A Critical Analysis of the Animatic Process of your group’s Film Trailer(Part 1)

1. An animatic is a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence with a rough dialogue and rough sound track added to the sequence of still image to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together. The animatic helps you to see what shots would and wouldn’t work. 2. First of all we started off with the storyboard, this is where you hand draw each individual shot and give a short explanation into what is happening in the shot. Next we had to choose a suitable area for us to take the photos and also when we would take the photos. We had to sort out some props for some of the shots which was easy enough as we already had them and didn’t need to buy any. After deciding this crucial information we then went and took the photos. We came across various difficulties whilst taking the photos such as bad weather stopped us from taking the shots. After taking the shots we then went into the editing room and edited the photos to the correct speed and added our soundtrack over the top. 3. We changed the order of the shots we took for our story to make sense to the audience. If we didn’t make a storyboard then we would not have been able to create our animatic. Also it is good to have a structure down to help us understand our ideas. 4. All together we had a total of five different shoots, using a total of four different locations to take our photos. The prop that we used in the animactic was a rope, the iconic image in the film. We chose the actors from visual appearance and reliability. Whilst we were taking our photos we realized that different shot angles worked better than the ones we had decided we would do originally. A shot we couldn’t take was the shot of a train; we couldn’t do this due to timing and having accessibility to taking photos on the train. We made a huge change as we completely changed our whole plot due to the fact that the old plot was more action rather than physiological. We now have a better new plot being developed which will be more physiological. We looked at various film trailers to help us. Shutter Island was an important film trailer we watched as it gave us some ideas for our own trailer. We used some of the ideas and then put our own twist on it. 5. We constructed our animatic during the editing process by firstly uploading the photos to the computer and then we had to put them into the correct order. Next we changed the times of how long each photo displayed for and then lastly added the intertitles and transitions. 6. We chose the length of each shot by using the times we had put on our storyboard. We had to change some of the shots down from five second down to two seconds. We used transitions that we thought suited our plot. 7. We used aerial black as our font for our intertitles and title of the film. The reason why we used this front and the colour black is because although it seems very basic it was a good way of showing the seriousness of our trailer. 8. We used the use of a heartbeat when we showed the death of the solider; I think this was a good sound to use as it can make the audience feel empathy towards the friend who has just seen his best friend die. We also used a fast beat soundtrack when the action picked up speed to make it more dramatic and more interesting to watch. 9. Our target audience is both males and women ageing from 20-34. Our animatic appeals to our target audience because it contains scenes with both males and females in. It also appeals to the audience as it is what you would want to see in any action film.