Today’s show and tell is shot 50 of the animatic in motion and a screengrab of the animatic in progress. The animatic is ugly but it tells me what I need to know – at that point in the movie, there’s a medium close up of Gronky on his evening constitutional, or possibly his morning constitutional.
Between 17 and 23 November I continued to storyboard like a thing possessed and churned out another 100 images or so. On Thursday night, I’d assembled my planned beats into a silent animatic and there was much rejoicing – Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries was even playing in my headphones. Felt good. 🙂
Yesterday I showed two people a version of the animatic who all but pissed themselves giggling once it kicks off. That also felt good. 🙂 Feeling a much stronger determination to sit with an audience of people watching this once it’s complete.
Today I showed it to someone without being there to explain what’s going on and they said while they enjoyed the hijinx, it wasn’t clear what the story actually was.
To fix that I started recording scratch today – that is, temporary dialogue recordings for the animatic. Storyboard filenames have been named by the scheme shot_setup, (e.g. 050a_s17.png). Accordingly, the dialogue and sound effects files were named shot_soundsource_vaguelyUsefulDescription (e.g. 046_pointy_entitled04.wav), still following the shot designations from the pre-production shot list. soundsource was usually pointy or gronky, though there was also one narratively important sound effect marked as 036_fx_thud
Dialogue is currently sitting on two tracks (one for each character), while music and spot sound effects also have their own track. There’s no atmosphere sound effects yet. I’ll be assembling the final soundtrack in Reaper because of the extra cool sound processing toys I get but for the purposes of laying in scratch dialogues for an animatic, Blender’s perfectly fine.
That’s about it for this week. I’m watching all of Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies over the next few weeks after finding Nostalghia at Planet Video. (That final shot, wow..) The Sacrifice is next, then it’s all the way back to Ivan’s Childhood and going chronologically forward again until Stalker. Tarkovsky’s long takes and ponderous pacing are completely the opposite to what I’m doing with my cartoon, and this makes them a very effective palate cleanser between reviews of the animatic – on top of which, Tarkovsky was the man.
See you next Sunday (or very likely sooner!) and thanks for reading. 🙂
