Blocked Animation: Animatic
Planning is never fun.
Nobody sits down in front of a spreadsheet, cracks their knuckles, and exclaims to the empty room, “Ah, yes! I’m so ready to catalog my tax exemptions, pore over these contracts, and while I’m at it, I’ll plan out all my meals for the month, too! Yes, three Tuesdays from now seems like a great night to make lasagna!”
OK, that’s an exaggeration. However, planning out a meal is a pretty good analogy for producing an animation.
The tendency (at least mine) is to get excited by a recipe or an illustration and want to jump right in — only to find, once you’ve got a steaming pot and five separated eggs, that you don’t have a stick of butter. Anywhere. There goes your lemon curd.
Whoops!
So planning is required. When you make a meal recipes are consulted and a grocery list is made. For an animation you need a script and an animatic. These force you to slow down and temper your enthusiasm, because beautiful art isn’t going to save your project if it makes no sense, and trying to use bread flour in place of cake flour is just going to make that blueberry buckle an inedible brick.
In cooking and animation there is room for flourishes and fun deviations, but only after the plan is made. If you’ve timed everything out, then you can be confident that the lovely drawing can be added to scene 4 without slowing everything down. Likewise, you can add cardamom and cinnamon to those oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.
Because you know all of the ingredients, the process, and the time it takes to put it all together, it frees you up to be creative.
This month I made up an animatic using Storyboard Pro. It is very rough. Since I’m working alone, it doesn’t need to be as detailed as something being shared by a group of animators. I’ll use this to make a list of assets (backgrounds, character models/puppets, sound effects) and to check and make sure each shot is necessary to the story.
In April I’ll start playing mad scientist. I need to experiment with techniques so I can balance style with feasibility. Please come back next month and see how I’m doing!
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Interested in other cool projects? Check out and follow the One Side Project Challenge publication. I will give project updates on the 3rd of every month, so stay tuned.
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Rachel D’Erminio is a freelance illustrator/animator. Her website is raetastic.com
