learning to love the animatic

Creativity versus commerce. The never ending battle in advertising. There is no greater example of this on going struggle than the animatic, the crude little storyboard come to life. 

Many clients insist upon the creation of an animatic before buying a spot. After making the animatic they place it in testing. They make changes based on those results and often place those changes back into testing. If the results are acceptable they approve the work. I'm not a fan of the practice but understand the clients wanting some assurances before allocating production dollars and media money. I also understand the creatives wanting to ignore its relevance. 

Between the "paint by numbers" nature of an animatic and the adherence to the taste of some faceless focus group, it feels as if the creative is taken out of the creative. The agency, not wanting to handcuff the directors vision, most often won't share the animatic or even acknowledge it's existence. Their heart may be in the right place but the omission of sharing this crucial element only leads to dysfunction and competing views. 

A few months back we produced a project. There was a brief mention on the conference call of an animatic. The agency producer suggested they share it with us. The creatives said NO. That was fine with us. If they didn't want to share it then it must not be that important and why limit ourselves. 

After the call the director wrote the treatment without constraints. We were awarded the job based on that approach. We went into pre-production and even pre vized the job without ever looking at the animatic. Somewhere between the week before shooting and the first round of the offline, we learned the importance of that animatic. All our planning and intricate attention to detail was thrown out the window in an attempt to turn the coverage of the spot we produced into an animatic that was tested. Much to everyone's frustration it didn't work. 

This brings me to this week. We were bidding another project. I found out there was an animatic. I asked the producer to share it with me. He told me it wasn't important. Learning fro my last experience I insisted upon seeing it. He did so only to caveat it with a plea not to take it too literally. We didn't. We interpreted the animatic with the knowledge of how the creative expectations were being framed, what had been tested and what had been approved. Sure enough in our pre-pro meeting the animatic was referenced several times by the client. 

If a client pays for an animatic and pays for it to be tested, they are going to want the animatic. Maybe not an exact frame by frame replication but something within the same family. Embrace it don't deny it. As the director said to me after the debacle from not seeing the animatic, he'd rather have seen it up front. He may have passed or the job or at the very least approached job differently knowing the parameters. Whatever the case it would've been preferable to where we ended up.