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animatics<br />
42 d<br />
Above: Just-released Antics Pre-Viz<br />
puts movie-style animatics and previsualization<br />
in the hands of the<br />
consumer for under a grand.<br />
nimatics<br />
Animatics gets George Lucas all hot and<br />
sweaty. We lift the lid on what he knows<br />
and what you’ve been missing. BY ED EWING<br />
T<br />
hirty years ago when George Lucas was developing<br />
the Star Wars trilogies, he used footage of World War II<br />
dogfights to show his stop-start model-animators what<br />
he wanted the final battle in his film to look like. His sketched<br />
storyboards were legendary for their detail, and when The<br />
Empire Strikes Back came around he used traditional techniques<br />
to roughly animate them on film. Crude, pencil-drawn sketches<br />
of AT-AT Walkers stop-framed their way through Lucas’ moving<br />
storyboard, and into cinematic history.<br />
Fast-forward 20 years and Lucas was taking full advantage<br />
of new technology to give him the creative control he craved.<br />
“George can finally ‘sculpt’ the film itself,” gushed the<br />
StarWars.<strong>com</strong> Web site in 1998. “Using animatics, the film<br />
has be<strong>com</strong>e a responsive medium. As a result, Episode I will be<br />
closer than ever to the Star Wars movie that George wants to see.”<br />
Skip ahead another technological light-year to <strong>2005</strong> and<br />
animatics – or 3D previsualization – is an important and influential<br />
part of the movie-making process. It’s not unusual for entire films<br />
to be blocked out in animatics, for actors to act against a bluescreen<br />
with animatic footage to guide them, or for directors to<br />
work-up ideas in animatic as part of their pitch. And it’s not just<br />
Lucas and his Hollywood colleagues who have access to the<br />
technology – software like RealViz StoryViz and Antics Pre-Viz<br />
can put studio-style power in your laptop.<br />
Cruise control<br />
David Dozoretz is at the forefront of animatics in Hollywood.<br />
In the mid-90s he was an art director assistant at Lucas’ studio,<br />
Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). ILM was trying to sell Paramount<br />
the idea of a helicopter and train chase on a new movie, Mission:<br />
Impossible. Dozoretz was asked to make an animatic to<br />
demonstrate the excitement and flow of the scene.<br />
“In four weeks we put together 100 low-res shots,” Dozoretz<br />
explains in his online bio. “It was the first time CG animatics had<br />
been used to previsualize an entire sequence.” That animatic<br />
pitch helped sell the film not only to Paramount, but to movie<br />
star Tom Cruise as well.<br />
It also made Dozoretz’s career. Lucas saw the animatic and
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