Animatic 101

In this online animatic course, you will learn to develop an animatic for animation. This course is part of a series of courses on storytelling for visual media.  This can be taken for our diploma course in animation. You should have some basic drawing classes under your belt. Also, if you want to delve deeper you can read this great book that talks about storyboarding.

What exactly is an animatic?

Animatics is a string of storyboard images edited together with sound to illustrate how a sequence will flow in motion. In this course, we will learn to create an animatic for an animated sequence.    Here is a great example of an animatic.

As you can see animatics are basically storyboards that have sound and camera movements. They also have timing. That means that we can tell how long a shot will take. The dialog is all paced out. With an animatic, you pretty much know what the film will look like without doing all the work of animation.

How well do I need to be at drawing?

Well, let’s put it this way, The better you can draw the better you can communicate. Drawing is a language. If you just know a couple of words, you won’t be able to communicate as well as someone who can speak fluently. However, if you just can speak a couple of important phrases you can get by. Make sense?  It’s also important to know how a camera moves and the angles or shots. You should watch a lot of films! If you don’t watch movies you are at a real disadvantage! Comics are a big plus and really help build your visual vocabulary! Animatics and comic books go hand in hand.

Some of the topics covered in this course are:

• Favorit movie scenes and camera movements
• Audio recording storyboarding
•  Recording dialog
• Making your own film
• Software for Story Boards and Animatics
• Creating an animatic