Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1081203
46 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2019 the animatic is the most labor-intensive part of the process," Williamson attests. "There are no dailies with actors in a scene to start cutting immediately, like live action. I have hundreds of separate lines of dialogue and thousands of storyboard panels. I also get the script and a PDF of the storyboards in order, so I know how the story is flowing and where the dialogue should be falling in the scene. It's a more naked feeling than in live action, where you have the moving images and the sound married from the get-go. In my timeline when I'm starting an episode, it's a void. "It's almost like writing a script when you start with a blank page," Williamson continues. "Here, in the animatic stage, it is up to me to marry all these images and sounds and make a show out of it." He notes another thing lacking in animation compared to live action. "In live action, you'll have a performance with interplay between characters, and comedic timing built in within a master shot perhaps, and then you cut from there," he explains. "In animation, with the dialogue performances all separated individually, the editor decides the timing between every single line of a character," he adds. "There's a tremendous amount of freedom in sculpting a performance because the media is so raw. There's an artistry in that, but it's also nebulous as to how it's going to land — and nobody knows until it is put together." DuckTales is a very script-driven show, according to Bocz. "The story is really fleshed out in the script phase and it creates a good guideline for the storyboard artist to plan out the scenes," she says. "The animatic phase is both complex and time-consuming. I'm building the boards from scratch and, for me, that's where I feel I'm the most creative." "I'm really pacing out the story and working closely with the director to see if the jokes are playing and the action is working," she adds. The most arduous aspect of creating DuckTales. ©Disney Enterprises, Inc.