There were a few reasons I wanted to make an Animatic for this project which I will list below and elaborate on…
1. To help establish the feel, story and atmosphere of my set
2. Improve ability to make Animatics (compared to last year)
3. Collaborate with someone outside of University
1. Feeling, Story and Atmosphere
The feeling and atmosphere of this set was very important to me from the start. I wanted the audience to feel connected to the set, so I needed a story that would help do this. A few times during this project I would get stuck with the storyboards, as I couldn’t imagine the scenes in full. I kept wanting to hear some music that would fit in the scene, and immerse myself in the scene as a viewer.
After researching into George Lucas and his journey in writing Star Wars, I wanted to look at the ways writers find their inspiration. This way I could write a story for my set successfully.
Although completely unrelated to Star Wars, I remember watching a video a while ago of Christopher Nolan on writing Interstellar. Christopher Nolan is one of my favourite directors, and his films paired with Hans Zimmers music scores seem to go together perfectly. They started writing the score for Interstellar before Nolan finished writing. Nolan would listen to the score as he was writing and finished writing the screenplay with the help of the soundtrack.
2. Improve ability to make Animatics
This one speaks for itself. Last year during the Animation project I did the storyboards for our film, and made the Animatic. Looking back at it now, it wasn’t that great. Since learning more about Storyboarding I’ve realised how I could’ve made it much better. I feel like this project would be a god chance to practice again, and to improve on last year. I will put the Animatic for last years Animation project below as reference.
3. Collaborate with someone outside of University
As this was a Collaboration project, I saw it as an opportunity to Collaborate with someone outside of University, to help with making the music for an Animatic. My friend from school, Joe, has made music as a hobby for years. He’s very talented and I’ve been planning on collaborating with him for a long time, so I saw this as a good opportunity to do so.
I would send him the screenplay, storyboards and other songs that fit the mood I was going for. He would write some music and we would go back and forth as I would give him feedback. I enjoyed doing it as I got to learn a bit more about music from him, and how a music score can change the atmosphere of a set.
Reflections
Unfortunately I didn’t have time to make an Animatic in the end, however it was just something I planned to do for fun. It also meant I did a bit of extra research into music in film, which I find very interesting. It also encouraged me to draw more storyboards and practice my skills further in that.