Day 006 – Animatic Editing – Workflow

Establishing a workflow is essential to animated films. Without knowing the steps ahead a filmmaker could fall into any number of traps from animating a whole story that makes no sense to neglecting the character design to simply never finishing the film. It’s tough to wrangle all the preproduction, gathering all the elements needed to animate, into a meaningful setup but it makes all of the later work more fun. Below is a shot of my setup. The setup is probably a bit more elaborate than needed but the breakdown is a good’ol Moleskine sketchbook, hipster I know but they are great sketchbooks, a Samsung Series 7 Slate, mini-Cintiq and all, and a Lenovo W520 for actual computing power. As described in my previous posts I start with storyboards in my sketchbook, taking a photo of them with the handy iPhone then putting them into a PhotoShop sequence. This works great because I can then import the sequence into Premiere or After Effects. The photo above shows timing out on the Lenovo is a bit faster due to more real estate and more system power but once timed out it is much better using the Slate for drawing (especially since I can draw anywhere with it.)