The importance of knowing about the animation pipeline

The animation pipeline is the structure involved in the making of an animated project; be it an animated short, a show, a movie… Broadly speaking, it’s divided into pre-production, production, and post production. However, each big step is also divided into more little steps, which end up completing every part of the process.

As for the production, it involves everything regarding the actual making of something closer to the finished product. The animatic, rough animation, lineart, cleanup (mentioning how it’s different depending on the animation technique).

The Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design illustrates how, during the production stage, everything done in pre-production gets turned into reality. When it comes to frame by frame animation and 3D animation, there are some differences in the production stage. For example, The Animation School mentions how, in 3D animation, some important roles are: 3D modellers, rigging artists, texture artists, technical directors, lighting designers, animators, and effects artists.

Lastly, in post-production, there’s editing, compositing, polishing, among other finishing touches that end up bringing the whole thing together. To cite The Animation School again, some important roles for this are: compositors, sound designers or sound editors, and editors. These roles are crucial to ensure the project can go smoothly.

With the rise of indie producers and animators lately, it’s important for everyone in the field to know the full and proper process involved in actually making anything animated. The animation field is already a pretty rough and unfair line of work for most, so at the very least, knowing what to expect or how to follow through with it can help prevent a lot of issues in the long run.

It’s also important to note that, as competitive and hard-to-get-into as the professional animation industry may be, hard work and knowledge can still get you a long way. Everyone starts out somewhere, so learning about the basics and going up from there is imperative. 

In conclusion, to highlight some of the best animation schools in the United States (according to the Animation Career Review website), given there’s a lot of opportunities there already, some schools worth mentioning are the California Institute of the Arts in California, the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, and the Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida.

However, considering not everyone can afford such high-end universities, there are also lots of free resources online. For example, kind user Ryan64 on Reddit made a post with some resources on learning animation from scratch. Additionally, there are free courses brought to light by big studios like Sony: they have a free online course called This Is Animation, and even courses on the animation pipeline specifically by the Toon Boom developers themselves.

References

resources | Sony Pictures Animation. (s. f.). https://www.sonypicturesanimation.com/careers/new-resources

The Animation Pipeline | Toon Boom Learn Portal. (s. f.). The Animation Pipeline | Toon Boom Learn Portal. https://learn.toonboom.com/modules/the-animation-pipeline