My Critical Analysis of the Animatic Process of my groups Film Trailer

My Critical Analysis of the Animatic Process of my groups Film Trailer

An animatic is a series of still images which have been edited together and are displayed in a sequence with a rough draft of dialogue and a rough sound track which has been added to a sequence of still images which have been either taken with a camera or are usually taken from a storyboard. This is to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together. This works as it gives us the producers of the film trailer a rough idea of what works and what doesn’t work, or what we have missed out and need to include. The process of an animatic comes in many stages the process of it is: Story boarding, Shoot schedules, Props, Limitation, Taking the shots and playing about with them, Editing suite – so that we are able to become familiar with how it work, Regular organised discussions, Creating the voice over scripts and putting them in, and to be completed by the 11th of December 2012. We created the narrative and developed our ideas before and throughout the process, our main plot was focused around one plot that had already been written in the group as we all felt it was a good idea and we could develop it in our own unique way. Throughout the process we stuck to our story board and tried to keep the images in order, however we discovered that we had to change the door image to make it more relevant to our film and make it more assessable. The benefits of sticking to our story board order made it easier for us as a group because we was able to know and understand what had been completed, what could been improved and what was incomplete. During the taking of the images we wasn’t able to include all of our props only minor ones because we were limited of them and as they are quite bulky we felt that it would slow or shootings down.
Throughout the making of our animatic we found that our storyboard gave us structure. We had a total of 6 shoots, which were all shot in our 3 main locations, the orchard, the town and our establishing shots from Tom’s house. Other shots were taken inside Alex’s house where he did the makeup. The props we used in the shots were the ones that were easy and gave a simple clear idea of what we had in mind we used things such as the back packs and radio because they were small and easy to carry. The actors we chose were relevant to the ones described in our back story. An example of this would be for one of the female actors we have chosen a girl with blonde hair because this is a typical horror convention. The shots taken throughout our animatic are the same shots but at different angles due to accessibility. During the process I wasn’t able to attend the town shootings because of other activities which clashed, other shots were taken individually such as the make up shots in Alex’ house where he was on his own, and the establishing shot which Tom took on his own up the mountain. Certain shots we were unable to take due to weather however we were able to reschedule and re-take them on a better day. One particular shot which was hard to take was the zombie shots due to the lack of people as we did not want to drag our actors out and about as it may not of suited them and there timetable. The things that we focused on most for improvement was the timing of our animatic, playing around  with the animatic helped us understand the timings a lot more.  Towards the end of our animatic I had to do the reading of the radio broadcast, and after adding it in to our animatic and listening to it over and over we found that my voice was not dramatic enough and felt that changing it to a male would be better and more effective.
In order to construct our animatic we followed a series of steps which involved, drawing our potential shots, storyboarding them, taking them, editing them if needed, importing our photos onto the suite, putting them in order of our storyboard and making any changes needed, changing the timing and speed of shots, adding effects and titles. For our timing we discussed before hand the timings and what we thought was the right length and added it onto our storyboard. We found that quick shots where a lot more effective and commonly used in trailers such as The Hills Have Eyes and The Chainsaw Massacre. The main editing used in our animatic was black outs and intertitles.
The titles we have used in our animatic have been chosen because they are dramatic and effective, we used the conventional font of type writing as it is used in a lot of films, the choice of black and white was made by all 3 of use because it created a more dark scary creepy effect. The music that we chose for our trailer was a song by a band called ‘Me and you at six’ , we chose one of there songs because they lyrics involved one sentence ‘is this the end of the world?’ which relates to our trailer and film, but because of copyright we was unable to use this but included it as an example of what we would potentially use in our animatic. We also used my voice for the voiceovers but we found that my voice was not dominating enough and we needed a males voice so it sounded more dramatic and realistic. Things that we have selected to change before the process of making our real animatic are: Jump cut to zombie for a scare effect, Finds tunnel door, Include trailer title ‘The Risen’, Include zombie screams.

 this image shows the equilibrium at the start of our trailer.
 this image shows 2 surviours walking towards an abandoned building.

My role throughout the process was mainly acting for the shots, organising the days we should go and during school hours and I have been in charge of making and completing the story board ready for the making of our animatic.