You can’t build a house without a blueprint, and you can’t create a movie or show without a script. During this process, our writers let their creativity unfold and make the story come to life. As the characters and their environment and interaction are defined, we make sure that every other department is up-to-date and involved, enabling our writers to create the perfect scenario and ready the script for the next step. ​

During this stage, storyboard artists work on developing simplified 2D illustrations, better known as storyboards, placing them in a sequential order to convey a hilarious gag, an important theme, or simply part of a story. By assembling these storyboards together and incorporating sound design and foley (reproduction of sound effects), we get a temporal version of the storyboard panel, referred to as a 2D Animatic – a specific action or moment which is part of a scene. ​

This particular department consists of three larger divisions: modeling, rigging, and surfacing/texturing. In the modeling stage, our artists receive 2D designs from our pre-production team, which should be realized into 3d assets. What they develop is a digital prop of a character to be later used in our production. What follows is the surfacing or texturing stage. Here, our artists are responsible for assigning texture to each model component and developing characteristics such as color, bump, and other surfacing attributes. Finally, our character arrives to the rigging stage, in which the rigging artists perform a series of technical actions with the purpose of providing enough control over character movement and character manipulation to our animators. ​

In the layout stage, a 3D representation of the 2D animatic is generated as well as complex character and camera movement. The layout department informs our production team about the exact number of assets necessary for each episode. On to animation!  ​

We come to the heart of it all: the animation stage. What that means is, creating character movement in a 3D environment – animated scenes and sequences. By using the modeled characters delivered by the asset department, our animators can manipulate the digital puppet and work on the subtler details, like facial expression.​

This is the stage which many of you probably want to know about the most! Forget everything you know from live-action movies about visual effects; dramatic crashes, explosions and those sorts of things – in the world of animation, when it comes to visual effects (VFX/CHF), we’re talking about generating complex motions and elements in the series, such as fire, water, snow, and other natural or unnatural phenomena. CHF stands for cloth/hair/fur and is responsible for precisely that: implementation of hair, fur, cloth and feather simulations based on the underlying character movement and behaviour. ​

Lighting – rendering – compositing. We’re nearing the end of our pipeline, where things are being wrapped up and compiled into a master file. In the lighting stage, previously completed work is being refined, and our lighting artists create and incorporate space and depth into the environment, and work on various techniques to illuminate a 3D scene. Next up is the rendering stage, where we want to get the final assembled animation scenes or shots in the format of a sequence of individual frames. These components are rendered and processed and delivered to the compositing department. In the compositing process, the final finished frames are produced by using all the rendered frames and elements from the previous stages – achieving the final image. Now we know what our episodes will look like.

In this post-production stage, we focus on the musical score, sound effects, foley and character vocalizations. Much needs to be taken into account for this to be done perfectly: genre, underlying theme, style, setting and the overall atmosphere that we want to create. All these sound elements are combined into a final audio track ready to accompany our narrative developments and reinforce our characters’ actions, emotions and thoughts.

During this final editorial process, only small adjustments are made on the final exported scenes and sequences, fine-tuning the finer details. Any additional transitions or movements are added here, before moving on to the final stage of our process: delivery.​

We’ve arrived at the ultimate destination: the stage where everything has been compiled together, ready to be exported into different resolutions and formats for different platforms. Proper archiving and specific technical requirements are handled during this final stage of our pipeline. And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the story of how everything is made here at Iervolino Studios: from ideation to the final delivery. ​