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Pipeline for Animated Short

1. Preproduction: establishing a story, visualising the world, planning out the action.

a) Project start: responding to inspirational material • thumbnail sketches,

• draft plans,

• ideas for sound design

b) Analysis and discussion: establishing a range of research for support and further development of the idea

• selection of core art works/artists,

• referencing past cultural products,

• responding to feedback

c) Art Direction and storytelling: Initial designs of sets and characters and story refinement according to story structure

• composition practices,

• shape tests, collages,

• mood drawings,

• thumbnail storyboards,

• initial script writing,

• gathering material for base soundtrack

d) Concepts and Script: Finalising concepts of animation’s world and characters having a refined script for animation.

e) Pre-visualizing the Animation: Storyboarding, Animatic. • creating presentable storyboards,

• constructing an animatic with initial soundtrack,

f) Pre-viz: blocking out the world of animation, setting cameras etc. all to be further used in production.

g) Ending preproduction: Preparing the project to move to its production stage.

• animation’s dope sheets;

• gathering visual references for modelling;

• looking into tutorials needed for project’s challenges;

• preparing lists of objects to be modelled,

• establishing a production schedule ( an economic plan of animation

production)

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2. Production: Building a Virtual World, Animating: a) Blocking the world.

• defining the spaces for further judgements

• Creating base shaders for further developments.

• Extracting the world into components for further development

b) Character’s modelling. • Blocking the shapes,

• refining model,

• judging the overall looks: adding details and tweaking

c) Refining separate environments, • bringing in the details, objects

d) UV layout . Preparing characters and environment for texturing

e) Lighting the scene and elements • Creating key lighting system

• Creating unique lighting systems according to scenes

f) Texturing:

• combining painted, photographed textures,

• using advanced texturing for reach of desired looks

g) Scene animation: animating characters, lights, elements in the scene.

• Reference for animation (finding videos, recording etc.)

• Blocking out the action

• Inbetweening animation

• Refining the performance

h) Rendering: • Creating render passes for complex scenes (Beauty, Occlusion, DOF, etc)

• Researching into render settings.

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3. Postproduction: Bringing the Animated Short together:

a) Compositing: enhancing the looks of the animation

• Replacing/bringing in other elements (sky, grass etc.)

• enhancing colours, effects the feel etc.

b) Designing other film’s element’s (title, credits, opening and closing sequences etc.)

c) Final Editing: bringing post-produced sequences to final editing

d) Product Promotion:

• DVD and CD covers,

• posters,

• synopsis,

• The Making of etc.

e) Delivery and presentation.