Nick Gellatly
Building the Animatic
Since the very beginning of first year, I have been admiring Adobe tools very nervously from a safe distance and, as you will see in Part 1 of my Week 4 blog, I was no less frightened of After Effects. The workshop in Week 3 was very useful but I will not pretend to be proficient and it has taken me quite a while and a lot of step-by-step guidance from ClaudeAI – acting as a digital users guide – but finally, and rather proudly, I can show you 90 seconds of a film:
Before you ask, it is not supposed to be animated – this is simply a stepping stone along the way to creating a new title sequence for ‘My Beautiful Laundrette 2026’.
Starting with an animatic
Having finished fourteen storyboard frames, the obvious next step felt like opening the first one and animating it. I am glad I did not. I had no real idea yet which frames needed movement and which could sit quietly, and I would have spent a week making something beautiful in the wrong place.
An animatic is the cheapest possible version of the finished piece. All the stills in order, at the right lengths, with rough sound underneath, so that you can watch the shape of the thing before committing to any of it. If it does not hold as a slideshow it will not hold once animated either.
Two things I learned before I started
The first was disappointing. My frames are flat paintings, and to animate them I need their elements on separate layers: the water turning independently of the objects, the flag moving separately from the newspaper. Canva has a layer separation tool, so I tried it on my benchmark image. It gave me six rectangular blocks, which is to say the left wall, the floor, the bench, the machine, the right edge and the porthole, and not one clean cut-out of anything I needed.
That has changed how I will make the rest of my assets. Rather than generating a finished picture and taking it apart, I will generate each element on its own against a plain background. More images, but far less unpicking, and I will own the layers from the start.
The second thing was more cheerful, and it was arithmetic.
I had already chosen 96 beats per minute for the soundtrack, because ninety seconds at that tempo is exactly thirty-six bars. What I had not noticed was what happens at 24 frames per second. One bar becomes exactly sixty frames, and one beat exactly fifteen. Set the composition to 24fps, place a marker every sixty frames, and every cut in the sequence falls on a downbeat without any further thought. Had I used 25fps, which would have been my instinct as a British default, a bar would have been 62.5 frames and nothing would ever have lined up.
It is a small decision, made for a musical reason, and it quietly organised the entire edit.
Learning to write scripts
This is the part of the week I had not anticipated.
After Effects will run scripts. You write a file, choose File, Scripts, Run Script File, and it carries out whatever you have described. I had never written one, and I was not expecting to start now.
I began with the markers, because there were twelve of them and each one needed the playhead moved to an exact frame with no layer selected. Entirely possible by hand, and entirely possible to get wrong without noticing. Once that worked I wrote one to import the twelve stills, stack them so that each frame covers the one before it, and set all their start times. Then one for the audio, and finally one for the render.
What surprised me was not the time saved, although there was plenty of that. It was that writing the scripts made me say precisely what a correct result looked like. The marker script checks that the composition really is 24fps and 2160 frames before it does anything. The build script tells me when a file is missing rather than leaving a silent gap. The render script insists the audio output is switched on, which is the usual way people produce a perfectly good silent video and only discover it after uploading.
I have spent a long career writing processes down for other people to follow. It had not occurred to me that doing the same thing for a computer would make me think more clearly about my own work.
The render script did not work the first time, incidentally. The solution was to write a second version that reported what it was doing at each stage rather than stopping quietly, and the fault became obvious within a minute.
A small technique worth remembering
I will note this down because I will certainly forget it.
Place all twelve stills in the timeline with frame one at the bottom of the stack and frame twelve at the top, then set each layer to begin at its own cut point. Because the later frames sit above the earlier ones, each new frame simply covers the last. There are no out points to trim and no gaps to chase.
I had expected to spend the evening dragging the ends of layers about. Stacked this way round, there is nothing to drag.
Sound
Everything here is scratch audio, which is to say rough and temporary.
There is a click track at 96 beats per minute to keep the edit honest, and a washing machine, a coin drop and a low bass note from Freesound, filtered to Creative Commons Zero so that there are no licensing questions when it goes online.
For music I used a track called India from Bensound. It runs at 99.5 beats per minute, which sounds close enough until you work out that it drifts around three and a half seconds away from the picture over ninety seconds, putting every cut in the second half slightly out. Slowing it by three and a half per cent corrects it entirely and cannot be heard.
There was a piece of luck as well. The track opens quietly, builds through its middle and reaches its peak between sixty and ninety seconds. My sequence is muted and fractured at the start, with the full spin arriving at sixty seconds. The music becomes loud exactly where the pictures do, with no editing at all.
