Our animation process is designed to act as a flexible framework for every project, allowing us to adapt and optimise the experience to work best for you. No stage is completed in isolation, but with consideration of the entire piece as a whole. Boundaries between stages are often blurred, ensuring a holistic approach that serves the final outcome in the best possible way.
As your guides, we navigate you through each step with expertise, ensuring your vision is brought to life with precision and passion. Come with us as we embark on this animation journey together and discover a path to limitless creative potential.
We begin the journey with a collaborative approach. Defining your audience and messaging and gaining an understanding of your goals and creative brand strategy. We establish the scope of the project, set project milestones, deadlines and budget to ensure a smooth pipeline. With everything in place we can start to consider the creative direction that will guide the project.
Here we craft the narrative of the project, not just in terms of the audio or text, but also the visual narrative, considering what we need to show as well as what we need to tell.
No one knows your story as well as you, so collaboration and feedback is key. If you already have a script when you approach us, we use this stage to help guide and translate it to best tell your story through the medium of animation. You know your story – we’ll help you tell it.
We work to find the best possible voice that encapsulates your story and brand, guiding the audience through the journey of your film. We can curate a shortlist of voice over artist auditions for you to chose from, offering recommendations and guidance to help you make the right choice.
The voiceover can also be a valuable tool for our animators, often leading the pace of the film. As such, it is beneficial to have this recorded before the animation stage when possible.
Entering the realm of design and illustration, and working to the creative treatment and any brand guidelines, we craft a selection of images that capture key moments from the script. Defining the look and feel of the film as a whole and allowing an opportunity for refinement of the art direction before we move into later stages.
Crafting a detailed visual roadmap, we outline the sequence of scenes and moments, providing a comprehensive guide for our animators.
Often, this stage is presented as an animatic – a video of the storyboard as a sequence of images timed out to the pace of the voiceover. Moments of animation can sometimes require multiple frames to depict just a single second of animation. An animatic allows for a better understanding of the flow of the imagery and pace of the film as a whole.
Now is the time to bring everything together and breathe life into your story. Our animators get to work, crafting and refining every movement with finesse and meticulous attention to detail.
The animation stage will almost always take the most time to complete on a project. It’s here that the importance of the preceding stages comes into focus, acting as a foundation for our animators to build from and ensuring every motion best serves the story unfolding on screen.
Here, we add sound design and music to the mix, refining the voiceover and balancing everything together to work harmoniously with the animation. This creates a seamless, immersive audiovisual experience for the audience.
At every stage we aim to provide plenty of opportunities for feedback and discussion, ensuring that we never lose sight of your objectives.
Once the final project has been approved, we export the video files to your requirements and send them over to you. Now comes the really exciting part where you get to share your story!
Get in touch and we'll warm up with a heart to heart.