Storyboarding is the first step in visualising a film treatment. Once the director has conveyed their vision for a project, the storyboard artist will set about sketching each scene, initially offering an insight as to how a scene will be framed, and where characters should sit within a background. Once a suitable scene has been staged, the storyboard artist will then draw frames to represent the key character poses within the scene, and produce diagrams to represent camera moves at the relevant intervals.

The background artwork is created with various mediums, using paint, pencil and ink to achieve the necessary subtleties in tone and colour.

The backgrounds are often very large and come in all different shapes and sizes depending on the action for the relevant scene.

The animator is responsible for bringing the character to life. Lead animators often map out key frames for characters in a scene, typically providing every fourth drawing – the remaining frames are then completed by an in-betweener, who fills in the characters motion between the key frames.

The renderer is responsible for the colour and tone of an animated character. They concentrate on where light and shadow should fall in order to render a two dimensional line-drawing into a three dimensional environment.

Matte lines are created in order to quickly produce a digital back-paint, which helps to embolden the hand-rendered artwork. A matte artist will finely trace around the animation, whether it be character or prop, with a very fine pencil point – creating a constant unbroken outline of the image. This is then scanned in, and using After Effects the outline can be filled with solid colour to create the matte. The matte is then placed behind the hand-rendered image (which is made slightly transparent digitally) in order to ensure that there are no breaks in colour, and to add the desired tone to the original render. All colours, both original pencil and back-paint, are predetermined by the art director before the rendering process begins.

Once all the individual elements of an animation have been produced they need to be composited into one single image. The compositor is responsible for ensuring the background artwork and character animation sit together comfortably as a stand-alone image. Images can be subtly re-coloured and resized digitally in order to achieve the desired look.

Although readily available to help all members of the team as necessary, the runner will spend most of the working day at either a scanning station or a line tester.

Line testing is the process of quickly capturing each frame of animation and compiling a viewing-quality video in order that the director may approve the animation or isolate certain frames that need further attention.

Scanners are used to digitise the rendered elements of the animation process to the technical specifications required by the compositing team.