I should be honest that this is placeholder music, and probably not the right answer. I noted earlier that a stock track called India risks labelling the South Asian part of this story rather than building it in, and that is still true. What I actually want is the collision between the Southall bhangra scene and the synth pop of the same year, both of which were genuinely the sound of London in 1985. That is work for later, but it is a better idea than anything I will find in a library.
What the animatic has told me
Watching it through is the first time this has felt like a piece of film rather than a folder of pictures, and three things became clear that were not clear on paper.
The quiet frames in the middle hold for longer than I had feared, which means less animation than I had budgeted for. The spin at sixty seconds carries most of the weight, so that is where the effort should go. And the ending arrives a little too quickly, which I had suspected but could not be sure of until I could watch it.
That is what an animatic is for. It turns opinions into observations.
Next comes separating the assets properly, one element at a time, and discovering whether a painted washing machine can be persuaded to turn.
References, Credits and Prompts
Film
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), directed by Stephen Frears, written by Hanif Kureishi. This is a student re-imagining of its opening titles and has no connection to the original production.
Music
“India” by Bensound. Music by Bensound.com. Free licence with attribution. Slowed by 3.5 per cent for this project to match the sequence tempo of 96 BPM.
Sound effects
All from Freesound, filtered to Creative Commons Zero.
Click track
Generated for this project at 96 BPM. Not a library file.
Images
All fourteen storyboard frames generated with AI image tools, directed to a written style specification of my own. See the prompt section below.
Typeface
Poppins, by the Indian Type Foundry. Designed by Jonny Pinhorn with Ninad Kale, Shiva Nallaperumal, Michelle Parmar, Rahul Gajjar and Liang Hai. Released under the SIL Open Font Licence. Chosen for the titles, which are not yet in this version.
Tools
Adobe After Effects, Canva, Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude.
Prompts
As with my other posts, I am recording the prompts behind the images. Every one of the fourteen frames was generated from the same style instruction, with only the contents of the drum changed between them. Keeping the style text identical is what holds the sequence together.
The house style, used unaltered on all fourteen frames:
A bold modern gouache and acrylic painting on canvas, 16:9 landscape, faceted cubist-influenced style. Flat painterly illustration, visible directional brush strokes, matte paint texture. Every surface shattered into angular geometric facets and triangular planes of contrasting colour. Hard-edged deep-indigo outlines. Flattened, tilted perspective. NOT photographic, no film grain, no 3D render, no vector clip art, no gritty realism.
PALETTE exactly: ink navy #121D27, laundry cream #F0CC96, warm orange #DE802D, vermilion #C0421A, turquoise #3F7D75, deep teal #2A5350, ochre sand #D5AF75, brick brown #663E26, pale sage #89A99B.
No people, no faces, no hands. No readable words, no lettering, no logos.
One frame instruction, as an example. This is frame four, the benchmark image, which sets the standard the other thirteen are judged against:
SUBJECT: the interior of a 1980s South London laundrette. A washing machine dominates the centre and its large circular porthole is a window onto a churning world painted inside the circle.
INSIDE THE PORTHOLE, a strong anticlockwise spiral of turquoise and white painted water. The objects caught in that spiral stay whole, large, solid and instantly recognisable, clearly separated from one another against the water, tilted and rotated by the spin but never dissolved or abstracted into it. Use only these six objects, generously sized and well spaced: a torn fragment of a red, white and blue flag broken into a few large angular shards; a folded newspaper with blocks of solid black standing in for a headline; a short row of brick terraced houses tipped on its side; a whisky bottle and tumbler; two or three loose banknotes; a panel of bright South Asian block-print pattern in turmeric yellow and coral. Leave clear turquoise water between the objects so that each reads cleanly.
COMPOSITION: the porthole sits slightly right of centre and is large. The left quarter is a calm flat plane of cream and indigo wall with nothing in it, deliberately empty for titles.
On the saturation. The palette stays the same across all fourteen frames, but the first three hold it at low saturation with navy and ochre dominant, the middle frames let the colour arrive, and the last four run at full strength. Held at arm’s length you can see the temperature rise across the sequence.
A note on how this was made. The images are AI generated. The concept, the metaphor, the storyboard, the decision to abandon my first visual style, the palette and every art direction choice inside those prompts are mine, as is the build in After Effects. Where I have used AI to research, to draft or to generate, I have said so, and the full record sits in my module development log.
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