Animation is the art of bringing things to life, making them move and through the animation - telling a story that will resonate with your audience.

Like any other form of narrative, animation is at its best when accompanied by a clear vision for the story. Things like knowing what it wants to say, who it is speaking to and how it wants them to feel. 

This basic concept applies just as well to an animated advert for breakfast cereal as a technical animation about spot welding. The secret of its success will lie in using the right ingredients for each animation - so you don’t end up with a bowl full of aluminium alloy or a car made of cornflakes - and this is where a good brief comes in.

A good brief is the perfect starting point for any animation and if done properly will save time and make your animation more effective; informing more people, selling more cereal and inspiring a new generation of welders. We’ll take it as read that you’ve already mastered the written brief, but if you’d like a helping hand we’ve got our very own briefing form here (www.doodledo.co.uk/brief)

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Pre-Production/Writing the recipe for your animation

With your brief and accompanying documents already sat with doodledo, the animation team will be busy working on a response. This will be a combination of scripts, visual descriptions, storyboards and possibly even an animatic to communicate how we think the animation should look and sound.

The Script

With careful consideration to the information you’ve provided us with and an understanding of your audience we have written words to outline what is heard in the animation. 

This could be:

• voiceover explaining a process
• dialogue between onscreen characters
• a poem or song
• key statements
• a presentation
• any combination of the above

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A Visual Description

This usually sits alongside the script and is to be read in parallel. The visual description outlines, in words, what is seen in the animation as the words are spoken.

This could be something like:

• a robot wheels into frame holding a cake
• the air conditioning unit rotates 180 degrees to show its reverse side
• the farmer gestures for the sheep to pass through a gate
• two businessmen shake hands and then morph into type which reads “Agreement”

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Boards

This sequence of images will block out style references or key moments in the animation to help you understand the composition of (position of elements within) each shot as well as camera movements, visual cues, key scenery and props. Depending on the proposed style of animation this could be: 

• scamps - a storyboard made up of loosely drawn sketches
• photo montage
• full colour illustrated frames 
• character concepts and designs
• mood boards - a collage of influences
• pre-visualisation renders
• examples of pre-existing work
• AI generated images

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Animatic

Think of this as a moving storyboard, the animatic is used for explaining complex movements, timings and synchronisation with voice and music and achieves something that is either difficult with words and pictures or helps sell the overall effect better. These can be:

• Sequenced storyboard frames
• Moving illustrations/sketches
• Demonstration of an effect such as parallax
• 3D camera movement

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Production - Cooking Up Your Animation

Now that the story is written and the plan has been approved - we’re ready to bring the animation in its many elements to life. This process isn’t unlike baking a cake or cooking a meal - you’re going to need your ingredients and equipment ready before you can get cooking, so let’s look at what goes into making an animation?

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Characters

Cooking up an appealing character requires a well seasoned designer/animator with their tool of choice. We’re not talking whisks though, this is more likely to be a pencil, digital tablet or software package and with a dash of inspiration they’re rising to the task like a soufflé. The finished characters should have a design fit for their specific purpose and leave the viewer with a taste in their mouth that they’ll want to experience again. 

The character now requires the ability to move, in animation we call this process “rigging”. Skeletal joints are connected, nodes parented, expressions written and custom controls built, so that our animator has the flexibility to make them move as they wish.

Scenes, Props & Lights

These create the location for our animation, like setting the table for a meal so delicious we can’t wait to cook it. This can be as simple as flat colours or as complex as a cathedral - and the tools to make them are as diverse as the world's themselves. From a couple of clicks to months of sculpting and painting, our animators use their skills and techniques to create an environment to focus and immerse the viewer.

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Typography & Colour

Typefaces aren’t merely clutched from a shelf like dry herbs and sprinkled together hoping it tastes right, the balance of size, positioning, kerning, spacing, colour and movement are carefully considered so that they add a consistent, well-balanced flavour which compliments the animation. 

Brand guidelines are our go-to recipe for ensuring this is just right.

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Animation

This is where things get really tasty, as the animator’s spoon stirs things up, life is breathed into the animation and the individual elements which we spent time preparing really come into their own.

Elements of the animation move with purpose and personality, whether they’re inviting us to join them on a journey of discovery; or demonstrating a life-changing new app. Each movement holds purpose, demonstrating a life we aspire to as well as one that we recognise. 

This is done through the careful movement of characters, objects and typography. Mouths are animated to match the voiceover narrating the story and they bring our sets to life. Cameras take us through scenes to reveal new places and light/shadow play an important role in drawing focus and communicating the passage of time.

The tools for animation vary between projects, whether it be 2D, 3D, CGI or physical; the role of the animator in bringing things to life and the underlying principles are the same but cooking times will vary.

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Post Production & Effects - The icing on the cake

With the animation complete it’s time for the icing and a great big cherry. This stage of the animation process is where hard work pays off and the original vision is realised and hopefully exceeded

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Compositing

This is the process of seamlessly combining different elements so they feel as though they exist in the same world. It could be replacing a green screen prop with an animated one or motion tracking images to video with the intention of extending or embellishing a set with careful consideration of things like light/shadow/grain/colour and physical space.

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Particle FX

Remember that character drinking a hot coffee? This is where we tell the computer how we want the steam to rise from her mug. It’s also where we create snow storms, rain clouds, add dust to the air and set off fireworks. Particles aren’t animated with keyframes in the same way that the rest of our animation is; the computer is told what particles need to look like and behave within a world of physics created by our animator. It’s a quicker and more accurate way to make hundreds or thousands of elements move in a believable way.

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Render

“Render” is code for the process of a computer recording animation and turning it into video or a sequence of images. 

For 3D animation, the computer will fire beams of light at the animation and the resulting images will follow a process similar to how a camera captures a photograph. More complex shapes and materials will take longer to render, especially reflective, metallic or transparent ones. If you hear words like “caustics”, “global illumination”, “subsurface scattering” or “depth pass” - your animator is talking about different things the renderer is doing and these will all make a computer work as hard as it can. The animation rendered from 3D software will usually need to be combined with other elements, processed and then rendered again to become the final video file.

In 2D animation this is where the “full quality switch” is flipped and the animator replaces the lower detail scenes they were working on with the full detail high quality characters that we want to see move, it’s where motion blur and depth of field are turned on ready for our masterpiece to be created.

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Grading

This isn’t where we find out if our show-stopper has an A+ and a Hollywood handshake - it’s much more important than that. Grading is where the colourist takes all of our animation shots and makes sure that the colour is consistent, corrected and tonally right for the piece. They can then use their tools to make the animation look its very best by enhancing the hard work that our animators have already done.

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Audio Mix

Whether your animation is destined for the dizzy heights of Cinema or TV or if it is destined to sit amongst a suite of videos on YouTube, building a soundscape comprised of voiceovers, music and audio effects and mastering it to the correct specifications is crucial in making sure that it sounds as great as it looks! 

There we have it - an overview and insight into the animation process, this is by no means extensive but hopefully enough to whet your appetite.

If you’re interested in commissioning your own animation then we’d love to hear from you - use the contact form below, email us at info@doodledo.co.uk or give us a call to chat through your idea