Jackrabbit Design

The Rabbits are super excited about the cool work we’re doing in video production.

We have a lot of new technology to play with, and some savvy employees to help get us off the ground (literally, in some cases). But we’ve actually been involved in video for a while, through our extensive experience producing engaging, fun-to-watch animation!

Animation is a multi-step process, involving everything from client meetings, to style comparisons, to script writing. But one of the most important steps involves the creation of the video’s animatic – the animated rough sketches that help communicate the visuals of the story without actually fleshing out the final design. Here, we’ll explore what exactly the animatic is, and why it’s so important to the process of creating a full-fledged animation.

The Creative Process

As Chris mentions in his The Power of the Sketch post, the creative process and the ideas it engenders can sometimes be difficult to communicate to clients. We might have a really interesting way to communicate an otherwise mundane portion of the video, but simply describing the idea can cause confusion. So our designers will sometimes pick the trickier aspects of the animation and draw up a quick, highly simplistic sketch to better convey their thoughts.Animatics are like the next phase of this process. They’re not quite as rough as these initial sketches, and they’re synced with audio to get the full picture.

Animating the storyboard

Once the script is written or the soundtrack is set (or both), the designer’s job is to create an animatic featuring key scenes alongside the corresponding audio. This helps both the creative team and the client visualize the progression of the story they’re telling, and ensures that the overarching points of the story are correctly highlighted both visually and textually.

An example here shows the very beginning of our collaboration with Good Sports to produce an animated video for their Legends of the Ball event:

Once the storyboard and its concepts are approved, we create a more fleshed-out animatic that actually adds some animation to the storyboard.

Finally, we translate the animatic into a full video: