Wow, it did take me a lot of time to finish this 2D animatic. As you probably know, a 2D animatic is just like an animated storyboard. Here we assign time to the different shots, and give hints about camera motion, and character staging/blocking. Here is where we work on cinematographic flow and rhythm. So, it is indeed a very important step and… this is the first time in the project where Blender shows up !

That’s right, we use Blender’s Sequence Editor to create the 2D animatic. We loaded all plates from the storyboard and then started editing. Manuel did a wonderful first version of it and from there I kept on.

As the editing went on, I realized more drawings were needed. For instance if a shot progression is not clear enough, in-between drawings have to be made. Sometimes it’s as easy as to load the image in Gimp and cut some parts of it and displace it a bit up/down or scale it up/down and save as a different picture. This way you can estimate how much time a motion should take, for instance if in the shot the character walks across a room, we need to estimate how long this shot should take in frames/seconds.

Here is also the best (and recommended last) time to make changes in the story structure. If a sequence is not clear enough for the audience, the shot order can be changed conveniently or more shots can be added as to make the sequence clear enough.

While I was editing I watched a couple of videos from the Making of Big Buck Bunny as I had a vague memory of some nifty new features in the Sequencer (not my greatest are of expertise)… and there they were, two features that literally saved me a lot of time: the Y (Split) and E (Extend) commands in the Sequence Editor.

The Y command works like this. When you select a bunch of images with sequential names like “shot01.jpg“, “shot02.jpg“, etc. and load them into the Sequencer, they show up as a unique strip with an image per frame. So if you want to give each image a different time, you have to either load each image separately or… use the Y command after you loaded the sequence. If you press Y, then a box pops up asking how long each image should take in frames, you fill in the desired time and Blender splits the strip into single images each one taking the indicated amount of frames in the timeline.

The E command is useful when you want to extend a particular image but want the following images to adjust automatically (like the strips moving forward the needed frames). For this to work you have to select ALL your strips (”A” command) and then locate your cursor over the strip you want to extend and press E. Now if you drag the mouse, the strip is extended and the following strips are adjusted accordingly. You can watch the BBB video I watched explaining this here .

One problem arises here. You can get bored of your own tale. After watching it over and over during a weekend, I got so tired and bored of the movie I thought it was better to drop it and move on to something else. That’s why we are supposed to have a life… to take a break and clear our minds from work

There is also another bigger problem, you loose objectiveness and some plots of the story that are obvious for you might not be crystal clear for the audience. It is a good idea then to show the “finished” animatic to people who knows nothing about the story, a “fresh” audience. So we did. After a few screenings, it was obvious that there was still work to do in a couple scenes.

The story we are telling is a mix between a fantastic tale and a classical adventure and thus, a fine tuned balance between clear facts and mysterious and vague impressions is required. The “clear” part should be really clear otherwise nobody will ever know what’s the story about.

There are also cinematography concepts we have to deal with that are very important as not to confuse the audience and do not break the illusion of being watching a real situation. I don’t want to sound too academic on this and there are plenty resources if you are interested in learning a bit more about them, so here is one I found very clear: http://accad.osu.edu/~midori/Materials/camera.html

And here is a nice PDF made by the guys of 3DWorld…

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/610243/tdw77_t_tips.pdf

Anyway… I wish I could show you the animatic but… it would be the greatest spoiler ever !