Critical Analysis of the Animatic Process

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.