An Overview of the Short Animation Process - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 2

Fortunately, there is a time-honored structure for actually fi nishing animation projects. It consists of three
stages: preproduction , production, and postproduction . Mysteriously and oddly named, to be sure, but
there they are.

Preproduction

Preproduction encompasses everything you do before you touch a single polygon of 3D. Story development,
storyboarding, a rough sound track, and the assembly of a story reel become the bedrock of the rest of your pro-
duction. The time you spend here will make the modeling, animating, rendering, and compositing worthwhile.

Before anything else, though, comes the story. Without a good story, your production will be little more than
a study or an extended animation test. A “good” story, though, is not only one that will interest or amuse your
viewers, it is one that is producible with the time and resources that you have available. Choose too ambi-
tiously, and you're on your way to “Natural Causes” before a pixel ever hits the screen.

A good subject for a short anima-
tion is more like a “short short
story” than a novel or any of the
longer narrative forms. It will grab
the viewer's interest, sympathy, or
comedic sense almost right away. It
will focus exclusively on express-
ing the theme of the story, or
setting up the joke, if that's what
you're going for. At this stage, it is
a balance between your resources
and ambition, and you are advised
to save the 20,000 character epic
battles for later in your career.

When your story is in order, you
proceed to creating storyboards.
Storyboards are shot-by-shot (and
sometimes pose-by-pose) break-
downs of your story in a visual
format. Usually done as line illus-
trations, they help to organize
your thoughts on how the written
story will translate onto the screen.
You don't have to be the world's
greatest sketch artist to pull off an
effective storyboard for your short

Figure 1.1 A script