What to Do After Landing Your First Animation Project
- Adilla
- Jan 23
- 5 min read
First of all, congratulations on landing your first animation project!
Whether you’re part of a team or a freelancer, your first animation project sets the stage for the rest of your career as an animator. Therefore, it’s essential to understand the structure of animation work to ensure a smooth animation creative workflow that supports your growth and doesn’t trigger loops of revisions.
In this article, we break down what goes into the animation process as a mini guide for you, dear beginner animator, and how animation project management can accompany you to run your project smoothly.
Table of Contents
Getting Familiar with the General Animation Process
Pre-Production
Begin by reading your client brief thoroughly to align on the vision, audience, and definition of success for deliverables. This is where you start preparing a detailed project timeline with milestones.
Once all of that is clear and defined, get written approval on the scope of work before continuing your work. By ensuring the plan covers everything, it saves the team and the project from going over deadlines and budgets.
Next, prepare the script with all the detailed scenes and actions, characters, and the full story. Whether this animation project is a 1-minute commercial or a full 10-episode animation series, it’s essential to have a detailed document of what the animators are expecting to animate.
Once the script is complete, storyboarding comes. This is where visuals come in; animation sequences are sketched in panels to lay out the angles of the scenes and key shots of character interactions. These act as visual roadmaps for animators to see potential issues before they execute in the production phase.
Beyond the visual process, placeholders for dialogue and sound effects are placed in this part of the animation process to visualise the flow of the story.
When everything has been decided and finalised, present your script, storyboard, mockup, sounds and dialogues to your client before moving forward to the next phase. This helps ensure that your project stays true to your stakeholders’ goals and needs. Lastly, present this to your client before moving forward.
Production
The production workflow for 2D and 3D animation projects differs. For 2D animations, before the actual execution happens (animating part), keyframes are set at important points of the animation timeline. Keyframes guide animators to fill in the ‘gaps’ to create smooth motion, which is called ‘tweening’. However, motion capture will be implemented into the process if the animation project aims to create a more accurate movement.
For 3D animation, animators prepare assets and models of characters, props, and environments, which have been listed during the pre-production phase. They need to rig and build digital skeletons inside the model to be used later to pose and support movement.
Then, the process moves on to texture and shading. Unlike 2D animations, where this phase can be added while setting keyframes, it’s a different phase for 3D animators, as they must place digital lights in their scenes.
As you progress through your production phase, ensure that you follow the approved storyboard to stay on track, including updating your leader and stakeholders with any updates and progress to avoid big revisions that could affect the project’s timeline. Utilise creative project management tools like TESSR to ease the process of approval. And with any digital files, it’s important to always save and back up your files regularly.
Post-Production
When everything is animated, it’s time to assemble the animation frames: compositing. It combines all the separated pieces of animated scenes to create a cohesive shot. This is also where the compositors replace the placeholders for sounds, music, and effects in the scene.
Once everything is combined and ready for rendering, it is converted to a playable video file in the required formats and resolutions. Then, to support your professional career, you can request feedback or testimonials for your portfolio.
Using Animation Project Management for Your First Project
It can get overwhelming when you organise your first animation project; there are deadlines to catch, assigned feedback to act on, and production stages to track. This is where animation project management, like TESSR, is essential to help you navigate this new journey to ensure you stay organised and deliver expected results.
Benefits of Applying Creative Project Management
Identifying Potential Gaps
Planning is an important part of an animation project for ensuring a smooth animation project workflow and preventing gaps. So, when principles of creative project management are applied, it helps make everything structured and less overwhelming for everyone involved.
For example, visual dashboards can help identify those gaps. Like in our TESSR Scene Hub, it shows what's in progress, what's delayed, and the estimated time to complete the task. This helps you prevent last-minute scrambles and ensures nothing falls through the cracks in the process.
Structured Production Pipeline
The animation process (pre-, production and post-) can get chaotic from its multiple processes of linework, colouring and shading, to name a few. Without a clear structure to execute, things like deadline slips and endless revision loops are bound to happen.
A framework like agile can make the process more manageable. Moreover, you can fortify your production pipeline if you combine it with creative project management software features like assigning deadlines to scenes and tracking milestones.
Effective Communication and Review Sessions
Creative project management software comes with features that ease collaboration by centralising feedback and review processes, sharing the latest renditions and facilitating the approval process without needing to upload the latest version elsewhere and losing it in email chains.
All of these features are made possible through TESSR.
As a beginner animator, it can get overwhelming to not have a dedicated space for reviewing and opting for just emails or chat apps. Moreover, scattered comments don’t give you the ability to share contextual and specific feedback related to the specific scene.
So, TESSR built a Review module with its flexible options to share constructive feedback with your team. It allows users to share voice notes, follow up in threaded comments, mark up directly on specific parts of the frame, and assign items without switching tabs.
Key Takeaways
As a beginner, the first step is to familiarise yourself with how an animation project is usually executed.
Completing a successful animation project requires thorough planning across three phases: pre-production, production, and post-production.
Utilising project management tools designed for creatives can help animators identify missing gaps, maintain and organise creative workflows, and streamline the team’s collaboration.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What should I do after getting my first animation job?
Focus on learning and familiarising yourself with the production pipelines, as embracing the creative workflow of the studio can help ensure your work is smooth. And never be afraid to ask your colleagues or seniors.
How do I get better at animation?
Other than learning through YouTube tutorials, picking up animation books like The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams shows more than just how to animate. It gives an insight into how the veterans of the animation industry produce their work, giving both inspiration and neat tricks to apply to modern animation.
How do I manage my animation tasks better?
Learning how to manage and prioritise your tasks can take a bit of practice. Implementing methods like the Eisenhower Matrix, Getting Things Done methodology, or the Pareto Principle can help you get back on track with your tasks. You can also get help from a creative project management tool like TESSR to reduce the load of admin tasks, so you can focus on creating.
Author Bio
With a background in Arts English, Adilla has been a casual writer for various hobbies like parodies of animated shows and plots for board games. She loves to read anything and everything, from fantasy stories to articles on tips and tricks. Now an advocate for mental health and effective project management for the creative industry. Currently, Adilla resides in Malaysia and is a creative writer at TESSR. To know more about her, check out her LinkedIn.
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