HI Daily! Could you maybe explain step by step how you do your animatics? I’m sorry, I know it’s a big thing to request in a Tumblr ask, but I was really curious to how you do them. Thank you!
Truly, there’s a lot of it to say when it comes to animatics but it’s actually a good opportunity to make a tutorial on some basic things!
This is how it looks like from the inside! (also here’s a proof, that the next part is in progress xP)
But let’s start from the beginning! (it’s probaby gonna be a long post so beware)
1. MUSIC
When I start a new project, I upload a music file first! To do that you go into File then Open and you choose the one you want from your computer. When you do that, it should look like this:
This is your track with music! I don’t make any special changes to music except splitting it to delete the parts I don’t need. To do that you need to choose a moment you want to cut it, right click and choose option split. It’s gonna split the song in two parts and you can delete the one you don’t need!
2. IMAGES
Okay, now that you want the part of the song you need or a whole song, you can upload your drawings. I usually draw 2,3 frames and I edit them right after I finish drawing them ^^ You need to remember that if you want to an animatic for YouTube you need to draw on the canvas with a proper size ‘cause otherwise it’s gonna look like this (black background, image doesn’t take the whole screen):
Click File then Open and choose image/s you want! After you do that, it’ll create a new track with images only:
Useful tip! If you want an image to appear in a specific moment, just play the music and press M in the moment you want your image to appear. Vegas will put an orange flag in that place so you can adjust the image length or placement:
3. MOVEMENT
You have a song, image in a right place, lasting the right amount of time but it looks kinda boring when it’s so still... So we’re gonna do some MAGIC >:3
Choose the little marked icon on your image! It’s gonna open a new window for you:
At the bottom you can see a timeline of your drawing. You need to pay attention to where your pointer is (in this case, it’s at the start) because that’s the place the image will change.
So for example, you want your image to go from left to right. You click at the start of the timeline, drag the frame to your left, then click at the end of the timeline and drag it in the opposite way - that’s it! Close the window, congrats, now your image moves!
BUT if you wanna do smth super extra, I’ll tell you a secret how I make it more dynamic >:3
Between the two points (right at the beginning, left at the end) pick a place almost right after the first setting you made. Drag the image to the left, placing it almost in the same position as the last one. The program will go super fast from the start to your second point but will slow down from the point 2 to end (as we have a lot time from point 2 to 3), hope it makes sense haha xD
Now, it’s gonna look like this:
4. EFFECTS
Effects are hiding in the icon marked green! You can click and choose one from variety of options and there’s so many of them I know/used maybe 20% of them xD I don’t always use those effects but they make a big difference with lighting etc.
Ah that’s it for now! If you have some questions, don’t be afraid to ask! I am not an expert but I can help beginners for sure!
what are some really important pointers you have for people who want to make animatics?
this is probably gonna be a bit long so just a heads up i guess?? also please note im not a student for anything in art and am not a professional i’m just giving out my opinions on this and things based on my own experience.
do thumbnailing
you don’t always have to start it with the actual frame and the drawing for thumbnailing doesn’t have to be good. this is just to let you have a feel of what you want for the final frame. it also doesn’t have to be digital you can just doodle it in some paper you found lying about. this is also good for parts of your animatics where there’s lots of movement(like dancing!)
thumbnailing is also good for parts where you have multiple ideas! doodle all your possible ideas and see which one is best for that scene
perspective/angled shots
these are super cool and can help with the atmosphere of the scene! for example:
they also just look really nice and interesting and fun
landscapes and backgrounds
you can’t always have just a bunch of people gathered around all in one frame, you gotta show the setting of the whole thing
this also allows for your characters to move around more! don’t always make them flat like this though(this doesn’t mean you can’t do this, just don’t do it all the time)
grab a ruler or if you don’t have one like me, zoom out completely and try to make straight lines(they don’t rlly have to be perfectly straight though! but don’t make them too slanted either)
and if you have sai, free deform it and set the perspective to 100% and then just mess around with it!
