Why Most Motion Designers Ignore both Storyboard and Animatic
On our website, we talk about our process and all the steps we take to develop great animations. It’s based on the steps we learned while in College, with our teachers who were classic frame-by-frame drawing animators, and complemented with many years of experience in the field.
From all the steps we covered here, there are two of them we see most people forgetting about: Storyboard and Animatic. I have to confess that I wasn’t very happy doing any of them at college, but after experiencing it in my professional life I understood the importance and relevance these steps have with the result of a project.
What are we talking about?
Storyboard is that part of the process when we bring the ideas we have into something visual. They are drafts of all the scenes we imagined while creating the concept and Script. They are used to develop and study the scene’s composition, transitions and any other related visual or animated aspects. It’s where the animation is born because we take each sentence written in the script and “translate” them into illustrations.
Animatic is done after all the final illustrations and designs are created, during the Style Frame phase of a project. It’s where we combine all the images created into a video, that will be joined with the recorded Voice Over and, sometimes, with the music we are developing. It’s the first time anything is being animated and it’s where we see the sequence of images we have and how they work together. The Animatic also helps to analyze if the animations and transitions, planned during the Concept Phase, will have the necessary time to happen.
Depending on the creative process you define, you can choose if you will show these phases for the client requesting approval or if will be used only by your team to lead the animation process.
Why people insist on not doing it
After reading this you may be asking yourself: Why people dare to skip these steps if they seem to be so important? There are some factors that are used to ”justify” it, but I will show you how these ”excuses” are actually affecting the quality of your work and creating “problems” between you and your client.
Three main factors can influence a Motion Designer to skip Storyboard and Animatic phases:
Time
A great amount of Motion Designers insists on doing projects classified as ”urgent” or ”for yesterday”, as we like to say in Brazil. When facing a short time-frame to develop a project, some designers tend to cut some parts of the process so they can start animating it as sooner as possible. Since an animation is made of many steps(Script, VoiceOver, Storyboard, Style Frame, Animatic, Animation, and Sound Design) people tend to skip the parts that are more conceptual or that the client won’t have to approve or see.
Lack of Knowledge
Even if a Motion Designer had a formal education on animation, they may just have blocked it out of their minds as it didn’t seem important by the time. I myself wasn’t very happy doing this during college and to me it was just a weird request from my teachers, rather than an essential phase of the process.
Depending on what you’ve studied in college before entering the Animation world, you may have never heard of it until this post. The field has people coming from different areas and those areas have different approaches for their projects. Without knowing it, when people enter the Motion Graphic’s Industry they tend to just jump immediately to their animation software and start to create. Which lead us to the third factor shown below.
Hurry and Anxiety
Creativity sometimes can be a “drug”. If you’re a creative person you probably have that thing that itches you when you’re not creating. So, when a new project appears, you just run to your computer, open your favorite software, and start creating.
It can sound very common and at the same time comforting. Nothing better than putting your hand on that software you love and blast your creativity. What is bad about it is that people miss something special: The Concept.
What are Motion Designers missing by not doing it?
No matter the excuse for skipping these parts, there’s one thing happening that those professionals don’t see: They are losing time and money
Wait… really? Yes, it’s the hard truth. By jumping over it, instead of gaining a time advantage and having more time to create, Motion Designers are losing a lot of time and money. All the Concept and Pre-Production phases help the project to flow on the right path and prevent future adjustments.
A Motion Designer should respect the process of designing a product. We create not to feed our creativity or to showoff, but we create to achieve a result for a client.
What is your client missing if you skip these steps?
Basically, skipping these steps can result in a bad relationship with your client in 3 different ways:
- How many of you have created an animation that the client didn’t like and them you had to re-animate it or leave the job creating a bad impression for your client? Yes, if you had presented your storyboard first and then your style frames, you wouldn’t have to change things during the animation phase.
- A client likes to know what they can expect as the result of the Professional Work they’re hiring. The Storyboard and Animatic help to communicate and create those expectations.
- If you don’t focus on the best way to communicate their message to their clients, your work will lose power and the results of your client won’t justify the investment made in the video. By doing that you’re not only denigrating your work, but the whole field.
Why you should start today with a new approach to your process
Have you ever jumped into the software, started clicking here and there to create something you didn’t plan yet and it ended up being a very time-consuming task? How many times you found yourself confused without knowing what to do next or how the next scene will look like?
If you do a good work on your storyboard you are not only seeing both illustration and animation processes in a big-picture, but you are anticipating eventual problems and difficulties. And the animatic isn’t different. The small time you take to create an animatic, give you a better knowledge of every new step you’ll have to take.
It’s much better to adjust a certain scene when you only have a draft in your storyboard, than having to adjust it after you illustrated and animated the whole scene.
Rework is for dumb and unprofessional people
If you never worked that way, why not giving it a try? Make things different in your next project. See how you’re able to achieve a better result by following a process with more steps and less risks of mistakes. Your animation will flow at lot better, your client will be way happier and your relationship with them will be much better.
We wanted to touch those points because we see the importance of a good process and a good relationship with clients. These are only two of many other steps we take to create great animations. Take a look at them all in our process page.
Originally published at mowestudio.com on October 7, 2015.
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