An animatic or story reel is an animated storyboard. “Think of them as taking the art of story telling a step beyond storyboards: breathing life into drawings through motion and sound.” They are most commonly used for production and marketing- related applications: commercials, sale’s pitches, special effect previews, market testing and promos. With the real time properties of the craft they can be used for features, TV series and commercial production work as well. Why does an animatic need to remain as a transitional process between storyboard and film, and not be used as a final out come? Illustration is appreciated as an art form. Storyboard is a practical application of illustrations in sequence, take away the practical properties and it is still art. The rate and context that the drawing is created leave it with an interesting rough, sketchy look that I find very energetic and interesting. The fact that it is still image can be ignored because of the life within the line work. My career aspiration is to pursue storyboarding and illustration. An animatic is essentially an extension of storyboarding;
bring the illustrations to life and bringing the work one step closer to film within a cheap production budget. Through my research I can see the increasing popularity of animatics used by freelancers and agencies like Animatic UK, and therefore I see it very important to fully explore and understand the craft. I am well aware that an animatic is a process however I aim to challenge that concept because the creative form itself offers more potential and deserves greater attention than it receives. It is a story telling form that can consume less time and effort than animation to create. By using an animatic I hope to tell the story to the same effect as a ‘finished’ animation but essentially using less time and tools to create it. I feel an animatic is the right form to present my story in as it offers more potential for application. The work processes towards the animatic produce many illustrations, concepts and sequences that could be edited into
a publication or graphic novel. Which means there is possibility for it to be applied to book form, posters and zines, and online sources. However as an animatic as well, it can be available to a wider audience through social media. The story is more likely to be communicated effectively through video, consuming less of there time to understand it. Living in a digital society, having work that can be consumed digitally allows the work to be seen by a wider audience. The fast pace nature of the story content makes video a good choice. An image is only dwelled upon for a moment before it is replaced with another, similar to journeys, which have surroundings constantly changing. If there is a scene or moment that is filled with too much information to take in at once, once it has passed the opportunity to understand it has passed also. I find that common when I an on buses and national rail trains.
I collected primary visual imagery of my journey from Walthamstow to Wimbledon.
I used some of the perspectives in the short film and a colour scheme directly influenced by the images. Despite taking this journey so often it was interesting to notice that I couldn’t remember details, or specific features of objects and locations. Therefore attempting to draw from memory was useless. Perhaps the route becoming so mundane has shut of my attention to detail in the surroundings, too focused on getting from A to B. I have read that the human brain deliberately shuts out all information that is not the focus of the eyes to avoid overloading the brain with information, and to allow us to make quicker decisions. Looking back at the video, this related to the concept of traveling on the TFL. People distance themselves from where they are and focus on their destination and not the journey.
The bus stop outside my house, Markhouse road Walthamstow
Waterloo Station, platform 1
Walthamstow Central station, bus station entrance
The short film featured a variety of characters, each serving a different purpose to the overall story, and so their design was different to convey that purpose. The idea of the animatic was to exaggerate the whole rush hour experience, so I focused on the expression and features to portray certain characteristics and emotions in the characters.
The first characters the main character encounters are the school children. They are the first wave of rush hour as school finishes just before work does. The children I identified to be small but loud and full of energy. Therefore their features had exaggerated mouths. I made them small with larger heads and wide eyes to show their enormous energy.
The first characters the main character encounters are the school children. They are the first wave of rush hour as school finishes just before work does. The children I identified to be small but loud and full of energy. Therefore their features had exaggerated mouths. I made them small with larger heads and wide eyes to show their enormous energy.
The Old woman was encountered on the underground part of the journey. She symbolized vulnerability on the underground and so I wanted her expressions to portray that. In drawing the face I found that the placement and shape of the line work heavily affected the characters expression. I slanted her eyes down and outward to create a sad, weathered expression and used the wrinkle lines to emphasis that expression. Through trial and error I found the shape and size of the character I desired. With the large number of businessmen and women in the animatic, I worked on the shape and exaggeration of features. They were meant to appear like genetic variations of each other and act as strangers with familiar yet unknown faces. It was as if I could have passed them before but would not remember them specifically. I used observational drawing and caricatures as inspirations. I also used the photo Booth feature on the mac to create facial distortions and draw from them. The main characters were always meant to seem ordinary. They were meant to remain unchanged but fit to the style of the world within the animatic. This was to exaggerate my perception of the rush hour, that during that experience, the main character would appear to be the only thing that makes sense in all the chaos. Since the girlfriend was not involved in the rush hour chaos it made sense to keep her unchanged as well. Since the story was based on personal experiences, it was simple to just use the people it was based on as the main characters.
The first complete draft of the story took longer to complete than I anticipated. I had a rough stage of what was going to happen at each stage of the journey. However it was the connecting scenes that consumed the most time.
AT&T Messages
4: 45 PM
Baby <3 Haha me too xx
Ugh canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wait to finish work fml!! Where we gona go eat? Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m starving
It was quite inconvenient that in a crucial time for me to record sound, the two-week Easter half term happened. Meaning that I could not complete recording sounds of children or rush hour. My timetable did show the Easter break however I did not think that the story script and first storyboard draft would take so long to complete prior to that stage. Time restrictions left me with no time to complete a sound trial of the piece. I believe that if I were able to create a completed draft with sound, the quality of the final outcome would have been improved further. Click on Images for links to videos:
Final Out come â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Rush Hourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is a 5-minute animatic film depicting the encounters of a boy traveling through London to meet his girlfriend after work, at the infamous rush hour time.
The final animatic film was hand drawn and coloured digitally in Photoshop, after which it was constructed within After Effects. Some of the shots and scenes from the original storyboard had to be taken out due to time restrictions of the film, and the time scale to which I had to create the film. The audio quality could be improved however the rawness of the sound was intentional to create a realistic quality. The most taxing process in creating this piece for me was in fact the drawing. Although being my favorite part, it became a long and tedious process to draw and redraw. However it is good to become familiar with it now, as that is something I would have to do in storyboarding. The link to the complete film is below:
RUSH HOUR
Experian example reel
Final cover design