In my past animation career, I’ve had opportunity to participate in some team projects. I’ll analyze how a completed animation work is created on my experience working in a team.

Storyboarding and Initial Framework

The process begins with establishing the story outline, storyboard artists will create the initial drafts. This stage may require multiple iterations, but we can shape the overall framework of the story through these drafts.

Draft

Key Animation and Secondary Animation

Once the storyboards are finished, the production moves into the animation phase, key animators will responsible for creating the keyframes and tiedown, which is the most important part in the animation progress. Then In-between Animator complete drawing of in-betweens frames, ensuring the movement are smooth and natural. At the same time they require constant update with other team members to keep consist with project’s version. Dialogue, sound effects and background music production begin to take shape.

Tiedown

Clean-up and Background Design

After this part completed, the clean-up progress begins, in the most of situation clean-up animator do not need to change too much of tiedown, but sometimes it may also include making small adjustments to the original drawings. They often update with tiedown animators to ensure the frames work on a correct direction. At this stage, storyboard artists may also step back in to assist with camera movements.

Meanwhile, the background design team starts to work on creating the environments for the animation. This phase usually works in parallel with the clean-up process and requires significant effort and time to complete.

Clean-up

Coloring and Compositing

The entire workflow is not linear. For example, the coloring process can begin before all the frames have been completed. Meanwhile, animation style decides coloring progress, For this project, the coloring process main use paint bucket tools, so it not require too much workload in this phase relatively.

Compositing

Once some of colored frames are ready, the post-production team begins composing, which involves adding effects and texture to enhance the atmosphere and visuals depth. After finishing this stage, all of clips are editing together and we can get a final version of projects.

Conclusion

Through my experience and research in this project, I’ve gained understanding of the complete production progress. on the one hand everyone should responsible for they own work in time, on the other hand, communication also is a important elements in entire work.