Pre-Production: Animatic

Once a storyboard has been produced, the next step is key framing everything important into an animated version of the whole storyboard, or more commonly known as an Animatic. 

Animatics are helpful for placing sound down in time with the storyboard so that it can be determined if it looks right; this includes voice acting, music and sound effects. 

Here is an example of how Pendleton Ward's "Bravest Warriors" did their animatics for their episode "Mexican Touchdown". In the bottom left corner is the timing of the animation with the seconds plus the frames (this was possibly showing it was animated 15 frames per second). It also shows colour in the most important parts like the hologram message and the room with cages and the "Tear Sucker".

Pre-Production: Storyboards

Once everything has been finalized (story, story arc, concept designs etc.), storyboards can now be produced for the animation ready for the Production pipeline. A storyboard will tell the animators and actors/actresses what will happen in keyed frames (Numbered).
Here is the storyboard for the Batman Animated Series produced in 1992.

How the actions are displayed in this storyboard are shown with arrows and star like shapes, where the villians run away from the crime scene, when Batman swoops down, the arc of Batman's batarang being thrown and the direction of the villian's gun being knocked out of his hand. Sometimes, storyboards don't need huge details in them as it is Pre-Production but it needs enough information to tell the animators what happens exactly in the scenes. 

Pre-Production: Concept design

Linking to mood boards and story telling, the next stage is concept design.
It is important that sketches and drawings of one character or the stage are always kept because improvements can be made from them up until it's decided that the character/stage will look like in Production.

This video is of the concept designs for Woody in the movie "Toy Story" which amazingly shows how far the designs have come for Woody, starting from the earliest stage of him looking like a Ventriloquist's doll, all the way to how the real Woody looked in the film. It was shown that Woody needed designs of being a Cowboy doll, possibly based on John Lasseter's (Head of Pixar) thoughts.

Pre-Production: Mood boards

Mood Boards are generally used to help the writers tell the mood of how the story should feel in emotions and most importantly mood.
The questions often asked in this part are "What mood should this piece be?" or "How do we grab the audience's attention in emotions?"
When displaying mood boards, it becomes a competition between writers to show how they would want the story to be portrayed which it will be the Director's decision alone to decide what they should produce based on emotion. Not only is it used for story telling, but also character building too, which will then influence the artists to then design a character based around that mood board. Here is an example of how a mood board used from different characters could possibly be used to create a new character based on appearance and mood.

Pre-production: Scripts

After the story arc is made, scripts are prepared and the number one priority of this is to direct the characters and the sound production team.

The Characters

The most obvious scripts are the ones given to an actor/actress to read and act out their scene. The priorities of the script are that it has the spoken dialogue and when they're going to say it (i.e. after another actor has spoken or after a pause). In some scripts, they will include the way it's said in (angry and shouting, quiet and sad etc.). Here is an example of a short scene from "The return of Duck Dodgers."










The Sound Production Team 

This is mainly for musical composers and sound effects teams that will play Foley soundtrack for certain pieces of animation, or will be in the actual animation itself (usually the musicians). These type of scripts will guide the sound production teams to create a sound from common objects, which will be used later on in the Production pipeline.

Pre-Production: Story arc

In the Pre-production pipeline, there are many vital areas that are needed before an animation is produced. In this post, I shall talk about Story Arcs. This is what one usually looks like.

A story arc tells the rest of the group what will happen in three separate acts known as an Intro, the Crisis and Climax points and the denouncement, or appropriately labelled "Beginning, middle and end". For example, the story arc in Pixar's "Married life" starts from Carl and Ellie (the main characters) getting married and moving into their new home; this is the introduction structured for the rest of the story. The next part of the story arc is the middle of this story where the two are settled in their life and now begin the crisis points, the first of which is where Carl and Ellie are given bad news about the baby. There are more crisis points followed where the cash jar is broken each time for extra costs (new car tyre, hospital bill, house repair). The climax point is where Carl and Ellie are both old. Climax points are otherwise known as "the point of no return" in which the story reaches a point where it cannot ever be changed with other events, so this is mainly involves life cycles (age or death). The denouncement stage is otherwise known as the ending scene, so in this case is where Ellie dies and Carl is left all alone and leaves the church. Denouncements are when it explains the beginning of the ending scene and finalize everything in the whole story.