HOW DO THEY DO THAT?

​When watching animation in a theater or on television many people are not aware of just how hard it is to do what they’re looking at. So perhaps it would be helpful to list out the process of animated filmmaking here.
 
This is not to say that all the films you see at DRAWTASTICON (or elsewhere) are done in this precise way. But it does at list give a generic process that professionals tend to use, and which non-professionals might benefit from. It will also help our audiences understand just how insane animators are to create what they’re looking at in the first place!
 
What follows is most applicable to a traditional, hand-drawn, 2D animated film. But the process will be almost identical for all other forms of animation production in general – with just slight modifications being made to accommodate the medium of animation being used...
 
With any production there are three stages of creation, ‘PRE-PRODUCTION’, ‘PRODUCTION’ and ‘POST PRODUCTION’. We’ll deal with them a briefly as we can, in separate blogs. Today we’ll deal with ‘PRE-PRODUCTION’...

​A) PRE-PRODUCTION:

01: IDEAS, STORYTELLING & SCRIPT

We have an entirely 'empty page' when it comes to the ideas of an animated film!

Everything begins with an idea and the hardest thing ever is to come up with one! Many films emulate other films and its true to say that everything emerges from a very few core concepts. Suffice it to say, I hope you will appreciate some of the ideas that emerge from the films you’ll see at DRAWTASTIC – although every filmmaker accepts the notion that ‘you can’t please all of the people or all the time’!
 
Once you come up with your basic idea, the challenge next is to create a script that will work filmicly. Usually scripts are text based but with some more visually driven animators, they will sketch out a simple storyboard of their idea without needing to resort to words at all.

02: CONCEPT ART & VISUAL DEVELOPMENT

Concept art from 'Hotel Transylvania'

​As well as create a working script or storyboard of their idea, animators will also develop concept art and other visual development for the work they are about to attempt. This will give a flavor of the ‘look’ their film will have when its final produced. Concept art can be very comprehensive or it may be just a few color wash frames that suggest the final look the film will have. But doing this at such and early stage sets out a visual as well as a storytelling objective for the filmmaker in question.

03: CHARACTER DESIGN
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'Pony' character designs by Hayao Miyazaki.

Side-by-side with concept art goes ‘character design’. Here the animator will visually resolve what their animated character (or characters) will look like when they are animated. Usually a ‘turnaround model sheet’ will be arrived at which defines the look and structure of the character(s) from all viewpoints.

04: THUMBNAIL STORYBOARD

Thumbnail storyboard from 'Pound Puppies'.

If the filmmaker wrote their story idea out as a text-based screenplay, they will now work out the visual storytelling of their film in a filmic way using a 'thumbnail storyboard’. A storyboard is very important to the filmmaker as if they don’t not create one and rush into the production on a scene-by-scene basis they will often find along the way that their ideas do not work filmicly when put together and therefore a lot of time, sweat and drawing will be wasted. A completed storyboard eliminates this risk as you work out all your filmic visual/storytelling ideas before a single frame is animated.

05: AUDIO TRACK

In the recording studio.

If the animation is dependent on dialogue or choreographed movement to music, it is really important to have your audio track in place prior to production starting. With dialogue its is really important to have the final track before animation starts but with music a guide track will do as long as the timing of the music doesn’t change when the final version is recorded.

06: ANIMATIC

Blu Sky animatic.

A very helpful pre-production exercise, once the audio track and storyboard is complete, is to film your storyboard frames and edit them as a real-time video. Known as an ‘animatic’, this preliminary video approach will enable you to watch your film storyline unfold on the screen, as it will appear when you have animated it. Animatics are a really valuable way of testing all your ideas filmicly, providing you with a chance to modify and polish your pre-production work before you enter the full animation production process.

07: ANIMATION & BACKGROUND LAYOUTS

Background layout for 'Spirited Away'.

If you are a traditional, hand-drawn animation filmmaker you will need to pre-plan each scene so you know how large your character drawings need to be in each scene and exactly how their backgrounds are position. Consequently, it is good to draw up both animation and background layouts for you to work with in the future. The animation layouts will define the size of the character you will need to animate in each scene whereas the background layouts will define where the character is placed in each scene and what is behind and/or around them.
 
A really neat thing to do, once all the layouts are completed, is to shoot everything as a final animation, so you can check for any final adjustments you need to make before you animate your film.
 
08: AUDIO TRACK BREAKDOWN

2D animator's Exposure (Dope) Sheet, showing phonetic audio breakdown frame-by-frame.

One last thing you may need to do if you are animating lip-synced dialogue is to ‘breakdown’ (analyze) your final audio track, frame-by-frame, so you know what phonetic sound is going to match each single frame of your animation. To not do this will pretty much ensure your animated dialogue will not work. If you do not have dialogue with your animation however, you do not need to do a track breakdown - unless you are animating to a music track, in which case its valuable to know where the 'beats' of this track fall, frame-by-frame.
 
Next, we'll cover the PRODUCTION process...