Animation Process

We take your idea and key messages and work with you to find out how we can best deliver these to your audience. This is the stage where we think about the best medium for the audience, length, style, distribution channel, voice over, tone and any existing material that you would like us to be influenced by.

Taking the ideas and key messages we then turn these into a script that will accurately and concisely deliver these to your audience in a fun and engaging way. If if you already have a script, we usually need to go through it and give it some RJDM magic to make sure that it not only delivers the right message, but it delivers it in a way that your audience will remember and is pitched at the right level.

This usually runs alongside the scripting stage and is the visual side of the process. Taking into account your influences, audience and tone of the message we unleash our creativity and come up with styles that we think will work. Once you are happy this will form the style and approach of all our visuals

Once the script and the style have been agreed we then start getting visual! We take the script and put this against a still of what we see happening on screen during that dialogue. We also add some information about the type of action that will be happening so you can see this coming to life.

A very important of the process, the voice over of the animation will set the tone and more importantly, pace of the animation.

This is a moving version of the storyboard – well sort of. Think of this stage as a very slow flick book! The animatic takes the still panels of the storyboard and places them on a timeline to the recorded Voice Over track. By doing this we can get a rough idea of the length the animation and the individual shots that make this up.

If this animation is in 3D then we will model the character. This involves building the character and any assets in 3 dimensions in the computer. Think of it as a high-tech computerised version of play-doh!

As modeling will give you a basic grey version of the object, we need to add the correct textures and colours to it. What these are and what they look like is entirely dependent on the style of the animation as the same object could look photo real or very stylised, depending on the look we want to achieve.

Once the character is build we need to add the bones that will enable us to make them move

This is the first stage of seeing the animation coming to life. We take the modeled assets and environments (or sometimes just a block of the right size – hence the name ‘Block test’) and time out each scene roughly with key poses to the required length of the animatic. This way we can quickly see if we have enough or not enough time for each scene.

This is the stage where the animation really starts to take shape. The animation is smoothed out so that all the movement looks realistic and all the little additions that add personality to the characters are added. This stage also sees all the background assets being replaced by the final versions so the animated scene is completed and ready to render.

This stage is where everything starts getting put together. Al the finished animation and environments are rendered, textured and lit correctly to create the right look and feel for the final piece. Once the rendered scenes are available they are put together and fine tuned to make sure they all work together. This stage is also where any visual effects or motion graphics can be added.

Once we are happy all the scenes are right we put them on a time line and edit together, add a music score if necessary as well as any sound FX.

Once we have added all the sound FX, music and fine tuned the edit we have a final movie ready to be uploaded to the web, or sent to TV stations for Broadcast.