Shot-Production

Step 1: Camera Blocking
Moving Camera Moments are pre-planned to ensure minimal
animation time. “If itʼs not in the shot, why worry about it”.
Step 2: Animatic Animation Blocking
The characters are very roughly animated in the scene using
solid objects representations to accurately time and plot the
shots. An extremely low res preview is exported from the
computer for use in the animatic.
Step 3: Animatic Polishing
The low res previews are edited together and placed back into the animatic to establish the
precise timing of each shot for use in animation.
Step 4: Animation and Motion Capture
Animate the characters in the scene and/or motion
capture the skeletons to be placed back into the characters.
This stage can involved multiple rounds of animating, and
then going back and fixing and cleaning up the motion in the
shot inserted all the objects needed in the scene. This is the
longest step in the production process and may involve
multiple sessions of motion capture and clean-up to achieve
the desired results.
Step 4.5: Lighting and Render tests
Lighting and Render tests can be done WHILE animating your scenes or can be done
afterwards depending on the amount of scenes and the changing locations. If done after the
animation process, the focus on lighting can be done by a dedicated team member rather
than the animator. The render tests may consist of multiple
frames of animation to test motion blur and other aspects of
motion that need to be set.
Step 5: Full Resolution Rendering
Once the animation is complete and every shot has been
planned out, the scenes are exported one at a time and sent
to the render farm manager for distribution and output to the
render nodes. The render farm will export Targa sequences.
Step 6: Visual Effects and Compositing.
The rendered Targa sequences are then brought back into After effects or Autodesk Flame
for additional compositing and additional 2d effects onto the animation. If a character was
matted against a blank background to save time while rendering, this stage is where the shots
are brought together for the final image output.