Having spent the last week or so preparing a treatment and animation style for the Voicing CSA Charity animation, it is time to flesh out the story by working on a storyboard and animatic.

With a film like this, we generally put the storyboard frames straight on the timeline, so that we can edit as we go and get an immediate feeling for how the story is coming together and what shots are needed. We also want this film to be loose and free-flowing, leaving the audience with little sense of geography or even reality as we ebb and flow between scenes. Bypassing the static storyboard step helps us to capture that looseness from the beginning, rather than trying to force it back in once the shots are planned out.

The film wont have a prescriptive written script – instead, actors will improvise around the ideas and mood of the story, to help keep the words sounding fresh, spontaneous and raw. This will also give us a lot of material to work with in the edit, where we want to build up a cacophony of voices that threaten to overwhelm our mouse character.

Below is our first draft of the animatic – it has our animation Director Katie Steed providing the rough voice track, and just a few sound effects added to help clarify what’s going on. We’ll be working hard on the timings over the next few days, and listening to the people whose story we are telling to make sure it says what they wanted it to say.