anatomy of an animatic

Anatomy of an Animatic from Paul Caggegi on Vimeo.


This month is going to be a vidcast-palooza, and you guys deserve it. The final podcast for last month was recorded before the end of July, but the downloads kept on soaring. July boasts a total of 5,593 unique downloads. Not bad, considering the first month I began this podcast, my grand total was 20.

So this week, I began to cut my animatic. I have still got pages to storyboard, but in amongst the insane amount of drawing I've had to do, I managed to put aside an afternoon as re-record the Sydney cast. Osman gave a cracker performance as Sal Wedge, the disgruntled and under-appreciated Sand Boat loader.

I think I'm getting the hang of this director shtick! With Osman, I found that actually acting out the lines and allowing him to add his own personality helped him get into character and stay in character.

You'll hear a little of his performance in this week's vidcast, as I show you how I go from storyboard to animatic.

I go a bit fast, and for this I apologize, but you can see the programs I use and the methods I employ to export the individual frames from the storyboard sheets for use in a cut.

The programs I used this week are Photoshop CS3 and Final Cut Pro 6.03 - courtesy of KFilms (where I work). I'm actually quite relieved to have these tools at my disposal, as KDEnlive is not nearly up to snuff with the editing side, and I use FCP every day, so I can cut quite fast.

Photoshop is like the more expensive and flashier big brother to GIMP (which I have been using to sketch out each panel) and the reason I used it is because I needed a fast way to export individual frames from the 6 frame sheets into an exact-sized panel. The math goes something like this: 40 pages to date, 6 panels per page. 40x6=240 individual panels to export.

I could sit there and crop out 240 panels by hand, paste them into a comp and align them... OR I could be smart, and set up an action in Photoshop which does this for me.

GIMP at this stage can only do an action via Script Fu. And I'm not too good with scripting. For those interested in trying their hand at saving some scripts for GIMP, check out this page: GIMP SCRIPTS.

So why - I hear you ask - did I choose to make pages with six images per page? The answer is this: I can easily import each page into a pdf document for a future producer or studio to look at. It is far easier to flick through 40 pages than 240 images, and they can have a hard copy of it printed to flick through at their discretion.

So it's not a mistake (for once lol).

So this is how I got six images off each page and into FCP:

First, I had to set up an action. An action is basically a way of recording a bunch of tasks you know you are going to repeat over and over and over, then saving them, so you can apply it to other images.

The action I set up would crop each frame out of the page, and export the single panel into a folder of my choosing. I did this by setting up guides on the first frame, filling in a black square, then duplicating the black square five more times. This gave me objects I could snap more guides to.


I then switched off the black square layer, and began to record the action.


I set up a new action in my "custom actions" folder. Then i record the following steps:

• Crop image 1#
• Save as SB01.tga to folder: Animatic
• undo crop
• Crop image 2#
• Save as SB02.tga
• Undo crop
• Crop image 3#
• Save as SB03.tga
• Undo crop
• Crop image 4#
• Save as SB04.tga
• Undo crop
• Crop image 5#
• Save as SB05.tga
• Undo Crop
• Crop image 6#
• Save as SB06.tga
• Undo Crop
• Save file
• Close file

After that, I hit the "stop" button in my actions window and this effectively saves the action.


In the vidcast, you can see what happens when I apply that action to another board. This saves me a lot of time, you could imagine, but I still have to go back and relabel each export so that they number SB001.tga through to SB240.tga

Even so, the bulk of the work is done by Photoshop for me, and that's a good thing.

Next, it's time to import all the stills into FCP. Now I am a stickler for setting up a job template for all my work. In FCP, I set up an audio bin, and edits bin, and a stills bin. Audio is where I put the voice recordings; edits where I save my timelines, and stills where Import my freshly exported still frames.

I drag the still frames down to my timeline, and edit as I would footage, in a 16:9 comp. I found that the frame I was working in is actually slightly wider than 4:3, so cropping was minimal, and the compositions looked fantastic in 16:9. I only had to adjust the odd screen up or down to get the framing spot on - you could imagine my relief.

Editing is essentially getting the timing of the words to match up with the pictures. I am about 8 minutes into the first cut. This is looking as tho the pilot might actually fit into 15 minutes after all.

Creating the animatic takes very little time for me, because it is simply trimming the stills to time, and not drawing them. As I've said before, looking back over the work I've created thus far, I can see holes appearing, and putting them into the animatic, it is more obvious when something is missing - a pose, a shot, a cut away. I will be getting into how to fill these gaps in a future podcast, so stay tuned.

Special mention this week to my studio - KFilms. They were kind enough to allow me to use the work macbook and the software tools to produce the work for this week's vidcast.

KFilms is a post-production agency in Ultimo, Sydney. We handle all sorts of media - from digital signage to TV commercials. We can take your promotional package from go to woah.

For more information, visit www.kfilms.com.au or email info@kfilms.com.au

Originally posted August 7th 2008

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