Now having presented our information to the class, our task has been extended. We have been told to select a minute-long excerpt of our chosen video to remake, shot-for-shot, as accurately as possible.
To get us into the habit of recognising and replicating shots and angels, we were introduced to animatics. In filmmaking, animatics are used as an optional stage of pre-production planning that clarifies the vision projected by the storyboard. Essentially, animatics are very basic projections of how the finished film will look; they tend to use illustrated or computer generated graphics with very little or no movement to show the angle, position and composition of each shot. The main benefit of stringing them together in the form of video is that the timing of cuts, and transitions can be conveyed in real-time, as it is intended to be in the final product. Sounds, or descriptions of sounds, can also be overlayed with the images, to give viewers a true sense of how the film should turn out. Overall, animatics are used because they can convey a lot of information in a way that is definitely more intuitive than storyboards; instead of imagining the film in their head, filmmakers can actually watch a very basic outline of it.
As an example, here is a link to an official animatic for a music video, and here is a link to the actual music video, so that you can see the way in which an animatic conveys the intentions for tone, pacing and look with only basic preparatory illustrations.
To help us plan our music video remakes, we have been advised to produce our own animatics in a kind of reverse-engineering process. Above is the animatic I produced, and in creating it, I certainly feel that I have gained a better understanding of the shots used in the music video, and the frames I have drawn out on post-it-notes should prove helpful when it comes to shooting the actual remake.
