Production Design - The overall look of a Fantasimation production begins here. Working with the director and character designer, the stylist creates black and white pencil sketches depicting key locales. Once approved, these are then re-worked as thumbnail color sketches. Often many of each locale are painted in order to offer a variety of choices to the director. At Fantasimation, we look to make each project visually unique and exciting. We don’t settle for just okay.

Character Design - Creation of a character begins with a blank piece of paper, an idea of a personality, and lots of coffee. We just don’t design any ol’ cartoon character at Fantasimation. We build the character from the inside out. Who the character is effects how he will look. And just creating a real drawn actor isn’t all that easy. It requires real insight and a full understanding of why that character should exist in the toon world. This understanding helps us create dynamic cartoon individuals which reflects our attitude at our studio.

Storyboard - Here we create the flow of the story through a multitude of sketches that reflect character personality, strong staging, and indication of camera movement. Story sketch is truly the heart of animation production because it is here that character relationships, story tension, and entertainment is created. It is here that is the blueprint of a Fantasimation production.

Layout - Taking the lead from the storyboard artist, the layout artist takes rough story art and expertly renders it full size, creating a set for our animated cast of characters. It is here that the layout artist will indicate how a character and the camera moves through a scene, setting the stage for the magic to follow.

Rough (ruff) Animation - Here is where our cartoon personality really comes to life. Asuccession of drawings are created containing a knowledge of personality, drawing ability and grace of movement. Lots of sketchy lines, plenty of loops and whirls create our cartoon star in a loose form for each drawing. The shapes evolve from drawing to drawing allowing us to see expressions and poses that change and really communicate to an audience. Ruff animation is tested and re-tested until its’ animation perfect.

Clean up/Inbetween - Here the animators’ drawings are cleaned up. Fine lines replace rough sketchy ones as each new drawing is made to shine. Inbetweens are made to flesh out the overall movement. We know that great clean ups and Inbetweens make a scene look like magic. Poor drawing and bad inbetweens can make great animation look amateur. At Fantasimation, we pride ourselves on superior quality work.

Backgrounds - Working with the color stylists color keys, beautiful black and white renderings are turned into full color master production backgrounds. Because we love to get depth into our background art, we work closely with our artists to achieve that effect either through paint or digital rendering.

Digital Ink & Paint - The pencil animation drawings are each scanned, and cleaned for stray pixels. Each cel level is digitally painted from a pallet of thousands of colors. Outlines can be also painted in a wide variety of colors. Tone mattes may be applied for a rounder looking feel.

Compositing and Editing- Here background, effect, and character levels are combined to one composited layer. Scenes are edited together and given their appropriate sound effects and music. Finished animation is dumped to Digital video and/or Motion Picture film. Here is where the full effect of Fantasimations’ quality comes through. Craftsmanship, Talent and magic culminate to create a product that is truly unique.