NOTES ON ANIMATICS In olden days, animatics showed timing of extreme poses and holds before putting in inbetweening or lipsyncing.

With computers we can be even rougher in our animatics and simply indicate proposed movements such as walks or runs using basic computer tweens. BUT an animatic is not merely a scanned storyboard put into a timeline. I believe a good animatic should show ALL MAJOR CHANGES in movement. This includes not only showing rough timing of all cuts, but also showing rough timing of when anything starts or stops moving. An animatic made only of still storyboard scanned frames with movement arrows drawn on them is often not enough to get a good feel for the proposed timing of the animation. A good animatic shows - what moves - for how long and how fast (duration) - how far and in what direction (space) The reason for this is: Timing a series of still images is different to timing the same series of images with motion within them the motion within the frame will alter the timing required. Most of the time, using basic tweens to show this is ok as long as you are showing the pace and feel you are aiming to get in the finished animation. An animatic should also ALWAYS include a rough soundtrack. If your music isnt done yet, then include a temporary track of any other music you have available now which is kind of similar. If you are expecting delays in organising recording dialogue, then, early in production, record a temporary track of yourself reading a rough draft, and animate to that. You can throw the temporary tracks away later when you get the real thing. If the soundtrack is added after animating to silence it is extremely likely to alter the pace required for the visuals. (Another Note: If you have scanned your storyboard for your animatic, you might have several storyboard drawings for one single shot of animation. Beware of including many entire frames from the storyboard in your animatic to represent this one single shot; the changing background can give the subjective impression of cuts where there are not supposed to be cuts. Instead - use a single rough background, and cut out the foreground characters from your storyboard frames to assemble a rough single shot that looks like the one shot it is intended to be in the finished animation.)