I’ve been inspired this week by making some slow progress on my short film, NF Core 01. I had a dialogue session with my sound guy that happened last August that we were finally getting around to cleaning up. A lot of people don’t understand the fundamental steps and workflow required to create an animated shortfilm, so I put together this small flowchart to show the steps involved in a broad sense and how they fit together and are connected. There are a lot of minutiae here I’m leaving out because the process is very complicated and has a lot of moving parts.

It’s a lot of work but for me it’s a labor of love to create short films. Every beginning step in the process should be far along before you move to the next one in order to save time, labor, and headaches later. This chart is specifically for 3d computer animation, of which my current short film will be created with.

Right now I’m on the edge of moving into storyboarding and putting together the first draft of my animatic. Once that is dialed in and perfected, I plan to move onto modeling characters / environments / props and setting everything up for production.

The reason the chart looks like this is because building an animated short is a lot like building a house. You need a good solid foundation to carry you forward. This means you need to record any dialogue needed before you start animating in our to dial in performances and put that to a moving storyboard, called an animatic. The animatic is the foundation of your film. It’s a lot easier to cut out scenes, fix timing and performance problems etc in this stage then to waste sometimes hundreds of hour down the line fixing things you could have easily fixed at the beginning of your production.

I’ll update more on my short as things move along this year. But for now enjoy this concept art flow for the antagonist of NF Core 01: the battle droid.

Cheers all!