Critical analysis

An animatic is a series of photos that depict the key shots that appear in a piece of film (in my case my film trailer) possibly accompanied by diegetic and/or non diegetic sound. Its function is too give a rough outline on the order of a piece of film and to help view whether any parts need changing.

The process of developing an animatic starts with the drawing up of a storyboard, which is the pictures in the animatic only roughly drawn. The pictures are then replicated through photographs. The photos are then collected and put into the relevant order for the animatic and then sound is edited over the top.

In order to create and develop the narrative of my groups animatic we first put all our separate narrative ideas together and then combined elements of all of them to get our final plot. We then edited the storyline using the process explained above, and then picked key shots out of the storyboard that we wanted to be used in our
trailer.

In terms of organising a schedule from our storyboard we took our photos in order of location instead of the order in the storyboard; so for example we took all our shots in the wood location at once and then took all of our shots in the school at a separate time.

Overall we had around 55 shots and used three different locations; my friends house, some woods and my school. We used a variety of props that ranged from a dress for our ghost character to some rope for a noose to a tent for the four characters to sleep in. We chose to use as little props and extra equipment as possible because we didn't think it was necessary to use everything on our animatic which only really acts as an outline.
As we went along with the photo taking process we chose to add and take away certain shots as it was much easier to distinguish what would work in our animatic when we were actually on our actual set taking the photos. Most of our photos were relatively easy to capture, the only problem being was with the ones in the woods that required a birds eye view. We attempted to climb trees to do it but it turned out to be very difficult to capture well, also with the limited amount of people we had available it was hard to get all the shots  taken of everyone; it required much changing round of the person taking the photos.

We constructed our animatic by placing all our photos in order and then playing the animatic back, we could then distinguish which shot we wanted to have shorter than the other and where to place the diegetic and non diegetic sound. We decided on the length of shots by basically deciding on what we thought looked best, for example we didn't want shots that weren't that visually attractive to be on screen for too long.

The titles we used on the animatic we decided on before hand during the storyboarding process, the font we used was one that we thought looked scary enough and one that related to our animatic. The font had to stand out and add an eerie edge.

Our soundtrack to our animatic was kept as simple as possible. We used very strange sounding chimes on the wood scenes and the other scenes were accompanied by my friend singing this ghostly child's song. It sounded great I felt and really accompanied the shots on the animatic well.

I think our animatic would appeal to our target audience because our characters are of similar age, and so they could be related too, and our animatic in my opinion has the characteristics of a good horror film that would capture people's interest.

Personally I would change the soundtrack to our film slightly, I like the one we have currently but maybe some more clips of music to build up tension better would be useful. Also more realistic props would be needed to make the film trailer look more authentic, and maybe make the editing look a bit more smooth than it was in the animatic, but overall I'm very pleased with my groups animatic.