During the latest Shamoozal Radio Podcast, The General Johnny Manf asked what an animatic was. I know I often use that term a lot when I make an update, and even though Phil answered Manf’s question during the Podcast, I’ll go into it a bit more here just to help educate our readers about the animation process.

Above is the animatic we used from GFG#1, “Rated ‘M’ For Molestor”. Read more after the jump about how and why we even bother with this step in the first place.

In live action films, you would shoot all your material from different angles and from different takes and versions. All of that footage is then brought together in the editing room where the best shots are picked that convey what the film makers are trying to get across. In any feature film, there’s a ton of material that gets cut out simply because it doesn’t work, and its during the editing process where the shape of the film begins to take place.

In animation, we don’t have the luxury of a ton of material to sift through. All of our shots and sequences have to be prearranged before any actual animation is even thought about. This is because the animation process is so time consuming. It can takes months to create one shot in a high level feature quality production. Storyboards tell us where the characters will be, and give us an idea of how they are acting in a particular shot, but it does’t tell us how much time it takes for Jacquo to pop up out of the ground. Everything that gets created has to be for a purpose, and this is where the animatic comes in.

They used to be called leica reels back in the Golden Age of animation. After the voice recordings and storyboards are done, we have to get an idea of just how long a shot will go for. I can’t animate something if I don’t know how long it is going to be on screen for. Where the editing process takes place after the film is shot in live action, in animation it takes place before the animators can begin producing footage.

In most cases, the dialog will tell me how long a shot will go for, but in order for a short to work, you need to take into account how the audience will perceive it. Time is needed for an action or a line of dialog to be registerd by the audiece’s head. Now we begin to build up pacing by how we cut the shots together which hopefully makes it funnier, more scary, more dramatic, etc.