OUAN505 - Animatic, First Draft

The first draft of the animatic was predominantly comprised of the initial storyboard images with some new ones that I had created for the purposes of including any ideas we had thought of since the storyboard had first been drafted. I had a copy of the script at hand, and used the sound recordings we had created of the narration to align the various sections of narration with the different scenes in the animatic. For this I used Adobe Premiere Pro as it has all the functions that were suitable for undertaking this kind of task, without having too many unnecessary features to distract from the simplicity of pairing the sound and visual aspects of the animatic. After importing all of the sound files and various scenes I began to listen back whilst trimming and unnecessary sounds at the beginning and ends of clips. I took individual scenes and coupled them with the sound to gather a good understanding of how they worked together. This overall was quite a straight forward thing to do, but it did take some time due to the number of scenes and the way I had to constantly go back over different sections to make sure it matched up correctly and the way we wanted it to. Before I had made the version with sound, I had created the version below which was a rough kind of mock up for the purposes of presenting to the class for our first presentation. It was important that we had something to show in terms of a concept and what our idea was in terms of the arrangement of the scenes.

The making of the animatic made me feel like we are making real progress with the project, even though the storyboard and animatic aren't to be officially finalised until a week or two from now, based on our schedule. Furthermore, it was the first time seeing everything sequenced up and it's given me a good sense of the style and pacing of the animation that we're creating. Combined with the audio clips of the narration we recorded it feels like the smaller pieces of the project are coming together quite well. The number of scenes we created for the documentary fits nicely into the two minute cap that was put on the project, and doesn't fall short or over run by anything that can't be quite easily fixed by trimming or extending certain sections. So far, as a group we're quite happy with the order and pacing of the different scenes, and I think with just a little bit more revision we'll be ready to move into the production stage with a solid animatic to use as reference for the final piece.