One of the best things about animation is that it's not just one thing. It is a wide range of skills and disciplines that all come together in one thing. Writing, painting, drawing, still photography, video photography, graphic design, music composition, recording, voice characterization, sound effects, video editing - they are all crucial parts of the process. The animation itself is actually one of the easiest things to do - but only if all those other things "pave the way".
The stages I go through in producing an animation are 1. Initial Concept 2. Scripting 3.Design
4. Production 5. Compositing 6. Post Production
1. The Initial Concept is probably the most important stage. I've started enough projects that I was unable to finish to come up with a few criteria for evaluating ideas. First of all, it has to be extremely interesting to me. It has to hold my attention through literally hundreds of hours of often very tedious work. It should be able to roughly fit into a five minute spot. It should be appropriate for animation - meaning things have to move and happen in a big way. It seems ridiculous to me to have animated characters standing around talking to each other. I've done it enough times to know that it requires enormous amounts of extremely boring work for results that just don't warrant it.
2. Scripting and Design overlap each other throughout the beginning of the process. It begins with a "treatment" - a brief statement of the concept. That might be accompanied by some sketches of characters and settings - just to get a feel for what the project is to be. This is more of an evaluative process, of seeing if the approach is something that could really work. Once that determination is made - or sometimes as part of making that determination, I move into the next step - the rough script. This is where I sit down, have a couple drinks and play the whole thing out in my head. Then I just write down what I see. I get down the general story line and any other random thoughts that bubble through. Then I may spend a couple of weeks going through that - refining it and analyzing it, planning out what sort of special effects or techniques might be required to pull it off .
Then I start doing some intitial design work. Maybe it starts with character development, maybe it starts with designing backgrounds, maybe it starts with designing props. It may start with experiments. But no matter how it starts, the initial design phase involves bringing aspects of that world into "being". Character development is by far the most challenging part of the production design. It takes a good ten hours (sometimes more) to build a character model to fit my particular workflow. It surprises a lot of people to find out that I do most of the work in Adobe Illustrator. The ultimate goal of the initial design phase is to produce one or more "concept images" - semi-developed drawings of a couple high points of the project. Once I have those, I go ahead and write up a final script which details action, dialogue camera angles, etc. At that point I will also write up a list of assets that need to be produced. The last thing that comes out of the scripting stage is a dialogue script.
3. Design really becomes the focus at this point. All of the assets get generated, the backgrounds get finalized, the bugs get worked out of the characters, and I start developing the "concept images" into actual finished scenes. Working from the final script, I create a series of renderings that describe all the action and interactions within the project. This is my version of storyboarding. I don't end up with sketches - I end up with actual chunks of the finished product. When I have a couple representative images from each scene, I record and assemble the dialogue track. The dialogue track is what sets the pace for the action. It is the "rock" upon which everything else gets built. When its finished, I match up my storyboard images to it to create a kinematic. I use this as a rough guide for the production phase..
4. The Production stage is actually a cycle of events that gets repeated over and over for each scene. First, I chart out each frame on a dope sheet. This is where the motion and action gets designed - frame by frame. I actually use the storyboard images as "primary keyframes" at this point. Another thng that happens is that the dialogue gets charted on the dope sheet - the character's mouth shape for every frame. This will ultimately be what syncs the dialogue. After the dope sheet is created, I produce a set of "secondary keys" with notations as to what frame they correspond to. Then I make a copy of those secondary keys for each of the characters in the scene, and remove the other characters. That gives me a full set of annotated keyframes for each character in the scene. Then it's time for the tweening. Again, based on the dope sheet, this is where the eases, squashes, stretches and any other base effects get applied. Then I export a SWF file for each character sequence, and check out the action. This is my version of pencil testing. After I'm happy with the way the sequences run, I'll go back to the drawings, and using the dope sheet, I'll do the mouth transformations that go with the dialogue, and export new SWF files. I'll use these to create a leica reel by glomming them all together in a QuickTime movie, and then lay that on the dialogue track to check the sync. When I'm happy with that, it's on to the next scene. Sound time consuming? It is! But I've gotten to the point where I can produce finished dialogue sequences at the rate of about 45 minutes per second per character.
5. After I have those basic SWF files for the entire project, and I'm happy with the way the leica reel looks, it's time to move into the Compositing stage. There are all kinds of things that you can do to those SWF files. I'm not going to go into them because I don't want to give away all my secrets. You don't need to do anything to them. Sometimes I just pull them straight into After Effects, along with the backgrounds and other elements. This is where I apply lighting effects or motion effects, do the pans and sometimes I'll cheese out on the zooms here - though I don't recommend it. Its just a process of assembling all the pieces into final, finished scenes. I think it's the part that's the most fun.
6. Post production is the final stage. This is where I pull all the finished scenes into Adobe Premiere and lay them onto the dialogue track. At this point, I actually have a movie, and I feel pretty good about myself. And this is where I put the project away for a few weeks. I do this mostly to let me "shift gears". The last things the project needs are the sound effects track and the music score. These things are very different from everything that's gone before, and if I don't "shift gears" I'll cheese out on them because they don't seem that important from the "visual perspective". But they are extremely important. A crappy score will ruin a project, no matter how good everyting else might be. And that makes it hard because I am in no way a musician. I have no natural rhythm or coordination required to play a musical instrument. Intellectually, I can see the theory and mathematics behind it, and understand some of the basic technical concepts of it - I just can't do it. So I let the computer do it for me. There are all kinds of music generation programs that will work, but I like SmartScore. This basically lets me produce sheet music on the computer screen, by actually placing notes on a staff. I can start of with a simple tune or progression of notes, copy it, change it, apply instruments to it, create variatons and orchestrations, and come up with something pretty decent. I generally create several themes that I can use to enhance what's going on in the animation, and splice it all together in Premiere.
Sound effects are fun. Spending an afternoon making funny noises into a microphone with bizarre implements is very satisfying to me. One of my favorite effects is grinding two pieces of styrofoam together. There's a little tip from the old man. Anyway, again, when I get all the little sound clips made, I bring them into the Premiere project, and lay them into the movie. I like to export separate tracks for the dialogue, sound effects and score, and then bring them all together into a new Premiere project for the final export. This makes it a lot easier to tweak them. When it all looks good and sounds good, I export the final project.
And that's basically the process.