What is an animatic? And how do we make one? Part 4

You’ve got your laptop. You’ve got the new Powerpoint in front of you. Don’t forget to click Later on the dialogue box. Go to the Project Library, select your project and click it.

When you insert sound effects and dialogue, you must play the clips in order to find out if the sound plays as you would wish. You may wish to plug your headphones into the computer now. You can move sound effects and dialogue recordings back and forth by selecting them. A hand will appear and you can move the clips back and forth with the cursor. For precision movement, you can also use the arrows on the keyboard.

Before I jump into music, I want to show you the other features you might want to use. The first is Transitions. Click the icon noted above. You can preview the transitions by clicking on them. If you find one you want to use, drag it and drop it between two clips.

Dropping it between the two clips will cause it to render.

Select the clips, along with the transition to preview. The transition is automatically set for 4 seconds.

Open the precision editor if you want to transition to be longer You should lay in the transitions and the texts before laying in music or long dialogue As “artsy” as most transitions will make you feel, most movies just plain cuts from scene to scene. Your animatic is already set up like that. If you’re going to use transitions. I would use them sparingly, at important points, time transitions, and at the beginning and the end of the film.

The next item is the T, which stands for TITLES. With the TITLES, you can give your animatic a TITLE, or give credit to the folks who did the voice-overs. You can scroll text across the bottom of the screen, thereby narrating the story. When you open the TITLES, scroll through and see if any of them catch your fancy.

Drag a title to the Project browser directly over the clip where you want the title to appear. You drag by holding down the button on your mouse or track pad as you move the selected title to the Project browser. You can release the mouse button anyplace you see a green Add (+) symbol.

Type into the box what you want the title to say. If you’re going to use transitions. I would use them sparingly, at important points, time transitions, and at the beginning and the end of the film. To play back the title (see how the title looks in your video), click the Play button in the upper-right corner of the viewer.

You can also Drag and Drop a TITLE right at the beginning or at the end.

You’ll be asked to select a background.

You’ll type in the text.

You’ll have an opening TITLE for your animatic. You can adjust the time through clip adjustments. Good luck. Let’s move on to MUSIC.

In the previous Powerpoint, we talked about what we are aiming to do with these animatics. If you are planning to pitch a series, or put the animatic on YouTube, you may want to stay away from copyrighted music. Most, if not all music that you can get from a recorded source, in is some way copyrighted. There are NO RECORDED TITLES in the Public Domain. For more information see as above.

Let’s start with the easy stuff first.

Your laptop won’t have music pre-loaded, like my laptop does. You’ll have to bring your own, or get it somewhere. You notice that all of the songs have time codes.

I select a song and I drag and drop it.

Even though it is a relatively short song at 2:58, it takes up the entire animatic. I have two choices: I can lengthen the whole animatic to accommodate the song. I can edit the song, and just use parts of it for the animatic!

Fortunately we can edit songs right in iMovie. Select the Clip Trimmer as shown above.

Yellow handles appear on both sides of the clip, as shown above.

To set where the sound clip stops playing, drag the yellow handle at the end of the clip. Depending on which type of clip you’re trimming, the duration of the sound clip (the time stamp) appears next to the handle. This makes it easy for you to adjust the sound clip to the exact length of the video clip or project it applies to. To preview your work, click the Play button in the Clip Trimmer ; click the button again to stop the preview.

Click done. I suggest that you review your work. For the ambitious among you, the last Powerpoint in this series will be on Garage Band….