the.com/animatic

A movie's rough draft that already knows its own timing.

means A rough, filmed-together sequence of storyboard images, often with scratch dialogue, music, and sound effects timed to a working soundtrack, used to plan out a scene or film before any real animation or shooting happens.

from A blend coinage — 'animate' plus the adjective-forming suffix '-ic' (on the model of words like 'cinematic') — that grew up inside mid-20th-century animation studios, Disney among them, as a working term for storyboards shot and cut to timing before a single frame was actually animated. It later migrated into live-action filmmaking, where directors use the same trick to pre-visualize action scenes and effects shots.

definition
storyboard images cut to a timeline with audio
purpose
tests pacing before anyone animates a frame
origin
popularized by disney and pixar previz teams
honest truth
ugly drawings, suspiciously convincing emotional impact
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