DreamWorks Production Pipeline

Script

Great films begin with great concepts. Some of our ideas are completely original, while some are inspired by a wide variety of sources, including children’s books and comic strips.  

Storyboards

Artists take the scripts and create drawings turning the diologue into actions and pictures. when they have drawn enough sketches and the director approves, they are all then strung together to make whats known as a story reel, which is combined with music sound effects and diologue. The company then works with the movie like this for about 18 months. 

Visual Development

Once the story reel is underway, their visual development department begins to plan the look of the film, developing the style, tone, color and overall artistic approach to each and every sequence. Everything has to be designed, from the major characters to the smallest of props.Thousands of drawings, paintings, blueprints, sculptures and models later, their development artists have designed a fantasy world and characters to tell the story. 

Casting

storyboards are drawn, characters and sets are designed, so now they find voices for the characters and start recording their lines. Casting in animation is unlike casting for live action movies. Since they create the physical characters on the computer first, they’re much more concerned with what an actor sounds like than how he or she looks. In other words, they cast with their ears, not their eyes. They record the actors before They start animating. They usually videotape the actors performing their roles to help provide reference for the next phases of production and to make sure that they capture key expressions, reactions and other nuances. 

Modeling

From this initial design, our modelers will construct the digital 3-D model we’ll use for planning and animation.

Rigging

The modelers start with this wire frame sculpture that we call an armature, that breaks down our design into workable geometry and allows us to “rig” the figure, which will give the animator the ability to move our 3-D figure in whatever way is necessary to get the articulation we want.

Basic Surfaces

Once we’ve set up the armature, we can begin to add basic surfaces. It is this simplified “puppet in a box“ or digital marionette that we use in our next step.

Layout

Layout artists use rough “stand-in” shapes to block out the movement of the character in the scene. This rough layout or animatic is the blueprint from which we determine camera movement, character placement, spacing, lighting, geography and scene timing. The animatic maps out the entire movie, giving us a digital picture of each scene before we actually begin the character animation. 

Character animation

Once the sequence is working well in layout, the animators start bringing the characters to life in the computer. They articulate the thousands of controls that were created during the character-rigging phase to bring each character to life and to synchronize them to the voice performances. Now the characters really look like themselves, but not quite. Remember, this is just the animation; the scene isn’t quite finished yet. 

Effects

After the camera moves have been set and the characters have been animated, the next steps are effects and lighting.In a live-action film, it’s easy to photograph things like leaves blowing in the wind, waves at the beach or even footprints in the sand. In computer animation, these simple things are all designed and animated by the effects artists. In other words, if it’s not acting, but it moves, it’s an effect.Let’s use water to illustrate our point. Here’s the scene where Marty the Zebra surfs onto the beach, from our 2005 hit Madagascar . This is what the scene looks like once it has been animated but before any effects have been added. The effects animators take that very blocky and plain looking stand-in water and turn it into something beautiful. Let’s focus on a single shot and look at the series of steps it takes to accomplish this.We start by building and animating the translucent surface of the wave. 

Effects (2)

Next we visualize how the surrounding environment is reflected in the wave like a mirror.We add foam to the surface, and bubbles under the surface. Then our effects animators add the finishing touch — spray and splashes. When all those elements are combined, or “composited,” the composite is sent to the lighting department where we add final textures and lighting to get a complete frame from the movie. 

The finishing touches

Throughout this entire four-year process we have been able to see and track our progress daily, projecting our images as they evolve. Finally, we are ready to add sound effects, add the final score into the film, mix our soundtracks, correct the color, make our film or digital prints and release to theaters nationally and worldwide. http://www.dreamworksanimation.com/dwa/opencms/inside/how_we_make_movies/intro/story.html