R+P Post 13: Our Animatic

It was decided in our group to create an animatic before we did our test shoot. After seeing an example of what an animatic looked like from last year's Year 12 students, we decided that we would benefit from creating our own, because we felt that it would help to lift the shots from our storyboard, and translate it into shots in real life, which gives us the first impression of how our film opening will play out and if it works well together with the music, titles and dialogue.

We started by taking photographs in our classroom, using the three members of our group to pose as the different characters and act out in still what they were doing in the shot. Because our opening contains a total of seven characters, Emilio and Sayo multi-roled as the teenagers being questioned, using props and items of clothing to set the different characters apart. In order to keep the animatic coherent, I played just the role of the detective, as in our opening, he is the only character that remains continuous throughout, and it would be confusing to change that during the animatic. We also asked Noa Craig from the other media group to act out the role of the officer, as in these shots three people are in frame, and we needed the third member of our group (Sayo) to be behind the camera to take the shots. 

Next, we recorded voice overs of the dialogue using the first draft of our script. We then had a week to edit. We distributed the work of editing by making an edit schedule:

Our animatic schedule

During editing, we placed our shots in order according to our storyboard, then added in the recorded dialogue to play over the corresponding shots, as well as the beginnings and endings of our music tracks. We also added in thick white arrows over the shots to indicate the camera's movements, as we couldn't synthesise the movement of the camera with static images. 

Here is our completed animatic:

The animatic was helpful in some regards. Watching the opening of our film from start to finish gave us a new perspective in which to make improvements; one of the improvements that came up from completing the animatic was that we needed to add more lines to the script and mise-en-scene that are indicative of the crime/drama genre. For instance, we added in lines such as 'It's time to call your lawyer' and decided that we could use a clock and a dictaphone to improve the look of the interrogation room.

It was also a lot easier to get feedback from other people about our film opening by showing them the animatic, rather than having to talk through our storyboard, so it proved a useful tool to show others, as well as ourselves, what could be accomplished.

Overall, the animatic showed that our film opening ran smoothly and had a good pace to it; however, some elements couldn't be exemplified very well in the animatic, such as the zoom at the end, leaving some issues unresolved by the time of the test shoot.