Animatics

In class we have been developing an animated video of our films, by uploading pictures of our screenplay onto the macs, and adding voiceovers, to give us an idea of the timings and layout of our film.

This process helped us with out script development as it enabled us to see where certain bits of footage worked, and what bits needed improving. An example of a change we made was converting the first conversation the girls have after leaving form, from one long tracking shot to shot reverse shot instead. This is because we got an idea of how long and boring the shot looked on screen and therefore realised that the film would benefit from having it as shot reverse shot.

The benefits we experienced from making this animatic:

It made us more aware of the importance of detailed dialogue, in order to make conversations seem more realistic. We saw that conversations between people were very short and focused, when in fact they should have been quite casual and typical to the relationship between the characters. We therefore went through and added more ''boring detail'' to the conversations, such as the mum saying that she wanted to get home to watch 'Deal or No Deal'.

Another benefit was that it showed us our film was only 4 minutes long. This helped us as it has given us time to make alterations to our script in order to make it long enough. We have so far considered including another scene, e.g. a flashback of the mum's death.