CaptainDisillusion
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Making "AlBot" Pt. 2 - Animatic
🕑 Added 2023-09-02 15:04:31 +0000 UTCBecause I don't have a sci-fi space lab or giant robot at my disposal, there'll be a lot of greenscreen in this production. To help plan out the shots I decided to preview the entire sketch as a rough hand-drawn animatic.
First I recorded the lines in Pro Tools and edited everything to exactly 1 minute. I was recovering from an illness so my voice sounds rough and snotty (sorry!) but it gets the point across. I also threw in some sound fx & music to help create a vibe and guide the visuals.
Importing that as a single mixed audio clip into Blender, I set up a Storypencil project. Storypencil is a free addon that lets you organize and manage a whole edit of Grease Pencil scenes in one file (Grease Pencil is a toolset in Blender for drawing & 2D animation). It's extremely handy.
After marking where all the cuts of my imaginary shots will be, I got into sketching and crudely animating each shot to the soundtrack, until I had some lazy version of all of them.
It's really hard to compose for vertical framing! Feels like a bunch of compromises. But I can't tell if that's objectively true or just my personal bias due to a lifetime of watching and working with horizontal aspect ratios... Is a future gen-alpha Spielberg going to think CinemaScope looks like trash?
You can see in the final video above, I started out doing very sloppy stick figures, then gradually slipped into doodling more details. I should've kept myself more in-check with that! Would've finished faster.
But now that I watch it... I think it works as a short. Let's commit to this. It shall henceforth be our bible.
Now to figure out how to actually shoot it. "Preproduction" is next!
Comments
Anapan
Awesome!
sam ballard
I lol'd many times. Can't wait to see it fully realized
BurritoGaming
The animatic is fantastic! However (perhaps its just me) the "Al" should have an initial function that captain disillusion expects it to do (like giving him a massage because alan gives him free massages all the time, since its supposed to "replace" some functions of alan).
PeteyPak
Your animatic is really good! ...are you sure you don't want to release it as is? You did technically make it in Blender.
Brandon Dilbeck
It amused me how much Al (Alan) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) look alike. When I read an article about AI, I like to mentally replace it with Al.
Daniel Kohl
me like.
Joe Greathead
Even just sketched out, this is already hilarious and a great short.
