To make an animatic, you first need your storyboard some editing software, a microphone, and access to production sound and music. At this stage you don’t even need to buy the music, etc. If you’re just using it for personal reference you can download; it’ll have a watermark, but that’s okay for reference purposes.

Start by separating your storyboard into separate JPEGs for each shot. I do this with my favorite screen capture software, ShareX.

Once that’s done, drag them into your video editor’s timeline. Knowledge of video editing comes in handy here…

From this point, we start telling our story!

I personally do this by finding a piece of music that fits with the opening of the story. In our short, I wanted something inquisitive and adventurous, so I found this track.

You can find production music online from a number of websites that sell music for productions, whether that’s stories or marketing videos. My go-to sites have been premiumbeat.com , Audiojungle.com, and artlist.com.

The sites also have sound effects, and you can download previews of them.

Once you’ve found the piece of music, pull it into your timeline. If you have narration in your short, you can plug in a microphone or webcam and record the narration.

All this gives you a chance to understand your script and get into the mind of your character. As you do this, new ideas occur, and solutions to problems come to mind.

With all these assets, you then go ahead and start to build your story and create a plan for the short.

Once you’ve done a first pass edit: 

Once you have your first pass, I recommend sitting on it for a bit, then coming back and watching.

After a couple of these, you start to refine your story into something you feel happy with, and you have your animatic.

At this point, you could show it to a few people to see what they think.

Now for 3D, you could completely skip an animatic and go to 3D layout and use that as essentially the same thing. There are some pretty cool things you can do with Grease Pencil and 3D to help in the actual layout stage, which I’ll demonstrate when we start laying out.

Note –

I’ve noticed a lot of animatics with tons of work put into them. While they look great, if it’s going to 3D, this is unnecessary unless you need to choreograph a whole complex shot sequence playing out. As an indie filmmaker, it can be another thing that slows you down. If you can draw fast and well, this won’t be an issue, but you can get bogged down here trying to get everything exact.

I personally decided to do an animatic to help me think about the story, in particular to time out and visualize scenes and figure out where the holes are.

First minute of my LitRPG short Into Pixels

Compare to the script

Let’s check out the opening scene animatic and see how it’s different from the script.

If you read the script, you will notice some differences:

1. As I edited the opening scene together, I found it rather quiet and a bit empty. So, I decided to add some narration, which also helped fill in the silence of a person on their own in the forest.
2. Secondly, it helped me find shots and build tension in the chase scene that occurs later in the script.
3. It also helps to establish some information about our MC character.

Help me out!

Interested in the Into Pixels series here’s a link to the it’s landing page. You can also support its creation by subscribing on YouTube also by grabbing me a coffee once a month on my Patreon page.

If 4000 folks buy me a coffee once a month I’ll be able to employ some folks to make the whole planned series