Introduction

Even the shortest piece of animation may require a lot of time to be made. For the uninitiated, producing 60 seconds of animation may sound like an easy task, but you can spend months until these few seconds are ready to hit the screen. Since animation is a very time consuming activity, having a streamlined workflow is a must.

You have to be organized in order to make things quicker and be able to fix errors easily. Imagine yourself having to throw away a week of work because things got so confusing in your scene that you found it easier to restart from scratch rather than try and fix it. That may sound acceptable if you're only making personal studies, but in a professional scenario with tight deadlines you're simply not allowed this luxury.

From this chapter on, we'll see some practices to help you stay organized, productive, and approach several kinds of animated shots. Of course, this is not a "one size fits all" set of recipes. There are various ways of bringing your characters...