A project milestone is finally achieved! All the beats I planned are now thumbnailed and arranged into an animatic. There’s 157 thumbnail storyboard images in total. Cut together and roughly timed, the story reel is sitting at around two minutes and thirty two seconds long – I wanted to keep it under three minutes and it looks like that’ll be no problem.

The animatic is completely silent right now – no dialogue, no music, no sound effects. I want to get a feel for how it plays out visually before I start adding audio. Questions I’m asking myself right now are things like: is the centre sequence too short, and does it cope with the audience’s surprise or does it begin too abruptly? should there be a hero close-up of Gronky walking at the beginning instead of just a wide-shot? does it make more sense to cut shot 34 given that the visual jump clashes so hard with shot 35? It’s easier to make all these calls once it’s timed out.

Even though there’s no music, I do have some preliminary frame timings stashed away in there – ten frame beats for the beginning, eight frame beats for when things kick off. As for everything else.. well.. the music can just work out what it’s going to do – I can always bump the timing by a frame or two. 🙂

Blender pro-tip for today:

• Ctrl+RMB in the Video Sequence Editor selects all clips which are completely on the same side of the frame indicator as the mouse is on. If the mouse is to the right of the frame indicator, hitting Ctrl+RMB will select all clips to the right of the frame indicator, not including anything that’s currently visible on that frame. Very useful for lengthening and shrinking shots quickly!