2D Animation Process

A look at the main stages

 1. Start with Ideas for your story
• Where will the idea come from?
• What do we do once we have an idea?
….
• Ideas can be found all around you...
• Hidden world of sea creatures, insects, plants,
etc....Think about non-human characters,
fantasy world, fairy tales,
• Your own perception of the world around you.
2. Write down your Story Outline
• Write down an outline of the story - a sort of
road map clearly relating what is going to
happen in your story
3. Write the Script of the story
• Focus on what the characters are supposed to do
scene after scene
• Include camera angles, action, dialogues etc ----
• A script is broken down into definabel sections,
action content, character dialog, narration
• Establish the number of scenes it should have,
• the order of the scenes, what happens in the
scenes, what is said in the scenes, how one scene
transitions to another.
4. Create the Storyboard
• The Storyboard is the blueprint of your
animation project
• It tells the story of an animation, frame by frame
in a visual format
• Used to help filmmakers plan the beginning,
middle, and end of an animation and resemble
comics in their imagery and text.
• Along with the visuals, it consists of notes on the
dialogues, transitions, sound, effects, etc
E.g of a storyboard

Source of image: http://projectorfilms.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html

5. Sound Track
• Recording of audio track…
• Completed cartoon soundtrack will feature
music, sound effects, and dialogue performed by
voice actors
6. Creating Animatics
• Animatics are timed storyboards.
• Using the still images from the storyboard, an
animatic
• They are used in the pre-production stages of
animation
• Communicates framing and important rough
actions of the shot
• Used to check your scene timings
7. Start Animating
• Using Animation Software e.g Flash/Director
• Put it all together and build the scene that you'll
be rendering.
Editing & Publishing
• In the case of an animated movie, you can edit
your rendered clips in a video editing program
and edit them
• When you have all your clips rendered, you can
fire up a video editing program and edit them
together. You can add any additional sounds you
might want to use- music, other effects- or to
replace the audio in the rendered files with
higher-quality sound from the original audio
files you made earlier.
Thank you