This overview is about the assemblage of the animatic for the comprehensive project. The production of such continues discussions that creative practitioners have during initial developmental stages, particularly as you advance story, character, and design ideas that evolve from the drafting of an initial beat board and/or storyboard.
No matter what technique you choose to employ, as you move forward and shape ideas, designs, and narratives in different ways, it will be essential for you to organize the emerging elements of the project in a time-based form, one that involves both images and sound. You will need to incorporate its temporal qualities, early on. The process is certain to open additional ideas and will reveal interesting creative goals and challenges.
Typically, when a person plans and revises story and design ideas for animation, they will set forth with organizing an animatic. You can work with editing software like Adobe Premiere, in conjunction with animation and drawing programs like Harmony, Krita, Clip Studio, Adobe Animate, Procreate, and so on. You will want to put together an animatic fairly quickly, using simple sketches and scratch audio. You will plan story sequences, block in shots, pose characters, edit dialogue, and construct an interim sound design. Moreover, because the programs allow for changes to be made, you are able to redraw, add poses, and change timing. You can easily create new sequences and save iterative versions. You will continue to evolve the animatic while you change and adapt the project along the way (for example, Main Menu > File > Save As > v_01, v_02, v_03, and so on).
An animatic is a living document, one that allows for all sorts of creative directions and organic change.
WIP reel / animatic
Animatics are meant to be flexible. They are often called different things, to suit the developmental nature of projects as they incubate, such as a story reel, pre-vis reel, time-based storyboard, and pose test. The animatic will soon become a “work-in-progress reel” or “WIP reel” or “WIP animatic”. Here, you will soon add to the timeline, more than just sketched storyboard panels. You will incorporate images in colour, rough CG models, line-tests, and the like, as the prototype options for production continue to grow.
Notes about preparing a WIP reel / animatic are here.
Process
Utilizing animation and editing programs, go ahead and assemble the artwork you have made so far, plus new images that you create, considering camera angles, staging, and character poses. An effective animatic involves more key poses than a storyboard, for timing and pacing purposes. You should also block in sound, even if clips are merely scratch tracks at this point. The audio will help to provide timing and structure. Later on, you will then update the rough material with stronger performances and better-quality recordings.
You will use the WIP reel / animatic as your primary working documents. Once you have put the basic elements in place, the next objective will be to work at progressively at sharpening the design, storytelling, staging, pacing, and animation, or the particular focuses you intend to pursue and strengthen by making the film.
Eventually, you will replace place-holder images with actual animated and rendered scenes.
Production standards for the animatic
Notes about preparing a WIP reel / animatic are here.
- Set the dimensions with drawing and animation programs to be at 1080p, 1920 by 1080 pixels.
- With photographic image capture and scanning, do the same. Set the dimensions to be 1080p.
- Some images may need to be higher dimensions, for zooms and pans. You can also export these images at lower resolutions.
Frame rate:
- 24 frames per second
- This standard will allow you to animate on both “twos” at 12 images per second, or “ones” at 24 images per second
Aspect ratio:
- 16:9
- Square pixels
- Progressive scan (no fields)
Audio:
- Sample rate = 48000 Hz or 48 kHz
- Stereo
For WIP reel / animatics:
Notes about preparing a WIP reel / animatic are here.
- Add a timecode
- For sound design and audio recording, at the “head” of the sequence, you might want to include:
- Colour bars
- SMPTE countdown
It will be important to upload versions to an on-line video hosting site, such as One Drive, Google Drive, Vimeo, and the like. Then, share the URL with others (password protected if you wish). You should seek feedback, as part of an ongoing critique process.