Making "AlBot" Pt. 2 - Animatic (Patreon)

Because I don't have a sci-fi space lab or giant robot at my disposal, there'll be a lot of greenscreen in this production. To help plan out the shots I decided to preview the entire sketch as a rough hand-drawn animatic.

First I recorded the lines in Pro Tools and edited everything to exactly 1 minute. I was recovering from an illness so my voice sounds rough and snotty (sorry!) but it gets the point across. I also threw in some sound fx & music to help create a vibe and guide the visuals.

Importing that as a single mixed audio clip into Blender, I set up a Storypencil project. Storypencil is a free addon that lets you organize and manage a whole edit of Grease Pencil scenes in one file (Grease Pencil is a toolset in Blender for drawing & 2D animation). It's extremely handy.

After marking where all the cuts of my imaginary shots will be, I got into sketching and crudely animating each shot to the soundtrack, until I had some lazy version of all of them.

It's really hard to compose for vertical framing! Feels like a bunch of compromises. But I can't tell if that's objectively true or just my personal bias due to a lifetime of watching and working with horizontal aspect ratios... Is a future gen-alpha Spielberg going to think CinemaScope looks like trash?

You can see in the final video above, I started out doing very sloppy stick figures, then gradually slipped into doodling more details. I should've kept myself more in-check with that! Would've finished faster.

But now that I watch it... I think it works as a short. Let's commit to this. It shall henceforth be our bible.

Now to figure out how to actually shoot it. "Preproduction" is next!