Animatics

This week we made our animatics this week by cutting up our storyboards. I will go in to detail about how we did this process and why they are useful.

To cut out our storyboards quickly and effectively we created an action in Photoshop that isolated each frame on the page using the marquee tool, crop it down to just that frame and save as a PSD named with a frame number. The action detailed the process for 3 frames on a page and since all of my pages had 3 frames on them I was able to use Photoshop's batch action feature to apply it to a whole folder. The action then processed all of the images I had scanned in and exported them all as single frame PSDs into a folder I had specified.

With all the PSDs I started a composition in After Effects and imported all of my files. Putting them down on to the timeline I used the Keyframe assistant to position all of the frames across the timeline so they were all 1 second and placed end to end. I then went and edited the timings of each frame to match how I wanted it to look in my video, keeping the pace very fast. I then exported this as my first, un-animated animatic.


First Animatic:



I then proceeded to add animation to the animatic to make it more visually interesting and more representative of what I want the final video to look like.