The Boords Animatic Tool makes creating, editing and sharing animatics a breeze! It's designed to allow you to edit the timings of your frames, add sound files and share work with your team and/or clients.
Here, we'll give you a rundown on the Animatic Tool's features and help you get started with creating animatics of your own. Check out the video below to see it in action or read ahead for the step-by-step guide.
Accessing the Animatic Tool
First things first, open the storyboard that you want to work on and click Animatic.
Animatic Tool
Animatic settings
Head to the Settings page in the bottom right-hand corner.
On the Settings page, you can customise exactly how you want your animatic to look and behave.
Frame timings
If you're not planning on syncing your frames to a sound file, you can specify the total length of your animatic in the settings panel.
Position the timings of your frames across the duration of the animatic by holding the shift key while dragging the frame markers (i.e. the little dot above the frame thumbnails) into place.
Or, you can set your frame timings to an even distribution across the duration of the animatic by clicking "Distribute frames evenly" on the settings page.
☝️Note: Make sure to check the "Loop playback" box if you want the animatic to loop, rather than stop at the end of playback.
Adding a sound file
If you'd like to add your own sound file, you can upload it directly from your device by selecting Upload sound, then Choose file. The duration of your animatic will be set by the duration of the uploaded sound file.
Both WAV and MP4 files are supported. Files can be a maximum of 20MB.
Once you've uploaded your sound file, use the waveform to help sync the audio to your frames.
Turning the subtitles on will also help in syncing the frames to the audio. This will display the sound notes associated with each frame as an overlay on the playback.
To turn the subtitles on, check the "Show subtitles" box on the Settings page.
A thumbnail preview for each frame can be shown or hidden by checking the "Show frame thumbnails in the timeline" box. Displaying the thumbnails allows for quick and easy navigation through the frames of your storyboard.
Sharing an animatic
When you've finished your animatic and are ready for feedback from clients/colleagues, you can share your work through the sharable link or by downloading the animatic as an MP4 file.
Read more about that here.
There you have it, that's the Boords Animatic Tool!
If you have any questions, send us a direct message by clicking on the chat bubble in the bottom right-hand corner - we'd love to help!