A musical Approach

Work on the animatic of our film is in a pretty advanced stage. We've been tinkering with several versions and started to put in the first compositions of our composer Luc Gut to get a better feeling for the timing.

For everyone who doesn't know what an animatic is: When the storyboard is done you take all the little thumbnails that've been drawn and try to fit them all together in an edit of the film. This way you can see if everything works the way it was intended, if something is missing or if some scenes or edits are unnecessary. Needless to say, that the storyboard also gets overhauled during that process. When the edit is advanced enough rough sound effects are added as well as music to help determine the timing and pacing of the film.

There's more than one way to go about this. Many productions work with placeholder music since the directors often already have a clear idea of what kind of music or sound should be played in certain scenes. We wanted to avoid this as much as possible though since temp tracks (that's the industries term of these placeholders) often mess with the creative vision of the composer and they can avoid the conception of an original score and turn it into more of a knock-off. That's why Luc Gut has been providing us with new ideas and new versions of scores while the directors have been changing around the animatic simultaneously to edge closer to the final result as a joint effort. For that reason, directors and composer had to meet up frequently to keep the exchange of ideas going.

As soon as the rough arrangements are approved by everyone and the animatic is deemed water tight the next production process will be green lighted and Luc will have to wait for almost all the animation work to be done until he gets to put the finishing touches on his score. Luc has done a wonderful job so far and we're psyched to hear what he will come up with next.