For this week we had to start creating an animatic based on our pre existing world and storyboard. We started off with a lecture from Aodhan on how to use After Effects and Krita to create animatics. I again had the issue of no computer but I watched along someone else’s computer so i could get an idea of how to do it. After I had access to a computer I watched the recorded lectures so I could better understand the features and how I could use them in my animatic.
When it came time to start my animatic I started off by looking at the storyboard for reference and the timings of the shotlist so I could better grasp how long each shot should last before cutting to the next one. As I used krita for my animation in A level Moving Image Arts, I was familiar with the setup for animating using blank keyframes. I set my animatic at 24 frames per second and animated on twos. After showing our lecturer my draft animatic the feedback he gave me was to make the shot of the shark grabbing the feather longer as it ends quite abruptly. He also said to move the second shot of the shark to the side a bit so it is clearer that the protagonist is watching from aside.
With this feedback I started to fix my animatic so it flowed more naturally and was clearer. I made the feather shot longer by having the hand linger on for longer before it cut to the next shot. I then got to work on adding the protagonist to the background of the scene. I started off just having the protagonist remain still in the background but then decided to add a bit of camera movement to the scene so it would more naturally flow into the next shot and frame the guy as the protagonist of the story. I feel this camera movement is effective and helps add to the tension as he is supposed to be hiding from the sharks. I achieved this effect by moving the layers of the protagonist and shark the same distance each frame before I got the movement I wanted.
Overall i enjoyed making the animatic and seeing how timing would work in the actual animation, however our group is terrible at communication and most of my attempts to gather everyone and try to sort information about what we are doing with our animation just end up ignored.