Animatic

I used my cleaned up storyboards and put them on a timeline to create my animatic. The door swing I used after effects to animate, just to make it clearer in this stage.

The short ended up being over 40 seconds (1 min 24) however I believe I can animate it in the given time frame as a lot of scenes are stills, and the reason it's long is because it's a slower paced story. Also, I don't think I can take out any scenes without making the story unclear.

I also think that the travel sequence may need to be a little bit longer, as it was hard to judge their timings in the animatic as it was only a still image. I think I could have improved the animatic by including more frames in each travel sequence scene.

I think for the ending scene, I need to do some tests to see how it'd work, as at the moment it's not entirely clear what's happening.

Despite this, I think the rest of the animatic is pretty good and clear, and all the scenes work well together. Again, the flashback wasn't obviously a flashback in this, but I think that's mainly due to the fact that everything is a black and white still as its the animatic stage. When the rest of the animation is moving and has colour, the difference will be more evident.

The music in the animatic is probably going to be replaced as I think it sounds a bit amateurish and doesn't completely fit my animation, however I think the thunder and door closing sounds really suit it and will keep those for the final edit.

As I was a bit concerned about how long it was, I made a second shortened animatic which cut the beginning section and used scenes from the flashback between the travelling scenes:

Although shorter, I don't think it's that successful as it gets too confusing with the changing scenes, and the story is much less clear and harder to follow. I'm going to stick with the first animatic and just work hard so that I can get it finished in the timeframe.