Week 5-6 Animatics

When presented with the different options for what I could make my animatic about, I immediately knew that I wanted to do the prompt of two friends meeting up for coffee and the ‘battle’ beginning when the bill arrives. I had the vague visuals of my animatic pop into my head and got very excited about it. I knew I wanted to use my cat characters that I draw a lot and had also somewhat used in our stop motion rotation BUT these cats are not the same cat, this is not Mr Meowmeow again, they are just other random cats. I thought it would be quite funny for me to have my cats receive the bill and rather than do the logical thing of splitting the bill, they instead argue over who is going to pay it in full and both move to pay. The waiter then takes this as a payment and a tip and both cats end up looking on in shock horror, because really and truly their bill was not worth fighting over. Honestly, when I was drafting this animatic on the post it notes, I also forgot that splitting the bill was a thing until someone looked over my storyboard and suggested why didn’t they split the bill, which made it more comedic to me as I had the exact same thought process as the cats themselves.

Looking at this animatic put together, I quite like the pacing of it and the back and forth of the argument that they’re having over the bill but I do also think that I need some variation in the shots that I use as it gets quite repetitive with just the mid shot of their faces. I think I need to add in some over the shoulder angles and different perspective shots so its more dynamic and also whilst the pace of the back and forth is cool, it’s very hard to read the subtitles and as I want my dialogue to be meowing with the subs as translations there won’t be an aspect of auditory comprehension with subs to read alongside so you will need enough time to be able to actually read the subtitles.

I think where I have added in shots to the end of the animatic and made it more dynamic it has really helped with the flow of it and it feels a lot more dramatic and lively and heightens the tension of their fight. I especially like how silly they look with their paws raised, I do think however that the pace of it is still a bit too fast for other people to easily read because I already know the dialogue and therefore can read it with ease, so slowing it down and putting in the voice audio may help me do this. I also worked on a script as it helped me to keep track of what I wanted and intended to show in the scenes of my animatic and then also helped me adjust the flow of the dialogue in the scenes so that it would feel more conversational and natural.

I looked at some different storyboards and animatics from movies that I enjoyed and scenes which were familiar to me to understand better how to convey scenes and visuals through simple illustration, and how to create more dynamic scenes whilst not making them not overly complicated. I looked at some storyboards from Blue Sky’s ‘Spies in Disguise’, Pixar’s ‘Soul’, Colombia pictures’ ‘Bullet Train’ from each film’s respective art book as well as revisiting the Up animatic which we were shown by Izzy in our workshop. I wanted to look at different animation studios and also live action movie storyboards in comparison to animation storyboards to get a wider sense of the different ways that storyboarding and animatics can be approached with varying levels of detail but still conveying the core elements of a scene. It was really interesting to look at each of these different storyboarding processes.

Feedback on my final animatic:

• Needed to have more distinct voices for each of the characters – make it clearer that they are two different characters and also would make it a bit more comedic
• Liked the angles and the different perspectives
• Good pacing with the conversation at the start – the minimal dialogue for the waiter is effective and having them communicate helps to set up their relationship

Animatics aren’t typically a part of creating an animation that I greatly enjoy but I had fun making this one. When we were presented with the different options for what our animatics could be about, I knew I wanted to work to the cafe prompt and had ideas for framing shots and angles which I felt could come across well, I do feel I did this quite effectively and the cutting between both cats makes it more entertaining but also more tense. I do think now to improve this animatic, I could have had some more dynamic framing for some shots so it wasn’t just a consistent back and forth and maybe a pan upwards when the waiter cat arrives to make it seem more dramatic but overall it was relatively effective and the different perspective shots did add to the conversational nature for the scene. Whilst I did use simple background cafe noise and then meow dialogue with subtitling, I think the end scene where their argument gets more heated could have had some more dramatic sound effects and from my feedback people thought that the character’s could have had a more distinct voices so that they were more distinguishable and more comedic and I think that this would have worked well also like with the waiter having a different voice to the other cats. I think I need to work on creating more dynamic scenes in my animatics and expand on the type of sounds that I use but overall I quite like my animatic and think it quite an entertaining story which is conveyed in a very simple way.