Every project at Merit Animation passes through an animatic — even the ones that never asked for one. It is the single biggest reason our on-time delivery rate is 98%.
What an animatic actually does for you
A storyboard is a comic strip. An animatic is that comic strip cut to the exact length of the film, with scratch voice-over, temp music and every camera move blocked in. Watching it feels like watching a rough version of the finished piece — which is the point. You can judge pacing, clarity and emotion long before a single character is rigged.
For clients, this means the big decisions happen while they are still cheap. Swapping the order of two scenes in an animatic takes an afternoon. Doing the same after lighting and rendering can take a week and a fresh invoice.
How we build one
- Script breakdown. We split the script into shots and mark every on-screen element, transition and text overlay.
- Boards. A storyboard artist draws every shot — clean enough to read, rough enough to change without ceremony.
- Timing pass. Boards are cut to a scratch VO recorded in-house (English, Hindi, or both) with temp music, so the rhythm is real.
- Camera and motion blocking. Pans, zooms, parallax and character positions are animated in 2D so the flow is clear, not implied.
- Review. You get a time-coded MP4 and a comment link. Notes come back as timestamps, we revise, and the approved animatic becomes the production contract.
Formats and hand-off
Animatics are delivered in every aspect ratio the campaign needs — 16:9 for web and broadcast, 9:16 for Reels and Shorts, 1:1 for feed — with a board PDF and a numbered shot list. If we are animating the film, the animatic goes straight into our pipeline. If another team is, they receive a package they can pick up without a call.
