Animatic — second draft

Little hesitant to call this an animatic as it's lacking a lot of movement — it's more a storyboard to sound than anything! It does serve a purpose in terms of checking timings and sound and whatnot.

I think some of the timings look a little odd with the static images — especially where he stands up and walks out of the room. I did actually record myself acting out that specific part several times. I tried to match up the stills with the average timing from the recording but it looks a bit weird. I'm hoping that once it's actually got all the movement in there it might look better!

I'm quite pleased as it all seems to fit comfortably into 40 seconds without me needing to trim anything, but it's still only a rough draft and I'm preparing for the fact that it could overrun when it comes to the final edit.

The "chat bubble" was really quickly put together using a rounded rectangle mask with a 3px stroke and pale blue fill. The animation was a simple keyframe job on the opacity and position elements. The "Craig" text at the top was set as a child object of the bubble so that it would track the movement and drift up in sync with the bubble. The chat text itself was a simple animation preset "typewriter" effect. I then keyframed the opacity from 100% to 0% to have it appear to fade out. If I'm feeling really clever I might even try to sync up the keyboard sounds to the text as it is typed!

I'm really not sure about the whole chat bubble idea though. It was something I came up with as a way to get Craig's most used phrase and some animated text in there, but I think it's a little distracting? I may just stick with animating the text on the title card.

I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out technically (though there are a couple of problems with the sound sync) but in terms of the actual idea I'm still feeling a bit wobbly. I'm just a bit worried that I've gone in the wrong direction with the whole thing...