13 Steps in Making An Animation Production Pipeline

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how to make an animation production pipeline

1. Animation Project Strategizing

Strategizing will ensure organized and efficient animation pre-production.

2. Animation Story Conceptualization

The creative process of crafting, developing, and communicating different abstract thoughts and concepts.

3. Animation Scriptwriting

Scriptwriting will ensure organized and efficient animation pre-production.

4. Art Direction and Character Design

During this step, you draft and finalize the design of your sets, characters, the typography of your text, dimensions, and the color palette of your animated video.

making an animation production pipeline with scriptwriting art direction and character design

5. Animation Storyboarding

Storyboarding is about creating or inserting a series of sequential images in a comic book-like strip to illustrate the shot composition, flow, look, and feel of your animated video.

6. Animatics

An animatic is basically an animated storyboard. It shows you a series of timed low-resolution storyboard images played in order to illustrate how your animated video will flow.

how to make production pipeline by doing animation storyboarding and animatics

7. Key Animation

This step involves making the skeleton of your animation or a rough sketch of your character's actions. The step may also be considered a 'rough animation'.

8. Animation Background Layout

Animated scenes' backgrounds must also be sketched since they are often affected by your characters' movements.

making a production pipeline by key animation and animation background layouts

9. Animation Lighting

The right lighting in every scene will effectively convey its mood, adding power and impact in character dialogues and movements.

10. Animation Sound Design and Dialogue Recording

This step consists of the musical score, the sound effects, and the voiceover narrations.

how to make an animation production pipeline with animation lighting, sound design, and dialogue recording

11. Animation Color Correction and Color Grading

It involves manipulating the sharpness of colors, contrast, blackness depth, white balance, and the color overlays in the animated video's every scene.

12. Compositing and Final Revisions

This step will merge all the animation elements you and/ or your team has worked on into one video.

how to make an animation production pipeline through color grading and final revisions

13. Run-through and Render the Animated Video

In this step, you must also check for any continuity errors in sound, dialogue, editing, and remedy any minor flaw for the final animation video to come out seamlessly.

Remember to carefully go through every scene and shot in your animated video.