had group discussions which helped us
decide on what needed to be change. From these discussions we learnt that some
initial shots and the order of shots did not work well together, because of this
we decided to switch some shots around during the editing stages of the
animatic. The animatic was very beneficial in this sense, as meant we
could edit and change the order of shots on the spot giving more freedom to
play around to see what worked and what didn’t. If we had gone and made the
trailer straight from our story board we would have made a lot off made
mistakes.
From our experience of creating the animatic we learnt
that the story board was very useful in helping us to plan effectively, giving
us the rough idea of what order and what structure to put the shots together in.
It also helped us to plan our photo shoots and between us we went out on six
separate shoots, although some of us couldn’t attended based on practicality,
we also had issues with the weather and one of the shoots had to be cancelled
due to the rain. We chose our actors by looking at the characters in the
film plot and then trying to base them on an actor. We did suffer with
numbers for the film animatic and had to take quite a few shots imagining that
they would be there. In a few of our shoots we revised the idea of taking
panning shots by capturing 3-4 photos of a similar shot, but from different
angles, so when they were put in order the shot appears to be panning, this
proved as a successful method.
During the editorial stage of our animatic we used adobe
software to edit all of our shots together to create our animatic. This
software allowed us to add sound, shorten and lengthen shots, add titles and
intertitles and basically everything that we needed to do. Having accesses to
this type of software helped us a lot and gave us the opportunity to play about
with different options, it also helped us to get the timings right even though
we had a rough idea from our storyboard.
For the inter-titles we chose to reflect the plots
narrative and the genre of the plot. We did this by revealing some of the
simple facts about the plot but not giving away anything away which would spoil
it for the audience. The font and effect we decided to use gave the
inter-titles an old school type writer feel.
We chose a song by you me at six a band, to be our main
sound track for our animatic. The song is called “The Swarm”, and the lyrics
for the chorus are 'is this the end of the world?', which we decided would
relate well to our trailer. However there is the problem that the song cannot
be used in our trailer due to copyright, so we plan on getting somebody to
compose a cover of the song that we can use in the originals place . The upbeat
rock vibe this song gives off also represents the action in the particular part
of the animatic. I think that the completed animatic does target our
target audience successfully. It does this through the soundtrack, the age of
the characters and also the genre itself. A zombie horror movie is very popular
with the new generation, and we feel we have successfully targeted this
generation.
Some of the selected things we would change before we begin
to make the actual film trailer will be:
·
Include the trailer title. 'The risen'
·
Shorten the radio transmission dialogue by
cutting up the sound and including only important dialogue. We can the edit
this together with the sound of the radio tuning, making the static sound.
·
Get a male to voice the radio broadcast
·
Include screams of zombie during zombie
change scene.
·
Use tripod more often, especially during
night time shots to avoid camera blur.
·
Zombie jump scare at the end
·
Re arrange the order the abandoned house
shot appears
·
Addition to trailer ending
·
Finds tunnel door
·
Wipes door over, discovers 'T13' written on
the door.
·
Film date then appears
·
Sounds of lights flickering, fades into a
low angle shot of
group walking into
abandoned lab with lights flickering
·
Jump cut to zombie jump scare
· Billing block.
This shows one of the characters running from the zombies
This shows the characters approaching an abandoned house representing the isolation and survival they face
This shows a number of zombies in one of the chase scenes
This also shows the isolation which the group of teenage survives face
This picture represents and shows the equilibrium at the start of the trailer
During the animatic process I was involved with most
things, during the photo shoots I stepped in as actor and feature in most of
the shots I also provided the props like the battered radio for the broadcast, I
also took some of the animatic shots like the establishing shots at the beginning
and worked out the all of the timings for the story board.