Process frame by frame animation

It is one of the most popular techniques that was used throughout most of the 20th century to produce cartoons. It’s an old and time-tested form of traditional animation which consists of numerous frames. Production of frame-by-frame video is quite a complicated and time-consuming process that takes a lot of effort, but the final result speaks for itself.

Unlike standard 2d animation, such animation helps to create more dynamic, interesting, and engaging videos. For example, everyone’s favorite old Disney movies were created using this technique. Nowadays this technique is mostly used for short animated videos, commercials, and brand videos since it’s rather expensive and challenging.

So, let’s take a walk.

Brief

Every video production process starts with a Creative Brief. This step helps us to collect the most relevant information about a company we’re going to collaborate with. To know more about goals, preferences, and ideas, we organize a quick call or ask to fill in a form. With this creative guide, we can stay on the same page with clients and generate well-thought-out ideas.

Script

To tell the world about your product with a perfect animation, we need to study it first. Keeping in mind the information about the target market, core audience, and demographics, we create 1-2 rough script concepts. If one of the concepts is approved, we’ll make necessary changes and move on to detailed script-writing. By using brand guidelines we also create a moodboard to provide a broad overview of all appropriate design options.

Design

At this step, we work on style design or style frames. What are style frames? These are full-color pictures that visualize the main elements of the video. Even if you don’t know what you need, the designing step helps to decide on the final style of your future frame-by-frame animation. We usually produce 3 of them, each of which includes the main character and background design. When our style is approved, we move to the illustration step. By combining rough sketches and design, we create illustrations for a future video.

Storyboard

After we come up with the whole story, we start work on storyboard creation. It’s a sketched visual representation that shows all scenes with descriptions of actions and transitions. Such sketched drawings help you to imagine how your final video looks and serve as a guide for illustrators and animators. A storyboard is a time-consuming step in the traditional animation video production process but it’s too important to be missed.

Rough animation

A stage where we make things move. Our animators draw each frame of animation by creating characters’ poses and expressions. To make your animation fluid, we need to work on a large number of drawings. This process is quite time-consuming, so one animator can make 4-6 seconds of such animation per day. In addition, compared to a standard 2d animation, most of the steps in the frame-by-frame technique can not be done simultaneously.

Clean-up

If rough animations are approved, we get down to cleaning our roughs and ink them. Typically, clean-up is made by assistant animators, while key animators continue to work on other scenes. Usually, the clean-up process takes more time than rough animation since sometimes it requires additional frames.

Inking and Painting

At this stage, our colorists take over the process by applying colors to finished “clear” versions of drawings. Depending on the complexity of details and lines, this animation process may take months. To streamline it, we use professional animation software such as Toon Boom Harmony, TVPaint, and Adobe Photoshop.

Composition

A final touch of the frame-by-frame technique is compositing. Our animators combine all finished drawings with backgrounds, add digital effects such as tones, highlights, and shadows, and add camera animation. Once we finish the compositing, there comes a time to render all the scenes.

Music and sound FX

This step adds a final touch to frame-by-frame animation. We create a unique video atmosphere by combining visuals with sound effects and background music. SFX is an important step in animation that sets up the mood and holds the viewer’s attention longer.

Frame-by-frame