Animatic: Creating

We have been using Final Cut Pro to produce our animatic. It has been extremely useful to refresh our knowledge of how the program works, as the last time we used it was last year for the AS task. By putting the animatic in to Final Cut we have been able to get a good grasp on how our overall trailer will turn out.

As you can see in the picture below we imported the still photos from our storyboards and then edited the length to fit our shot list. We then decided to add in the transitions that we had previously decided on.

We have been playing around with different features such as the Ken-Burns crop effect in order to give our animatic some motion and hopeful improve the overall quality of the animatic.

Sound was by far the most challenging aspect of this animatic, which is important to note for our actual trailer. We found it very difficult to find a soundtrack that fitted our exact needs. We wanted our animatic and trailer to contain similar music to The Disappearance of Alice Creed trailer however we couldn't find any similar music on youtube or soundcloud. This meant that we had to resort to using the music from the trailer, this isn't ideal as throughout there is dialogue from that trailer which we ideally wouldn't have. However if you simply ignore and tune out the dialogue, the soundtrack is very similar to our ideal sound.

We also plan to have several foley sounds throughout our trailer. I found a website where you can download these sounds for free, here I found many of the ones we wanted. Some however I couldn't find such as panting or an impact sound and therefore we just had to leave these off our animatic.

We found the water dripping sound on Final Cut and extended it over the start of our trailer, this hopeful gives a good introduction to our trailer before the music starts.

The zipper worked great however the heavy door slam isn't quite as effective as we would have hoped, this is due to the sound effect we found to being sharp enough as it is more of a heavy door closing rather than slamming

The shovel going in to the ground works very well, especially when combined with the picture. This is because the picture isn't very clear however once you also hear the sound effect of the shovel going in to dirt it is far clearer.

The gun shot sound was very easy to find, it sounded great however didn't quite line up perfectly with the music, which may be something we will have to address when we edit the actual trailer.

AF

Animatic: Colouring

In order to differentiate between our three male characters during out animatic we decided it would be best to colour code them according to the code name we have currently given them

Pink - Mr Pink
Yellow - Mr Blond
Grey - Mr White

This makes it extremely easy to tell who's who in each shot and gives a better understanding of the narrative.

Examples of before and after shots are shown below:

This effect was remarkably easy to create as we simply opened the file on photoshop and then edited the opacity of a layer in order to make the lines visible underneath, we found that around the 60% mark gave a good contrast between the visibility of the lines and the strength of the colour

AF

Storyboards

Over the holiday, Ewan and Emma produced the storyboard for our trailer using the shot list. I will now have to edit these to create the anamatic. These storyboards will be extremely helpful when we start to film.

EJ
EL

Shot List

We have produced a shot list which will help us when making the storyboard as well as shooting the film. It took a fair amount of time but it was worth it as it as given us a clear idea of how our trailer will look, however we were slightly unsure of how long each shot would take and therefore that column is most likely quite wrong.

AF

EJ

EL

Props

These are all of the props which we will need:

3 guns
These are the most important props as they will be shown several times throughout the trailer. As it is extremely difficult to get realistic guns, due to there price. Emma has found a cheap alternative that we can use; spray painting metallic black paint on to some cheap realistic looking toy guns. There are numerous videos and posts online that we have found that show how easy it is to and the results look great. If we want we could also use some silver spray paint on the edges of the guns in order to give them a worn out look. This shouldn't be too difficult to do or take up too much time, the only difficult thing may be finding a realistic looking toy gun however I'm sure that we would be able to find some.

A shovel
This would be shown in one or two shots, it will be fairly easy to get as I assume one of us has one at home. It should just be an ordinary shovel similar to the one shown below.

A duffel bag
This bag will be what the men are putting their gear into and will be shown in a couple of shots. It should just be a plain black bag, but it wouldn't be disastrous if it has a logo on it. It has to be large enough to put several items in as well as place the camera above a shoot down into. The bag should be similar to the picture below, this prop shouldn't be a problem to get at all.

3 flashlights
This are going to be fairly important as well because they will be a main source of lighting during the robbery portion of our trailer, therefore they need to be fairly powerful but not too large, each male character should have a flashlight. These again should be too difficult to get a hold of as they are a fairly common item. A flashlight similar in size to the one seen below would be great.

A wooden chair
Fairly self-explanatory, this will be what the girl will be seated on in the warehouse.

Rope
Again fairly self explanatory, a rope is needed to tie up the girls hands. It could be any colour or size as long as it would realistically be used to tie someone up.

A bag
This is again fairly obvious it should just be a plain black bag that will both be put over the girls head. It should be similar to the one seen below or if if can't find anything similar to that then we could use a black plastic bag

AF