Group: Animatic

Below is the animatic we created with our storyboard to roughly show the order in which our main shots will go, accompanied by our track.

What skills did you use at AS to produce your animatic?
At AS level, we recorded our animatic in a lesson using Henry Cramer-Todd's Canon 550D camera, and we did not include very many shots. We put a bit too much effort into drawing the few frames we filmed, and our animatic was very short. Because we were all in different groups last year, this is just a description of how my (Jake Piercy) group did it.

What challenges did you incur?
Last year the main problem we encountered was that we did not have very many shots drawn out for the animatic at all, and because of this, our animatic was not nearly as long as our final production would be. We also did not really edit our animatic, and this caused it to look quite boring and slow.

How did you improve your performance at A2?
We improved  our performance at A2 by using one of the school cameras on a tripod rather than handicam like last year. The fact that we used the school camera meant it was much less effort, and therefore we were more relaxed about it. We edited it this time round to make it a bit more lively, and tried our best to make it match the music. We included much more shots than last year and managed to fill up the entirety of the song with shots.

Evaluate the outcome of your animatic, what did you learn?
We made quite a few mistakes this year which we can learn from. Due to the shape of the tripod, we could not record the storyboard at the perfect angle, so in the animatic all of our shots are tilted slightly, which looks unprofessional. We also made a simliar mistake to last year in not drawing out enough shots. This caused many of the shots we drew to be on the screen for a long time, perhaps making the video a bit more boring than it should be. We learnt that it is much more effective to spend less time on detail and more time on drawing as many shots as possible. Because of the lack of shots, the animatic does not match the fast cutting rate we wish to have for our final production.

How are you going to use this information when you shoot your video?
We will use this information when shooting our video, as it has taught us that we will need a lot of footage of lots of different shots, as otherwise some shots could linger for too long. We have come up with lots of ideas for other shots that we will need to include, but have not drawn them out.