First Fight Education – First Fight Education

ANimation Education

The process that First Fight follows for taking animation from A to Z is almost identical on every project. Regardless of style and execution, we break every project down into the 3 phases of PRE-PRODUCTION, PRODUCTION, and POST-PRODUCTION.

pre-production

This is the first phase of the process and where we begin after we have been briefed by the client and a concept has been decided upon. Pre-production consist of:

STYLE FRAMES

Style frames are single pieces of art that depict how we feel a final frame from the finished project will look. These are shown at the very beginning of a project to help our clients get a feel for where the project is going.

storyboard

Usually done in tandem with the style frames, a storyboard is a series of sequentially drawn images that depict exactly what we will be showing in the animation. Here is where we focus on storytelling and making sure that everything is making sense.

ANIMATIC

Once the storyboards are approved we move onto the animatic. This is a rough animation that is made from the storyboards. This is when we begin to get the timing down and plan out pace, music, sound design etc. The approved animatic will be the cornerstone we base the final animations off of. Once approved we begin the second major phase, which is Production

PRODUCTION

This is where the magic begins. Style usually determines what process we use to generate the animations, be it 2D, 3D, cel (hand drawn), etc. No matter which process is decided upon, this is where it gets refined. For now, let’s look at the process of cel animation, which consists of passes done to establish roughs, then tie-downs, final line and then color.

post-production

We are in the final stages now. This is where everything starts to come together.

FINAL COMPOSITE

Here is where all of the animated sequences are put together to build out final scenes. Lots of tweaking happens here to get the compiled animations looking exactly how we want it within a scene.

edit

Here is when the final scenes are cut down and edited exactly how we want them in the final render. Any last timing tweaks happen in this phase.

Sound design

This is our final step before approval and render. Sound design and music are carefully added to help tell our story. This step accounts for almost half of the impact that the final piece has, so we make sure to give special care here to help add to the desired emotion and message.

Final render

The culmination of all of our hard work. The vision has fully come to life using the one, two combo of design and animation. Time to go and win some rings.

This shot featured here is part of a larger project done for the professional eSports team, the Minnesota Rokkr.

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