Ordinary Animator
Introduction
This course walks you through the complete animation pipeline in Ordinary Animator — from building your world and characters to publishing a finished episode. The workflow is organised into eight phases that mirror how professional animation studios work, adapted for a single creator.
The first three phases are one-time project setup — you do them once when you start a project and revisit them only when the project itself evolves:
1. Project Foundation: Identity, world, season plan, concept, and art direction.
2. Character Foundations: Major characters, arcs, and relationship dynamics.
3. Asset Readiness: 3D characters, sets, and props ready for production.
The remaining five phases repeat for every episode:
4. Story & Narrative Development: Story arc, episode discovery, structure, screenplay, and editorial review.
5. Audio & Performance: Voice casting, dialogue rendering, music, and sound design.
6. Shot Planning: Scene objectives, storyboards, shot strategy, and base image composition.
7. Shot Animation & Video Generation: Video generation, motion review, VFX, lighting, and shot approval.
8. Episode Assembly & Delivery: Render settings, edit assembly, color grade, final review, and publish.
You do not need to finish every step before moving forward. Pushing ahead early — for example, producing a pilot scene before completing all assets — can surface useful insights that feed back into earlier phases.
At the top and bottom of each lesson you will find buttons to take you to the previous and next sequential lesson.
In the top right corner, if you click on the checkmark icon, you will mark the lesson as complete. This can be helpful to track your progress, particularly if you view lessons out of order.
The left arrow in front of the lesson title at the top of the page takes you to the table of contents. The page you navigated from is highlighted with bold text. You can also view your completed lessons and update your progress as needed.