Our process

Animations come in all shapes and sizes, but ultimately what each client has in common is that they want to tell a story. How an animation actually gets made, however, can look daunting. So to demystify the process, here’s a guide to how we go about it in 8 easy steps:

Kick-off

Potentially the most important part of the process - we sit down and talk about your project. Not only is this vital to finding out what your expectations are, but it’s a great way to learn each others’ ways of working.

In addition to the message you want to get across and the objective of the film, we chat through a bunch of specifics: length, format, style, audience, etc. with the aim of nailing down the story you want to tell.

We will of course continue to talk throughout the process, but a solid base of understanding will help the process run smoothly, and we may find answers to questions you hadn’t considered before.

Design

Alongside the script, we work on how the film will look and move.

During the kick-off, we’ll have discussed design options and found out what best suits your brand and existing design materials - logo, colour scheme, typefaces etc. Using these learnings, we provide you with a deck of design inspiration for you to help us nail down what works best.

Once we have a good idea of your preferences we’ll work up some ‘styleframes’ - still images from key moments in the film. Once these are approved, we’ll have a foundation of design which will inform the rest of the film.

Animatic

Now we’re ready to start building the skeleton of the film

We create an ‘animatic’, which is a rough, moving storyboard. At this stage, the animation is very basic and not indicative of how it will end up - this stage is just for working out timings, and visualising how our story is going to play out.

It’s important to get timings and script changes made during this stage, if needed. Because of the time-consuming nature of animation, keeping this part rough enables us to make changes quickly and without having to abandon lots of work if things change.

Sound

Script and timings are totally signed off by now, and depending on what decisions we made earlier on we may have a voiceover to record, or music and sound effects to mix.

Some projects may not need any audio, or it may be that an audio track already exists which we are working to. 

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Throughout the process, we share work with you at agreed-upon stages.

We don’t want to bamboozle you with too much work to sign off, nor do we want to make assumptions and put in lots of work, only to find out we were going in the wrong direction. Each client is different, so we will work out in advance what your preferred level of feedback and approval is.

The last thing we want is for the next step to be anything other than a lovely surprise…