Jackalopes Animatic
Now that the recording for the Jackalopes film is done, our next step will be to make what is called an Animatic. In the 30's and 40's it was referred to as a Leica reel. By either name, it's basically the storyboard scanned into the computer and edited together with all of the dialog to form a sort of slide show; complete with sound. This step is where we really start to see the film come together and it helps us find out if it's on time or too long. It also helps us read which jokes work and which ones don't. During the recording we had the actors ad-lib in places and in some cases recorded multiple lines for jokes so we could see which ones were the funniest.
An animatic is an extremely useful tool when used correctly.
It's also a great tool for people who can't really "read" a storboard well and need to see it move in front of them. A lot of executives like to use animatics so they can really see the flow of a film without having to work to hard.
Harry would know best about that after a six years stint as an Assistant director over at Klasky Csupo who made such hits as Rugrats, As told by Ginger,The Wild Thornberries and a host of other faves for Nickelodeon before Paramount pulled the rug out from under them.
An animatic is an extremely useful tool when used correctly.
It's also a great tool for people who can't really "read" a storboard well and need to see it move in front of them. A lot of executives like to use animatics so they can really see the flow of a film without having to work to hard.
Harry would know best about that after a six years stint as an Assistant director over at Klasky Csupo who made such hits as Rugrats, As told by Ginger,The Wild Thornberries and a host of other faves for Nickelodeon before Paramount pulled the rug out from under them.
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Yep, animatics were used extensively at Klasky Csupo. It was a great tool to set the overall timing of the show.
It never made any sense to me that other studios couldn't seem to figure out the pre-editing advantage an animatic provides -if as Mike says it's used correctly.
The purpose is not just to show some exec who can't read a storyboard (which makes one wonder how people get to be execs in the animation business if they can't figure out a storyboard) it is a precision tool for timing. It puts the power of overall show-pace timing firmly into the hands of the Director where it should be. The Director can tweak a show's overall timing at the animatic stage, rather than have a sheet timer make all those decisions for him/her. Because the over all time is set, sheet timers don't need to worry about the length of individual scenes; they can concentrate on timing the animation that happens within the scene during a preset time.
If a show is 26 minutes long as boarded, and it should be 22:50 or whatever the set pre-final edit time, then the Director can sit down with the A.D. and cut the time down with precision to the very frame, before anything is needlessly animated. The process is intuitive and very powerful- since you can watch how things play out in real time, you can see visually how much time it takes for an action to happen on screen. It cuts out a lot of guess work when it comes time to make crucial timing changes.
A Director can still pop out his/her trusty stopwatch, and click off the time, and say: "Okay, I need three feet for the character to complete that action, not five."� Done. Then the Director can watch the result of that decision in real time. "No, wait, that's too fast. Let's try four feet."� Done. Four feet it is, and it works.
Now the sheet timer, who might have decided that three or five feet was great, now has four feet to time within. It was the Director's call, not the timer's, as it should be. And hey, the timer needn't be upset. There's no issue for them to be singled out for timing that's too-fast, or too slow in the overall sense. If there's an issue, they can merely say "Hey, don't look at me! That's the time you gave me o' great Director!" Seriously though, the process is still flexible enough that a timer can borrow time to shuffle around here and there as needed, so everything isn't just set in stone, there's just a more polished framework of time to start with.
Over a whole season of shows, the process cuts down on tossed final footage, and makes for tighter/better paced shows. Eventually it starts cutting down on shows being 'over-boarded' because Directors start to get a better feel for when a show is going to run over, and they pre-cut what will be boarded. This helps cut down the load on the storyboard crew. Why have people wasting time boarding long sequences you know will be cut?
I just did an animatic for Cartoon Network a few weeks ago, on a show called Megas XLR. (Mike does freelance timing on that show too.) I'm pleased that for that series, Cartoon Network has a slick operation running where the animatic is used not only for timing, but also to produce the cut-to-time vocal track as well, which cuts out another redundant task: having a sound dept. person re-assemble the vocal track when it's already been done at the animatic stage. That extra step is part of the evolution to computers being able to work with high quality broadcast quality audio, so that the animatic soundtrack is good enough for the final mix. This wasn't possible when a lesser-quality audio sampling rate was used in the old days.
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