The Storyteller Squad Animatic

Off the back of the animated short, The Storyteller Squad came back wanting to expand into a series of animatics — a format that's having a real moment in the actual-play space right now, especially within the D&D world. For this one, we landed on an action sequence: a chance to put the show's bigger, more kinetic beats on screen in a way the animated short's runtime hadn't been built for.

The client had a very specific vision for this sequence, so we stayed in close contact the whole way through — frequent check-ins, detailed notes, and a few passes on staging and timing until every beat matched what they had in mind.

Action lives or dies on timing. Getting it to land took real back-and-forth instead of one hand-off and a long wait for notes.

Most animatics are a blueprint for a later animated pass. This one was built to go straight to screen as the final piece, so we stuck closer to the character model than usual to get it there — giving the sequence a level of fidelity and weight animatics don't typically carry.

It's not the standard way to approach an animatic, but it was the right call — this sequence was always the final deliverable, so we treated it like one.

The finished animatic gave The Storyteller Squad a fast, high-impact way to put a bigger action sequence in front of their audience — leaning into a format the actual-play world is already primed for, and setting up a template we can repeat for future sequences in the retainer.