Creating animated magic with Chello
At Chello we love telling your stories, through beautifully designed animations. It’s an exciting communication tool, and a great way to get attentive eyes glued to your messaging. It allows you to communicate in multiple styles, unshackling the imagination from earthly logistics.
We understand commissioning an animation can be daunting, so we’ve simmered down the production of short-form animations to their core steps; so you can confidently jump on the animation train, and enjoy the process as much as we do.
Let’s go!
The Brief
Kick things off by working with us to pull a comprehensive brief together. This is where we determine key messages, the target audience, quantity of animations, durations and sizes, along with placements and usage. We’ll also discuss any styles or key features you have in mind.
References
When the brief’s set, we’ll start finding existing references we think suit your project and brand.
We’ll discuss these together and note the aspects you like or dislike, shaping the unique approach for your content.
Quote
At this point we’ll have the information we need to confidently quote up your project.
You’ll receive the fully broken down quote for your approval.
Script
We’ll take your key messaging, target audience and voice and tone to draft up an audio-visual script.
Typically 2 rounds of client revisions are about right for this phase, but can scale up if required.
The script provides the skeleton for the whole project, and your seal of approval is a checkpoint for us to move forward with the visuals.
Style Frame
We revisit your favourite aspects from the references and apply them to a section of your script to draft up a style frame.
This will provide a sample of your subject matter, illustrated in your selected style, but with brand guidelines applied (e.g fonts & colours).
Storyboard
Once the style frame is approved, we’ll sketch out the rest of the frames and pair them up with your script. This shows you exactly what subject matter and action to expect in your final animation.
We allow for approximately 3 rounds of client amends during storyboarding, to ensure the boards are absolutely perfect!
Animation
When the storyboards are approved we make them move.
This phase is typically the longest, involving illustrating and rigging the animateable assets, before animating each scene.
We again allow for approximately 3 rounds of client amends here too.
Sound
Sound will progress with your animation as we work through the rounds.
Your early drafts will be sent to a music track and a temporary voice over.
Later we’ll replace your draft voice over with a professional voice over and start to layer sound design to emphasise and further contextualise your animation.
Final Exports
If your brief outlined shorter durations or multiple sizes, we tackle them once the longest animation is complete and signed off.
It’s always important to know this upfront so we can refine the animation design for all of your outputs.
