Before the start of the course, I had a rough idea of what the process of animation was to produce a film, but I had little knowledge of what the industry roles were within the pipeline and what the steps were to complete a final product.
One of these roles was storyboarding. I used to have trouble drawing each panel and planning the shots, especially when these are next to each other on a sheet, as opposed to flipping through the frames to see the characters move, which seemed intimidating to me. Storyboarding for multiple projects through the course helped me break out of this fear. It feels like the sketch phase of drawing, where it is still easy to make changes and can tell the story through a sequence of rough keyframes and evolves into an animatic after timing each panel. I also realised it made the rest of the process of animating significantly easier, as it allows you to have a sort of ‘foundation’ to base the keyframes off. If this foundation of rough drawings can tell the story clearly enough, the production will go more smoothly.
The second role I would like to highlight, and arguably my favourite, is the rough and tiedown animation. I find it extremely satisfying to see the shots come to life, especially if the storyboard has strong key panels that clearly tell a story; inbetweening starts to become more of an autopilot and even relaxing kind of process, as Aaron Blaise explained on a livestream during the making of his last short film “Snow Bear.”
There are so many approaches to rough animation that, to me, it is almost like solving a puzzle. Sometimes more keyframes are needed to convey the intention of the shot accurately; a good way to plan this is through the thumbnailing method, as mentioned in Josh Saunder’s TVPaint Masterclass, along with the dot technique for cleaner and consistent inbetweening, which I found quite helpful.
Another key insight came from the opportunity of taking an in-depth look at the TVPaint files from some of THE LINE’s previous work, which allowed me to scrub through each frame and see in detail how they put together a shot, analyse timings, keys and breakdown frames, and even see each layer separately, from roughs to cleanup to colour, as well as what looked like a very tidy way to organize a project inside of TVPaint, which I now apply into my own workflow.
To conclude, as an emerging animator, there are many industry roles within the pipeline that I would like to get involved with, as they are all a discipline on their own. Most certainly, I would like to eventually direct my own film with a large production, but there’s a long way to go to get there. Working on multiple projects through this course has helped me realize what some of these roles are like first-hand, and what I see myself doing in the next following years.
References:
Blaise, A. (2021) Live: Working on my Animated Short in TVPaint – The Art of Aaron Blaise [YouTube]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGmrz6hnzWI [Accessed 23 Nov. 2025].
Pantoja, T. (2020) Animation Freelance VS Fulltime – My thoughts and experiences [YouTube]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18gwx8j_fHc [Accessed 23 Nov. 2025].
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