Main terms

we use at our studio

Animator -  a person who creates animation. This is an actor of animated films who animates a character in the scene. Depending on technologies used there are 2D and 3D animators.

Animation director - a specialist responsible for the whole artistic plot of the project. He or she processes a script into a storyboard, defines which shots, how many and which characters should be in the frame. A director searches for interesting gimmicks to use in the film and also defines the play of the characters. While production process only a director foresees the whole picture of the film and his task is to watch whether an artistic plot is implemented in the right way. An animation director is carrier of an artistic taste and he or she is the one who initiates ideas.

Art director - a specialist responsible for a graphic style of the project. 

Background artist - a specialist in creating backgrounds and surrounding objects for the scene. 

Character artist -  specializes in character development. In case of 3D animation he or she prepares a character in necessary aspects of view and draws poses and emotions by which a modeler and an animator will be guided in future.

Pipeline - a working process adopted at a studio. It includes the software (2D- and 3D-editors, compositing programs, etc.) that is used by studio specialists, a transferring process from one editor into another, sequence of usage of each editor and an accepted input and output data format.

Pipeline in creation of graphic content may vary from studio to studio. 

Tracking time (chronometer) - duration of a scene or a video in a whole, is measured in seconds or minutes.

Animation timing - allocation of an object (character) movement in time. This is one of the most important moments in creation of a credible and smooth movement  and reproduction of an emotional state of a character.

Project timing - allocation of range of works on the project in a defined time frame  including reconciliation stages. 

Storyboard - a sequence of pictures, which is made on the basis of the skript and is used as a guidance in creation of movies, animated movies and advertising videos. A storyboard includes key moments of a future video with a specification of a format of each shot (a wide shot, a close-up, a panorama) and its preliminary composition.

A storyboard may also include an explanatory text and the lines said by characters and/or narrations. In the context of a limited tracking time a preliminary duration of a scene is specified in each shot. This is especially important for advertising videos which have tracking time just from 5 to 45 seconds. 

Animatic - is a video sequence of static pictures accompanied by music. It provides an idea of how each shot will look in dynamics gives a feeling of scenes' tracking time. An animatic often includes a preliminary record of a dialog/ narration to provide understanding of how a visual range works with sound.

In 3D animation there is also a kind of animatic, where a special animation of camers is defined and scenes include a compostion of draft 3D objects in accordance with a storyboard.

An animatic shouldn't be percieved as a copmplete product, it doesn't give an idea of general character and the style of the video, this is an internal technical document needed for production purposes only.

3D modeling – creating a geometry of  an object in 3D virtual environement. 

Character setup -  a stage of preparing of a character for animation. A virtual 'skeleton' is developed for a static 3D model, than a geometry of a character is bound to this 'skeleton' and special 'handles' - controllers are made to help an animator to manipulate a character as a puppet. 

'Gray' model - a model without a texture and final visualization.

Playblust - the first render of a created animation scene without visualization.

Texturing – 'painting' of a 3D object.

Visualization of a 3D scene – includes such processes as shading and lighting.

Shading - each object in a scene has its own material. Each material in its turn has particular qualities which interact with the environment in a special way. E.g. a cup has a glazed surface which reflects spots of light and the environment, a tablecloth has a matted texture and it doesn't reflect light, glass is transparent, etc. Defining qualities of a material of each object is called shading.

Lighting – the process is similar to lighting at a movie set. The difference is that it is made in virtual space of a 3D program.

Rendering – after all preparatory works (modeling, texturing, animation, vizualization) the scene should be transferred from 3D space of a program into a sequence of pictures to use in compositing programs then. This process is called rendering. Depending on the complexity of the scene rendering may be quite time-consuming and require a lot of computer resourses. 

Montage – a process of assembling of selected shots into one footage.

VFX – artificial or natural phenomena, realized in the scene (dust, wind, rain, steam, mist, fire, smoke, explosions etc.).

Compositing – separate objects or groups of objects are created in different programs by different people. And these are compositing programs (Adobe AfterEffects, Nuke, etc.) that help to bring them together into one single frame. They are also used to polish out roughnesses that appeared while rendering and to add diverse spacial, light and colour effects if necessary .

Colourcorrection – each shot in a footage has its own saturation, brightness and contrast. To get a beautiful comprehensive picture in a video, each frame is balanced to one colour scheme.