Guide to Making Your Animated Movie: From Animatic to Post-Production

After polishing the script and storyboard, the production finalizes the animated film's concept art works and the director's treatment and vision. After which, the team also discusses the animated project's technical requirements including the animation technique/s to be used and the production and format/s required for the film's final output. The pre-production stage finalizes all creative, technical, and financial plans to be implemented throughout the course of production.

Animatic

Upon release of the final storyboard and prior to the actual animation, the creative team makes an animatic. This allows them to utilize the initial drawings from the storyboard and the key audio elements required in the film to come together in a raw animation -- functioning more like a moving storyboard with sound and/or music. This makes it easy for them to see if everything is working well in the story in terms of timing, pacing, and storytelling.

The animatic's main purpose is to match itself the closest possible to the final animation, especially with the film's camera shots and angles, timing, and cutting. As the movie's preliminary version, it incorporates each shot as presented in the storyboard, along with the scratch voices and other available sound elements.

Rendered in video format, the animatic allows filmmakers to clarify each action in the story without wasting hours of effort by going directly to the animation process. This prevents them from investing too much time in finalizing the animation right away, only to realize that the storytelling doesn't really work or there are some technical or creative issues that would require major changes. Worse, this may also result to a total revamping of the actual animation, which considerably renders the prior work useless.

Animation

After finalizing the animatic, the production carefully follows the planned workflow to create all visual elements the film needs including the final look of the characters, props, sets, backgrounds, and effects. The actual animation happens during this time. The workflow ultimately depends on the software and animation technique utilized for the project, whether the film uses traditional, stop-motion, 2D computer, or 3D computer animation. Yet, the main point in any animation project, regardless of format and technique, is to allow the drawn images, shot images, or computer-generated images to move and tell a story.

An animatic is a practical means to see if the animation will work according to the film's needs. It also allows easier spotting of any correction or improvement needed in the story and the storyboard before starting with the actual animation.

Compositing

Once the animation of the characters, props, sets, backgrounds, and effects are finalized, it's time to combine all of them through the process called compositing. This allows all the visual elements to come together as one video with synchronized movements to make them look solid together as a film.

Post-production

The sound designer, sound editor, and musical scorer get the video's rough copies so they can prepare the film's different sound requirements. This also includes the finalizing of the characters' voices. Depending on the production, the high-quality scratch voices from the animatic may already be used for the final work or the voice actors are called back for the final voice recording.

Once all sound elements are made available, the sound mixer or engineer mixes the final sound track. The mixing process provides the right volume and direction to all the sound and music elements when heard from the speakers. After which, the final audio track is laid in over the visuals for the release of the animated film's master copy.