Animatic Tool

Your Storyboard is a concept for a future project, whether it's a video, movie, book, website design sketch, story, or anything else you can dream up. Sometimes in the process you don’t want to only look at an idea frame by frame, but to see it in its entirety, in motion. For this purpose, we came up with the Animatic Tool and put it into action.

Essentially, the Animatic Tool is a tool which allows you to view your frames in one continuous animation, to see the slip-ups and planning errors, and promptly change them. However, our little featurette has a couple of aces up its sleeve. Let's take a step-by-step look, shall we?

How do I open the Animatic Tool?

Select the Storyboard you want. On the top panel, click the Animatic Tool icon. The Animatic Tool window will then become available to you.

Let's take a closer look at this tool. The selected slide will be available on the main screen. Below the slide is the frame sequence that was previously set up in the Storyboard. If you want to change the frame sequence, go back to the Storyboard, change it with the drag and drop tool, and go back to the Animatic Tool window.

The Animatic Tool toolbar is available above the frame sequence, as well as the Storyboard timeline. 

Storyboard Animation Timeline

The dots on the timeline are frames. The intervals between the dots are the frame durations set in the Storyboard. The Animatic Tool automatically reads the estimated frame duration you specified in the Storyboard. The full time of current animation is displayed in the upper right corner above the timeline.

When you place the cursor at any point on the Storyboard, you will see a checkbox with the number of the frame currently being played.

Animatic Tool Toolbox

Available buttons on the left side of the toolbar are:

• Back to the first frame
• Go one frame back
• Start animation playback
• Go one frame forward
• Forward to the last frame

Next to the buttons, you will see the number of  currently selected frames, as well as the total number of frames available in the Storyboard.

The center of the toolbar shows the current time and total animation time.

On the right side of the Storyboard, you can zoom in and out for the animation timeline. This is useful if you have a large number of slides and need to zoom in on a timeline to select and view a particular moment.

You can open the animation full screen. To do this, click the corresponding icon on the right side of the toolbar. Then go back by pressing the escape button. You can hide the panel by pressing the gear button at the very end of the toolbar. 

Scene Details Menu

Always remember that you can refer to the Scene Details menu on the top right of the screen. There you can change the frame duration, description and title, shooting angle, and leave a comment if you think your idea needs edits.

We hope that the Animatic Tool will be useful for dynamic scenes when you need to take a fresh look at the whole picture. It's also a great tool if your frames are hand-drawn and animation is vital to pulling everything together.

By the way, have you checked out our blog yet? There's a lot of new stuff there for Storyboarders - our clients can use tips from real illustrators in their practice.

Look forward to more updates from us, and be sure to stop by to try Makestoryboard in practice.