Creating my Animatic

To create my animatic, I used Final Cut Pro, as I have used this before in personal projects outside of college and am therefore familiar with how to use it. I will use this programme to create my film as it gives me the tools and freedom to create a quality piece using industry standard software, without taking extra time to learn how to use it. 

One thing I learnt while creating my animatic was to use the 'Blade' tool. This tool is used to split clips at the point where you mark. This was useful because the clip I downloaded of someone reading the poem toads, was read a lot faster than I plan to have Alfie read it and therefore to give me an accurate idea of how long I want my piece to be, I used the blade to cut up the piece and then 'Position' to move the clips apart from each other. 

The red line on the picture above shows the line I used the blade to cut down, and the other black lines show how the clip has been cut up.

Another use for the blade was to help me fade out the intro song (Witch - Lazy Bones) as I only wanted to use the start of the song and I needed to fade it out to focus on the beginning of Alfie's narrative. I cut the clip up into many different pieces, and gradually lowered the volume of each clip, to give it that fade effect. I only lowered by 1dB at a time however as the audience would be unable to notice the sudden drop of 1dB compared to if I dropped it say 5dB at a time. 

Another technique I used was to zoom in onto the storyboard to ensure that the straight cuts I was using were on the beat of the song that I wanted them to cut at. As you can see in the picture above I have perfectly lined up the end of the first clip and start of the second clip precisely where the sound waves amplitude is the highest, all on the red line.