We were given the task of creating a short, 30-second animatic conveying a conflict of some sorts. Though we had a range of scenarios to choose from, I decided to come up with my own scenario. In my story, two best friends meet up in a tavern to celebrate their long-lasting friendship, only for it to shatter the moment they realise they fancy the same woman.

My initial goals for the project were the following:
Learn basics of Storyboard Pro
Utilise a wide range of shots in my storyboard
Have a clear narrative that engages the viewer

Choreograph a convincing comedic fight scene

I wrote a rough script (not properly formatted) as a word document. Some tiny tweaks were made later, but the initial script was very similar to the final one.

After this, we were given several post-it notes to do thumbnails on. I really enjoyed this and it allowed me to explore story beats, camera angles and compositions all very freely. I drew on about 80 post-it notes, generating as many ideas as possible which I would then refine.
After this, I took photos of all of the best drawings and edited the animatic together in Premier Pro. This was quite simple as I had experience with Da Vinci Resolve and other video editing programs before.
While I was doing this, I had to find voice actors to deliver the dialogue. My brother and Favor did an absolutely excellent job and I am very grateful for their help in bringing these characters to life! Additionally, I tried experimenting with sound design, however quickly realised I would struggle to create convincing sounds of crashing without causing damage, so decided to look online on sites such as freesounds.org and BBC sound effects, which I could use.

Below you can see the first version of my animatic consisting of only photographed post-it notes.

For this project, I wanted to challenge myself by incorporating a fight scene, something I had never done before. My strength lies in displaying emotion, not in dynamic action sequences so this was very tricky to come up with. I looked at several movies with this type of comedic fighting including the fight scene between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones’ Diary as well as fight scenes in old Bud Spencer films.
To challenge myself even further, I wanted to make this animatic fully digitally in Storyboard Pro, a program I had never used before. The interface was relatively easy to get used to, though adding and modifying camera motions could get a little tricky and tedious.

I also created brief character explorations for both Hubert and Stefan, whose main distinctive features will be their hair colours since their designs aren’t fleshed out for this animatic. I also did some sketches of Henrietta (the girl they are fighting over) even though she only appears for a few brief shots.

Below you can see the final animatic, created fully digitally and incorporating dynamic camera moves and different shots. I am particularly pleased with the clarity of my storytelling – nobody had any issues in understanding what was going on. I think I succeeded in creating an engaging narrative with a very obvious conflict. Nevertheless, the most obvious area I need to address is the length of my animatic, which is 1 minute and 47 seconds whereas the initial brief suggested 20-30 seconds. Though I think my animatic is well-paced, I could have focused more on the conflict itself, perhaps cutting the dialogue at the beginning and starting with Stefan noticing Henrietta and getting straight into the fight. The scene could also have ended with the “trunk shot” of Henrietta blinking surprisedly at the two guys to cut time.