This week we were introduced to animatics, and learned how to use Adobe After Effects; a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application widely used in the animation industry.
An animatic is a timed sequence of storyboard images edited together; often with a soundtrack and created in greyscale, that’s used after storyboarding to illustrate how a sequence will flow in motion, and to provide a fuller sense of how the final animated piece will look and feel (Dunham, 2023). Therefore, when creating an animatic, it’s important to time out the movement, and for effect, think about how long to hold a certain shot.
Unfortunately, as the licence doesn’t include the use of After Effects outside of the animation labs, I’ve been unable to include my completed workshop tasks here in my blog, so instead here’s my animatic, that I created in Krita, for my own segment of the final group animation.
Ideally, if time had allowed before I needed to submit my animatic for tutor feedback, I could have also added the ‘If I Didn’t Care’ soundtrack, and sounds to provide a better understanding of what is happening onscreen, and would have made the pan of the queue characters, which I feel moves too quickly and jerkily, slightly longer and smoother.
Also, from now on I’ll definitely use the tip of adding different colours to my timeline to help make certain keyframes more easily distinguishable.
References:
Dunham, B. (2023). Animatics Are Essential Storytelling Tools. [online] StudioBinder. [Accessed 29 December 2023].
Available at: https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-an-animatic-definition/