Animation creation consists of idea development, pre-production, production, and post-production.
In idea development, the characters and story for the film, ad or other creative are created and a go-ahead taken on the same.
In pre-production, the idea is converted into layouts. The script is written and finalised, characters are designed, a storyboard is created and layouts are developed. Cost-wise, this phase is extremely important since a single mistake here can put the entire project over-budget.
Pre-production for 2D animation
 
 
1. Scriptwriting    2. Storyboarding    3. Character development
         
 
 
4. Backgrounds    5. Layout designing    6. Animatics
         
       
7. Voice        
Production for 2D animation
In this stage, we get to see the actual results of the treatment given to the story as well as its visualisation.
A large volume of production work is outsourced by overseas clients to Indian studios and the majority of Indian animation professionals are involved in production-related activities.
 
 
1. Animation    2.In-betweening*    3. Scanning
         
 
 
4. Compositing*    5. Background preparation    6. Colouring
 
* In-betweening: Tweening (short for in-betweening) is the creation of intermediate frames between two main images to give the appearance that the first image flows smoothly into the second one.
* Compositing: Images from different sources, e.g. real-world video, digitised film, synthetic 3D images,
2D animations, painted backdrops, still photos and text, are combined to create a finished frame of animation.
 
Learn about 3D CGI animation
 
Post-Production
Final sound recordings, colour editing, testing and special sound effects are all added at the post-production stage. The animation created during production is compared against the goals set down in pre-production to make sure everything has gone as per plan.
Some of the more common activities in 2D & 3D post-production are:
 
 
1. Editing    2.Special effects (SFX)    3. Colour correction*
         
 
 
4. Compositing    5. Voice & music editing    6. Rendering*
 
*Colour correction: Undesirable cast or tint is removed from a colour image.
*Rendering: Giving final touches to an animation scene, in which the (vector) data is converted to the raster image or animation.