Our Animatic & Plot Details

Plot of film: A struggling, young writer is dealing with the symptoms of schizophrenia...only he doesn't know it. He has visions in which he sees things and people close to him in a mysterious white world, which slowly begin to come true. The film deals with the writer's life changing as his experiences begin to take control.

Opening scene: In the opening scene after the company credits, our central protagonist opens his eyes into a vision, in which he sees his friend (or hopefully partner) begging not to be hurt. This is intercut with shots of this same character dead on the floor (similar to the technique used in "The Shining").

The next scene is when the character awakes in bed in the real world. He goes down to the kitchen where we are introduced to the person seen earlier in the vision. He tells her must go to church and confess, even though he's not religious. This begins to suggest the torture these visions are holding over him. One problem we may have with this scene is making it interesting, and keeping the viewer engaged with what they are seeing, as ultimately if you lose the viewer's interest in the opening of a film, you lose their interest in the events follow.



With our animatic we attempted to roughly layout possible shots and sequences for our production. Clearly at this point we didn't have a suitable cast or location available so our main aim was sorting out the shots and camera work. The video with text summarises what we were trying to achieve and problems we may encounter with our later filming.

Animatics are used to give the film makers a better idea of certain sequences may look. Wikipedia says: "At its simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence." Basically they are a moving image variation of the storyboard stage of planning, done whilst the idea is at it's earliest. It also describes how rough soundtracks may be applied as well, though we were not at a suitable stage to do this. Animatics make the next stage of pre-production faster because it allows it to explore the timing issues that we are constricted by, and will also make planing the actual shots and screenplay much easier.