How to Become a Filmmaker - Part 4: Animatics and Principles of Animation

Okay so you have a story and you’ve designed the characters and background. The next thing you want to do is put the words and pictures together into a comic strip. The reason for this is to be able to share your idea with others. When you show it to your peers they may give you new ideas for changes to your joke or story. The process of sharing your ideas at an early stage in the development of your project is tremendously advantageous. You may find out that the joke isn’t clear to the audience. Maybe some people interpret your idea differently, or they see it in a way that you don’t like. Maybe it’s offensive to them and once you see it from their perspective you make a change. The point is you want to get feedback from at least of few people before you jump into the labor intensive animation process.

Now if you’ve cleared the story with some trusted friends and everything looks good its time to make an animatic. The animatic is an extremely rough version of your story. It shows the basic movement of characters and objects in your scene. It’s like the outline for an essay. Its the skeleton of the final product. It should take a fraction of the time spent on your finished film. When you show it to someone they should understand what is happening in the story. The animation not there but they understand. It’s like you’re reading your comic strip aloud to an audience. Based on your words and a few pictures the story comes across. Here is an example of an animatic and then below that is the final version of the gif:

This is an animatic.

This is the final gif.

After the animatic is complete you are going to want to think about principles of animation. If you are unfamiliar with the 12 principles of animation start doing some research. I’m going to put a bunch of links in the description to get you started. Knowing when and where to add principles of animation to a project takes practice. You won’t get it right the first time. Be patient and it will get easier and easier with each new film. Now if you are feeling totally overwhelmed I recommend that you focus on just a few in your first project. For example, try just adding 3 principles like: squash and stretch, slow in slow out, and exaggeration. Then add one new principle with each new project.

So to summarize you’re going to:

1. Create a comic from your idea

2. Make an animatic

3. Think about where to add principles of animation in the project