Animatic Workflow (After Effects vs Fusion 7 vs Blender)

Shiny Shiny New Toy! Software!

Recently Blackmagic software made Fusion 7 free with only a few restrictions. This excited me as a free motion graphic alternative to After Effects (AE). I have been trying to stay focused on Ebil, I have been avoiding new software so as not to take away from my production time with Ebil. I figured I would use Fusion to build my animatic as a learning project and get my animatic done. It took me a lot of hair pulling to get the swing of things. I could have done this in about 30 mins or less in AE. I've never used a node based compositor before. The user community on Fusion seems tight lipped. I guess all the pros using it are busy being pros. Whatever the reason (a hot topic on the forums) there is a huge lack of free Fusion tutorials online. You can easily find the basics if you want to do VFX compositing or 3D importing. But I failed to find any tutorials I could follow to give me the skills to load a sequence of images (storyboards) and time them out to an audio file. After many hours of struggle I did manage to load the files into nodes and chain them together. However Fusion 7 lacks the ability to display the audio clip alongside my visual clips in realtime (or I could not find it).

Animatic Fusion 7 comp

After a week of struggle I decided to pass on Fusion 7 for the time being.

Back to Blender (Bender 3D 2.73a)

So it hit me. Blender has a sequence editor already built in. So I took my frames into blender, and I was able to create a sequence in a matter of minutes. Granted I do have years of experience with Blender, but I have never used the sequence before. I did need to watch a few tutorials on the ins and outs. These were very easy to find, and there were dozens more available if I need them. 

Animatic Blender comp

It was a very simple matter to import my audio file and sync it with my storyboard renders.

So for now I will continue to work within Blender.

Project notes:

Making progress on Fart Demon using volumetric texture. Decided to avoid physics sims for this short. I will cheat and use censor bars to comically melt my crowd. This should take a huge amount of time off production (R&D, simulation, Render overhead...)

Storyboards or Animatic

MOVING ON

I have been finalizing the rigs and I think I have most of what I need for Bus Stop working. So I'm blocking out the shots. I have gone about this backwards in a way. I have a dozen rough storyboards that have been reworked a bit over the years. I was creating a polished storyboard to make my animatic from. But...

old storyboard image

I can see this in my head for the most part (I think). I have most of my assets completed. I started staging my assets and rendering shots to place in the polished storyboard to build and animatic from... Redundant? I rendered shot1, 12 frames. Then I layed them out in Photoshop, but I think I should just go ahead skip the polished storyboard and just create the animatic. I am learning Fusion 7 which is free now. It will be a great learning project. Could do it much faster in AE since I already know that program....

Anyway here is my shinny page 2 storyboard I am unlikely to ever print.

New Redundant storyboard

NOTES:

setup storyboard set using linked assets

blocked out shots for shot 1 and shot 2 rendered for storyboard,

figured it would be redundant to make the storyboard from renders since I'm not likely to print them. layout animatic Fusion/AE if fusion is too much to figure out.