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Comment by g-b-r | Hacker News Reader

It's probably already been said in a thousand other discussions, but Flow is a really good movie, highly advised

The thing that animators are talking about is the fact that they eschewed a storyboard in favour of an animatic (an animatic being a motion sketch of the animation). This is the workflow we now recommend to our students.

This animatic can be found on YouTube.

Animatics in my experience have always been a thing, it's just they were normally created from the storyboards. At least on the movies I've been involved in (admittedly years ago), it really came down to the fact that the directors really didn't know how to use 3d animation software, so they drew the story boards by hand, like they'd been taught. I'm guessing today most animation students don't really learn to draw or storyboard like that, and we're probably seeing the end of the classic storyboard.

With examples ranging from Avatar the Last Airbender, to Castlevania, to Monty Oum (who also completely eschewed storyboards), I can't help but that reducing the over reliance on storyboards and focusing on the animation instead is a recurring theme among unusually successful animations/animators.

Flow's having an impact on animators seems great!

What tools do you use for an animatic?

As the previous poster has implied, An animatic can evolve directly from a storyboard. The frames of the storyboard are placed directly on a timeline (e.g. premier) and sometimes given a few animations (e.g. zoom, pan etc) and annotations. As the animation progresses, rough 3D renders (sometimes called flip books) can be dropped onto this timeline. In this way, the final movie can evolve directly from the animatic.

What made Flow unusual is that they bypassed the storyboard almost entirely, which is unusual for a feature film. One rational is that the movie features significant and lengthy camera motion shots. Camera motion is very difficult to capture in a storyboard.

At a student level, another motivation for lessening the importance of the storyboard is that they require not insignificant drawing skills in order to do effectively. Even animation students cannot be guaranteed to draw well, and the number of student filmmakers who can draw is vanishingly small.

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