also remember to add buildings/furniture/etc if needed!!
do dynamic poses
these help the facial expressions of the character! a lot of people seem to just concentrate on just the face for emotion but body language is also important!
you can throw in some perspective into this as well!
make a LOT of frames
as mentioned above, movement is very exciting!! and you can show movement with those frames. it doesn’t even have to be a lot of movement like one second they were there and now they’re in an entirely different spot, subtle movement is also very good!
try not to reuse the same frame too much! it might end up looking very awkward
also try not to just erase and add things to the body of a character as if it were some kind of paper doll stuck to a wall like this:
it’ll end up looking very stiff and awkward. instead, just redraw the character completely! make them move around a bit
you don’t always have to make things super clean
you don’t have to do clean lineart, just doodle a frame and make it easy to read for everyone on what’s happening. especially because drawing hundreds of frames is already so time consuming and not to mention stressful. do yourself a favor and not tire yourself out more than you should.
that’s kind of all the pointers i have. hope this helps!!!
During this lecture, we were given a more in-depth understanding of animatics. We looked at a couple of examples for Production Bibles, which helped give me a stronger idea as to what I should include in my production bible as well as graphic design techniques I could apply when making my production bible look appealing. We also watched some example animatics, the ones that stuck out to me were from a more modern incarnation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Loud House (2016), both of which contained simple sound design paired with the recorded dialogue. A couple of things that I took note of was the timer, which tracked how long a shot was on screen before changing, the shot numbers and the production code, all of which were added to help the team understand what exactly they needed to produce, and the timing of shots and animation. The images in the animatic only contained scenery and props when they were important to the shot, with horizon lines occasionally being added when they were needed to establish perspective. After this, we then took part in a tutorial in which we had to take stills from a Johnny Test (2005) storyboard and edit them into a basic animatic. Using skills we’ve previously been taught in both Premiere and After Effects, we l;earned how to add basic effects in Premiere Pro and how to set key-frames for said effects, while also learning how to apply plug-ins such as an animatic timer to the video.
During my own time, I chose to watch this side by side comparison of the music video for the Gorillaz song Feel Good Inc. (2005), with the animatic on one side, finished animation on the other. Again, I noticed the use of perspective lines and arrows indicating movement. Something else I noticed was that many aspects from the animatic, from simple face expressions to entire shots, were changed. Look towards Gorillaz for another example, when comparing the animatic and finished music video for DARE (2005) there is a large number of different shots being changed, with Noodle and Shaun Ryder interacting with each other more in the animatic than in the music video. It highlights how even so late into production, certain aspects often continue to be tweaked and improved.
I’ve also managed to produce a couple of model sheets for my characters, although I may edit them or add more to them later, given how simplistic these first ones are. I’ve also given greater thought to R.O.N.’s origins – I think that the person responsible for designing and creating the line of Factory bots R.O.N. is a part of wanted to create more human-like, truly sentient robots, but was forced to create factory robots in order to make a living. While these sentient types of robots do exist in this universe, I fell that R.O.N. and its peers are the most recent updates to a model that was created years before fully sentient civilian robots. I think that the idea that R.O.N.’s creator is someone who was forced to ignore their passion and create something they didn’t want to in order to earn a living draws an interesting parallel between R.O.N. and its creator.
Recently, me and a fellow class mate were offered a chance to produce a logo for a third year business student. While nothing came from this offer, it has given me a small degree of experience with clients, and how to deal with them.
Ayyyy so alot of people like the animatics I make, so I figured I would make a small tutorial detailing the process I go through. It’s probably super unprofessional compared to industry standards, But I make animatics for fun, so lets go!
(This i gonna be super long, so I’ll leave it under the readmore. rip mobile users)
Once It’s all uploaded, post that shit on every single social media platform you have, and watch the viewcount roll. I hope it was fun to learn what I do to make animatics! <3
