Our team acquired a job to make a video for Perpetuum, a company that makes a wireless safety monitoring system for the railway industry. Cutting Factory uses an animatic to show our client what they can expect from the final video.
During the pre-production stage of the video we want be directly in touch with the team from Perpetuum, this encourages a constructive and efficient workflow at quite a crucial stage of the video production. The video they wanted wasn’t an easy concept to convey visually, the product that Perpetuum builds is a wireless fault detecting add-on for trains and this is the first time our team had heard of the technology. Like most of our videos this production wasn’t aimed at the consumer, it was more a technical demonstration for B2B clients. Our team have understand the message quite well ourselves.
We estimated that our 3D animatic would take the team one week to make, but the night before we were supposed to send it off (actually it was 4 am) we realised that some shots needed more time and some camera movements need to be different. We didn’t want to send something we didn’t think our client would be happy with. After a brief phone call, Justin from Perpetuum agreed that we should make the necessary adjustments and send it one week later.
Making it Clear to the Client
Sending a 3D animatic to a client who’s never been through this process before is a bit scary, It’s important to write things like:
“Often the quality of these animatics can be quite terrible. There is often flickering and I ask you please to ignore that, it’s just a primitive pre-visualisation. You have to remember that this is just a rough 3D sketch of how long each shot is, what the camera is seeing and how things are moving.”
It was thankfully received very well and we just needed to make a small adjustment to one scene and add another because the client felt that a certain aspect of the message wasn’t emphasised enough. They also made it clear that although we are using a voice-over for this film, he wanted the film to also have a version without a voice-over.
Getting the animatic right and receiving the approval from the client is a really important part of film production. It a visual map for the client to see. It also sets the foundation of our pipeline for the rest of the film’s production.