What’s Our Animation Process?
In our recent blog, How Animation Can Bring Your Brand to Life, we shared why the moving image is a fantastic storytelling tool. Yet, where do you begin? By starting with pen to paper, we can breathe life into a creative idea. Let’s break down the animation process so you know exactly what to expect.
Here’s our recipe for a great animation…
Preparation (Script + Concepts):
Most animations include a voiceover (VO), which helps guide the pace of the animation. We need words for this voiceover to speak! You might develop the script yourself, or collaboratively with us.
With the script in hand, we develop three potential creative routes for you to choose from. This involves metaphor concepts, moodboards, creative directions and colour palettes.
Above: Setting the look and feel for the animation
Measure (Lo-fi Storyboard):
Once the broad concept is selected, we sketch out a series of pictures similar to a comic strip containing details on the intended visual content, metaphors and transitions, paired with your script. This is called the lo-fi or sketched storyboard.
This is the perfect stage to test ideas and implement your feedback. Note that the visuals are very simple at this stage – the focus is on content, not style.
Mix (Hi-fi Storyboard):
When you are happy with the general content of the lo-fi storyboard, we bring this together with the visual style explored in the Concepts stage to create a hi-fi storyboard. The visuals in this storyboard are exact replicas of how your final animation will look.
This stage is the most important sign-off point! It is the final step before animation production begins. As animation takes a long time, it is difficult to make large changes to the content or visual style once it is in motion.
Above: Developed storyboard by Buttercrumble
Bake (Animation Production):
This is the really exciting part! After recording the voiceover, we bring your hi-fi storyboard to life through motion and pair it with background music to create your final animation.
We can provide your animation in various formats so it can live across multiple channels, and add subtitles to boost accessibility.
Enjoy!
As always, our process is collaborative – we want your thoughts and feedback at every stage of the process. If you’d like to bring animation to your brand, project or story, please do get in touch; we’d love to support you.