Before the animation, we must first create the animatic!

An animatic is a very, very basic animation created with Adobe Flash CS6. What it does is go from scene to scene without any actual movment. It can consist of audio and transtions, but nothing on the screen goes from place to place.

To make the animatic, I first drew the comic (the graphic novel) for English, while in Design I created a story board. A story board, which was made in none other than StoryBoard Quick 6, is like a graphic novel except instead of drawings there are pre-made figures that I dragged-and-dropped onto a canvas. This story board, similar to my animatic, would be very helpful in days to come, as I constantly checked back at the two to see what I should do next in my animation. After both these tasks were completed, I scanned the pictures of my graphic novel in Web/Audio, and put them onto my computer for editing. After editing the pictures with Adobe Illustrator, we cut them all up into seperate scenes per each picture. Then we put the individual drawings into flash, and simply played them one after another. All the animatic is is those pictures and some really bad, improv audio.

Even though the animatic is not the best looking, it was still very vital in creating my animation, as I could always use it as a backtracking resource. The story board I created was also rather helpful, as I could see what my animation could look like without it being my bad drawings. StoryBoard Quick 6 was also a good program where I could just simply drag-and-drop pictures to make my graphic novel come to life quickly and easily.

Special thanks to: Thomas H., Kevin vD., Sasha H., Stella (G-Dawg), Arlene O., and Nastia G., for the constant support and hilarious jokes!