I have a pretty solid idea of how I want my short film to look, and am comfortable with the story arc, however have found that the lack of speech in my film makes the storytelling quite tricky. The character of FISH never says anything, beyond maybe a few sounds; the idea is that the story is told through the acting of the characters, and hopefully the flow of the soundtrack.
Working on the animatic has been helpful with regards to realising the flaws in story representation. I have added elements, taken them out again, messed around with timing, changed backgrounds, and so on, in order to tighten up the story. I feel like I have got a grip on my animatic fairly early on in the process, so it has been helpful to get feedback at early stages. I’ve found that I’m quite happy to ‘kill my darlings’ and take out scenes that I was initially keen on, when it became clear that they wouldn’t work. For instance, I animated the keys on a dance scene with FISH doing a well recognised move from the music video for Beyonce’s ‘single ladies’. This took AGES to execute, and added something comical, but I ultimately decided that it wasn’t effective enough to add anything significant to the film. Going forward, I will work on backgrounds so that I can visualise each scene more clearly. I’m currently working on the 6th version of my animatic, but hope that the next edit will be the one I use for the film.