Intro to the Making of semester 2: The Wolf and the Kid story board animatic. 4/2/18-5/2/18

Final animatic 

From learning the basics of Animatics in Premier pro in Intro to the Making of this week I set to work on doing the animatic for my Aesop's Fable story The Wolf and the Kid. Before I could do so however I first needed to isolate the frames and scenes from my storyboard and so using the cropping tool in Photoshop I cropped down the frames and named them in sequence to be placed in a file for Premier Pro. I remembered from the feedback I didn't give any indication of what happens in terms of camera angles but this was so when doing the animatic it would be a test to see how I would possibly handle motion stories in the future.

I would include the camera angles in my next few storyboards after completing the animatic. I opened premier pro and began the process. Remembering from Tuesdays session I first needed to import the which I had set via the file browser in the opening workspace then import the media  select the first scene and right click on the scene and selected new sequence from clip, and this created a new clip sequence and placed it into the timeline. The next few clips came into the timeline soon after, I then looked at some of the frames such as the beginning frames and the frames leading into the forest and from the wolf watching from the distance. In elements such as the wolf appearing in front of Billy I wanted to add some suspense so I did a very slow zoom out shot using the position and scale key frame settings.

However there was some difficulties in this process and that was adjusting the scale settings and the position. There were times when the sliders didn't move but instead just showed the type option to type the settings into them and even when it did work it was too fast as I wanted a slow outward/ inward shot of the scene. I managed to work around this though, and increased the timing on the frame slightly to make the zoom out seem slow and natural.

However I would need to move the frames along the time line when lengthening the time of the frame which was time consuming. Once I'd sorted the frames I then introduced a new sequence by clicking the new sequence option which was similar to the new layer icon in Photoshop. I remembered the settings were DSLR 1080 25 and added these settings to the sequence The next stage was to nest the new sequence and animatic sequence together by dragging in the animatic and this was nested together. The time code was then introduced from the video effects option but I didn't include the adjustment layer as it was introduced to the sequence itself and it seemed in synch with the  animatic all the same. I then added a time code for the frames having it set to frames in the settings.

This was then exported  in the settings of H.264 and I made sure it was exported with maximum render quality and maximum depth as seen in the session.

This was done as a preview to see what I would be working with before I introduced any sound effects, or voices.

Preview:

For the sound element of this animatic Annabeth had suggested a website that we could use to select sounds for our animatic. I looked at the site and searched some bird sounds and it did look promising, however I was a little uneasy as I'm cautious when it came to some websites as I didn't want to damage my computer with a virus. However I took the chance and selected a school bell sound for my animatic and downloaded by right clicking and using the download linked file option downloading it to my computer. I repeated this procedure with multiple sounds such as wolf howls and wind blowing for a more suspensive scenes in the animatic. I introduced my own voice recordings from my Voice Memos.

I added the sounds to the animatic sequence and I discovered much like After Effects anything effected in the animatic sequence it affected the nested sequence. This was unexpected but was very useful. To introduce the sound effects and voices I dragged them into the sequence then extended the frame they were in accordingly. However, once again there was a problem whilst the final animatic sequence was affected it didn't seem to capture the final film and in some instances some of the sounds wouldn't play forcing me to open and close the sounds and program again and thankfully this issue was corrected. In terms of the sequence I realised another nested sequence was needed.

I therefore created another sequence with the same settings and nested the two together, this was then exported the same way. This was then uploaded to my Youtube account as it was too big for the blog player to handle. I was rather pleased with the finished result and the combination of some of the sound elements were very entertaining and funny in my opinion. One thing that I found of interest was the site that Annabeth recommended for the sounds which could be of use to me in my own motion animation projects. I was tempted to do an animated version of this in after effects and then compile the frames together in Premier Pro and see if this would work in motion graphic animation, but there wasn't enough time, this would have to be a side project sometime in either the weekend or over the easter break.