Shooting Frame by Frame1 - Frame-by-Frame Stop Motion: The Guide to Non-Traditional Animation Techniques - page 24

You need to scout a location first. If you cannot scout a location or event
before you shoot a time-lapse film, then you need to get information about
the weather, accessibility of the location, and what sort of traffic crosses
through your focused area. This research and environmental anticipation
can be done on the web or by talking to people who have been in the area
you want to shoot. This is all preproduction, the planning and preparation
necessary to execute before you enter the actual production stage. It saves
you a lot of time, effort, and helps give clarity to your idea. It forces you to
think through the process and solve problems before they arise (which will
happen in the field or on the downshooter during the actual shooting).
Preproduction does not eliminate all the potential problems but it resolves
the majority of them and focuses your vision. Alternative stop-motion
techniques are not an exception from all other types of animation when it
comes to preproduction.
Many directors and animators like to take the preproduction process one
step further. They make a moving storyboard, or what is known as an
animatic . An animatic puts all the storyboard panels into a timeline and
makes a movie of the artwork. It should be timed out to match the final
timing of your film. You can make adjustments to the animatic, and it
helps determine the final cut of your animated film. Often animation can
be pre-edited through this process. The advantage of this is that you do
not overshoot the animation footage, which is a very time-consuming,
expensive, and potentially exhausting experience. It forces you to look at
the overall flow of your film, check for consistencies, and have an idea of the
dynamics of your shots all together. It is critical to look at the big picture.
Once you capture the final footage, then the corresponding artwork shot for
the animatic can be replaced by the final footage. The sound and dialog play
an important role in this process.
Fig 2.9 animatic on a timeline in Final Cut pro, Courtesy of Tom Gasek, © 2011.