I began creating the animatic by first replacing the rough sketches in my early animatic with my refined ones to see what it would look like with the same pacing.
I could see it working, in the end, though I wasn’t completely happy with it yet, so it became the starting point for me to edit the animatic so that it would create more suspense and easier to follow.
This also meant that I had to go over the 40-second time limit by 14 seconds, though if I had compressed the animatic any further then it would be difficult to understand from how fast each shot would have to be and the narrative structure would be lost.
SOUND
Most of the sound used in the animatic was made by recording whatever was near me straight to the program. This included any rustling, plastic scrunching, and tearing sounds.
A specific sound that I used comes from a performance of the song ‘Butterfly’ by Swedish Eurodance group Smile.dk, which is also what is always playing on the TV in the cube Tai is in.
I chose this specific performance for many reasons, the main one being that this was a pretty perfect capture of insanity.
In my contextual research, I established that insanity can be portrayed as a semi-realistic scene where elements of the scene may seem normal, though what is actually happening has a hint of mayhem to it.
In this 1999 performance, Smile.dk are performing on a Korean music show ‘SBS Inkigayo’, now known for featuring K-Pop artists, where the two caucasian artists are performing with bindis and one of them in black face. The song itself is about wanting to have a Japanese male partner, referring to them as ‘Samurais’ who live in woodlands and hills.
The performance is reflective of its time as none of these elements would be deemed acceptable in today’s context which made it seem all the more disturbing.
Another reason why I chose this song was because of the elements within the music itself, with the repetition of ‘Ai yai yai’ in a high-pitched voice that can be found in old 2000s fake Barbie toy phones from China.
I used to play with these as a child, which only made coming across Smile.dk’s original performance even more surreal.
As my parents own a children’s clinic, it was very easy to get a hold of these toys that are still being manufactured. The ‘Benign Girl’ toy phone sounded exactly as I had remembered it.
As the sound quality is just the right amount of grainy, I thought it would be perfect to use in the animatic when Tai breaks his composure and things become chaotic near the end.
PACING
It took me a while to figure out how to slowly build up suspense to reach the climax near the end. I tried making the shots cut to the next one faster or use more sounds, though I couldn’t get a satisfying enough tension.
Then I remembered a viral Tiktok video that created suspense and anxiety incredibly well with an effective tonal shift.
I noticed that the build-up includes a lot of repetition in quick succession as well as all the different sounds mixing together to create something incomprehensible and unnerving.
In the end, I incorporated all of these elements to create a pacing that I find to be effective while still maintaining the narrative structure throughout.
Though this wasn’t my first time creating an animatic, I felt that I had improved quite significantly from my first one, with consideration to how the analogue drawings can be translated to digital without losing its detail as well as layering sounds and shots together to create a more immersive viewing experience.
⇨ THE FINAL ANIMATIC