Wednesday is our ‘final’ board meeting, by which point the storyboard should be completely sorted. The editors have only actually had the last 5 days to be working full time with the animators – it’s been a moment here and there stolen from another project before now. So essentially that’s 7 days to get the animatic sorted and sort out the angles, plot holes, ordering, trimming of redundancies…. theoretically all possible. Except every time you request a new angle or additional drawing to fill in either information in the current angle or a new one, the animator has to go and draw that, as well as scan it!

Once all of the frames from the original storyboard had been scanned and put in order, we basically started working in a system where I played around with timings and made a wish list of extra shots/ points to raise while Hye-Bin (my director) was working on some new frames. We meet up when she’s done with that. We quickly insert the frames in to where they were meant to be, I go through my new list with her, we discuss some of the plot points and/or pacing issues that are emerging from the present version, then I go and trim the frames we’d just inserted and look through it some more whilst she goes and draws the solutions we think of during our chat. And repeat.

It’s a process not without difficulties. The main point at the moment is making sure that an audience understands what’s going on – especially since there’s going to be very little intelligible dialogue even when the film’s been finished. For this film we should initally be aiming for an animatic completely without sound, any points which motivate action (e.g. a doorbell) should be drawn on to the frame at the appropriate point or added in FCP. Looking over the current film this weekend I’m considering suggesting the removal of a scene which I think isn’t adding much to the film – however nice it is and how much we’ve worked on it, it’s sometimes a decision you have to make. And the ending’s something that neither of us are yet completely satisfied with – but we’re sort of hoping for inspiration to strike!