How to Make an Animatic: A Producer's Guide

An animatic is your storyboard put on a timeline and given time. You take the panels you drew from the script, drop them into an editor in order, hold each one for the number of seconds its shot should run, then lay a rough voice recording and some temp sound underneath. Play it back and you are watching a rough draft of the finished video, pacing and all, before anyone animates a frame or books a shoot.

I have made a lot of these. The reason I still start here on almost every animation and motion project is plain: an animatic is the least expensive place in the whole pipeline to be wrong. Fixing a scene that runs slow costs a five-second drag of a clip. Fixing that same slow scene after it is animated costs a week.

Here is the whole process in five moves. I will walk through each one below.

1. Lock the script and break it into a shot list.
2. Storyboard each shot as a rough frame.
3. Import the frames into a video editor and put them in order.
4. Time each panel, then sync a scratch voice track.
5. Review, adjust, export, and hand off.

What an animatic is, and how it differs from a storyboard

A storyboard is a set of still drawings. It answers who is in the shot and what the camera sees. It says nothing about how long that shot lives on screen or how it cuts into the next one. An animatic takes those same drawings and puts them in time. Now each panel has a duration, the cuts have rhythm, and you can hear a rough voice reading the lines. MasterClass describes it as the last pre-production checkpoint before full production begins (MasterClass), and that is exactly how I use it.

That difference is the entire value. Two boards can look identical on paper and play completely differently once you decide one holds for four seconds and the next flashes by in half a second. If you want the deeper case for why boards earn their keep before you ever time them, I wrote separately on the purpose of a storyboard. The animatic is the step where those boards start behaving like a video.

Start with a locked script and a shot list

Everyone wants to open a drawing app first. Do not. A good animatic starts with a script written for the screen, meaning every line can be pictured. If a sentence describes an inner feeling no camera can see, it will stall your boards later. Keep the action visual and the dialogue lean. If you need a refresher on writing one an artist can actually draw from, here is how to write a video script.

Once the script holds, break it into a shot list. This is where you stop being a writer and start directing. For every beat, decide how the audience sees it. Does the punchline hit harder as a tight close-up on one face, or a wide shot of the whole room reacting? A working shot list usually tracks a shot number, the shot size (wide down to close-up), the camera angle, a one-line note on the action or line, and a rough guess at duration in seconds. That last column is your first stab at pacing, and you will revise it the moment you watch the cut.

Storyboard the shots (drawing skill optional)

Now draw the frames, and please do not stress about the art. I have shipped animatics built from stick figures and grey boxes to clients who went on to approve six-figure productions off them. Clarity beats beauty here every single time. A clean stick figure that shows who is where reads better than a gorgeous illustration nobody can parse in one second.

One frame per shot is the floor. If a shot has a big move inside it, a character crossing the room or the camera pushing in, draw a start frame and an end frame so the timing has two points to travel between. Photos work too. I have shot reference frames on my phone for live-action animatics when there was no time to draw. Each frame only has to answer two things: who is in the picture and what they are doing.

Time each panel to set the rhythm

This is the move that turns a slideshow into an animatic. Timing is how you steer the viewer without them clocking it. Hold a shot a beat too long and you build dread. Cut fast and you build energy.

A few habits I lean on. Read every line of dialogue out loud with a stopwatch running, because that is the true length of the shot, not your guess. For a suspense beat, hold longer than feels comfortable: four or five seconds on a hand reaching for a door, then snap to a one-second reaction. For comedy, speed up. Half a second on the banana peel and a short wide of the fall lands better than any slow build. A typical dialogue shot sits around two to four seconds, but treat every number as a draft you will overwrite.

Shot	Hold	Role
Establishing shot	3 to 6 sec	Lets the viewer read the setting
Standard dialogue	2 to 4 sec	Matches the pace of a short spoken line
Quick reaction	0.5 to 1.5 sec	Creates surprise or immediacy
Action cut	0.5 to 2 sec	Builds energy through fast succession
Emotional beat	4 to 7 sec	Gives a key moment room to land
Reveal or discovery	3 to 5 sec	Builds anticipation before the payoff

Starting points, not rules. Watch it back and adjust every number to how the cut actually feels.

Wistia’s data on how long people keep watching is worth holding in your head here: engagement stays high on short videos and starts sliding once you run past a couple of minutes (Wistia). Your animatic is where you find and cut the flab that would push a ninety-second explainer to two and a half minutes of slack. For more on using rhythm to hold attention, our visual storytelling examples breakdown shows the same principle at work in finished pieces.

Assemble and sync it in a video editor

Pull your numbered frames into any non-linear editor and lay them on the timeline in order. Each frame becomes a clip you can trim by dragging its edge. Set your default still duration to your average shot length, around three seconds, so the first assembly builds fast and you can start feeling the flow immediately.

You do not need pricey software for this. Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects are the common studio picks (Adobe), but DaVinci Resolve is free and more than capable (Blackmagic Design). The tool matters far less than the discipline of naming files in order, like Sc01_Sh01 and Sc01_Sh02, so they import already sorted. If you are weighing options, we compared the best video editing software for exactly this kind of work.

Add scratch audio so it actually plays

An animatic with no sound tells half the story. Record the dialogue yourself. Your phone mic is fine. Nobody grades the audio quality at this stage; you are capturing the real pace of the words. Drop that scratch voice on its own track and slide it against the panels until the mouths and the lines line up. You will feel where a shot needs to stretch to let a reaction breathe, or tighten to catch a fast line before it trips over the cut.

Then add placeholder sound. A rough whoosh for a quick move, a temp music bed to set the mood. Keep it simple and keep it cleared for use. Even this crude mix hands you a surprisingly accurate read on the finished video’s energy.

Review it with the people whose sign-off you need

The animatic is a working draft, so treat it as one. The single most valuable hour is watching it back with the people who have to approve the final cut: your marketing lead, or the client who signs the invoice. Do not ask “so what do you think.” You will get a shrug.

Steer the room with specific questions instead. On pacing: did the middle sag anywhere, was there a point where the energy dipped? On clarity: was it obvious why the character did that, did any beat confuse you? On payoff: did the opening line land, did the ending carry the weight you were after? Those prompts turn a passive screening into a work session, and they surface the story cracks now, while a fix is a mouse drag rather than a reshoot.

Export and hand it off clean

Once the timing is approved, package it so the next team can run without asking questions. Export at 1920x1080, match the project frame rate (usually 24 or 29.97 fps), and use H.264 for a light MP4 anyone can open. Send the video together with the locked script and the source frames, named in order. A clean handoff is the difference between an animation team starting Monday morning and a lost week of “which file is shot 14.” For where this fits in the larger build, here is our guide to the animation process.

Where this leaves you

That is the whole thing. An animatic is unglamorous work, and that is why it earns a spot on every project: it drags every timing and story problem into the open while a fix still costs one drag of a clip. At Moonb, we build the animatic into every animation and motion project as a standing checkpoint, so clients see the shape of the film and sign off on the pacing before the expensive part starts. Make one for your next video, even a rough one. It pays you back the first time it catches a scene that does not work.