Post-Production : Does Pre-Vis Help Your Edit Time? by Karen "Kay" Ross

I'll chime in on this. We storyboard all of our projects. Then we do a table read (or virtual 'cause you know covid) and make an animatic with the actors lines and an animated storyboard movie. It helps us time things out and see if it all works. And then we can get exactly what we want on set with time left over to get other goodies/extras. Seems to work out well for us.

Actually it's interesting that the first thing I do when we're shooting something is talk with Leya and we figur out what that is, what shots I want and what do we need and especially if we can play around with something.

Then she usually creates the storyboards for the shots and I create a shot list, where I usually read trough the script myself and try to act out stuff to see how long something takes and then add a margine of error and that usually is enough for normal shots.

For some of the action shots if you can call them that we've actually just gone to locations and done test footage with our phones and maybe one of us would try acting out something and then edit it together. If it works then we've got a baseline on how to do it.

But the table read and using storyboards to cut together a previz of how the editing would go sounds really appealing and I hope I get to do a project with enough budget to do that soon.

I probably should have read the question a little more. The answer is yes, pre-vis helps a TON on the post side of things for us. If we do it well the first time around, we can basically have a rough cut in no time. Which allows for more time to be creative.

I appreciated both responses, Sam Chambliss, thank you! There is another thread in the Animation Lounge where an animation editor mentioned that doing an "audio play" as a scratch track helps to direct the timing of animation, and thus cuts down on their post-production timing as well. To think - pre-visualization helps to keep all the post elements in line, including audio, and pre-AUDIO helps to keep all the performance elements in line, including visuals. WILD!

we do a lot of pre-vis because of we film action movies, and so they do help to give me an idea on the framing and eventually edit it correctly. And also giving me an idea some b-rolls that I want to get to add into that 'special shots'.

Any prep you get, especially previs if there are heavy FX will most always make things "EASIER."

Agreed, @Warren! There's been quite a bit of chatter in Animation about how crazy live-action filmmakers are when they don't storyboard at the very least. Animators, on the other end, have so many iterations that they have storyboards between their scene beats LOL!