Animatic Evaluation

This is our animatic, which we are going to base our music video on.

 Animatic is one of the crucial parts of music video preproduction process. It finalizes the sequence we are going to put the images in. We also get an idea of the pace of editing, what we are going to cut to etc. So it gives a pretty good overall idea of what the music video will be. This is one of the final stages of planning, and from now on what we have to do is to find props, costumes, locations. But all of these will be based on the storyboard and animatic that we have created. So the most creative stage in planning is done (not saying that choosing props and locations is not creative, it's just more technical).

Our concept is going from black and white world to the world of colour. Colour will be represented through the coloured smoke and powder. So we try to follow this "narrative" as video progresses gradually introducing more and more colour. There are some key shots that reflect our concept.

We also want to gradually increase the amount of colourful smoke and stress that it has influence on everything around.
That's why looking back, it seems pretty obvious that we should have drawn our storyboard using various colours so that it looked more eloquent. Also the editing of the animatic itself wasn't really good since many cuts were not to the bit, and that's why they seemed random. We didn't have too many images drawn to work with, that's why it looked repetitive. Some of the images weren't particularly great, and so we cannot understand what we mean by this shot.
However, during the lesson we didn't really talk a lot about animatic itself. Our focus was on which parts we want to cut out and which parts are going to be included in the final version. To be fair, we decided to cut about half of the shots we had in the animatic and substitute by the better ones. For example, we want to put this swirly black and white bit in the beginning of the video.

We also want to add completely new set up, which will include exploding balloons with powder inside. There is also a new ending, hopefully, more interesting and, in case we pull it off properly, much more beautiful. It will be based on Harrods advert.

The reason why we cut so much is that we were not sure if it was going to look good or if we are able to simply shoot it, meaning if we have enough resources.
However, I think we were pretty successful in constructing the star image. We reflect the theme with colour, music and 60s style pretty effectively. Our target audience is quite young and I'm explosions and colour will appeal to them. Moreover, our image will never stay the same, the set up will be constantly changing, which may also appeal to young people.

Overall, making this animatic was very useful step in planning our final product since it outlined what we clearly need to work on. I've learnt that music video requires to think meticulously through every single even extremely small detail, otherwise, mistakes will be very obvious. And we definately need to do a lot more preparation for our music video. But it's slowly coming...