How to produce an animated TV series

[cboy666]

I was just wondering if anybody could tell me how to produce an animated TV series.

 

[Bob Kessler]

Start with a pilot.

 

[mbafilmgeek]

Who's your audience and what is your story/premise? That's the best place to start. Are you producing a childrens' style show for adults, or a pre-school age show? Is it an ensemble cast or a few centralized characters? This thought process will help you put a script together (first thing).

Before you write the script, who are you distributing too? If it is local or a normal network, you will have a half hour program (typically 20-22 minutes of show and 8-10 minutes of commercials). If it is an adult swim or online scenario, then you are looking at 12-15 minutes (or even shorter if online). Then write your script: 1 script page in script format equals 1 minute typically. (for more on script format, go here http://www.oscars.org/nicholl/format.html)

Once you have your script written, cast your actors. Do the voice over stuff first because it is easier to animate to voices than try to match voices to animation.

Then, animate! Depending on the type of animation, it may be a one man show or a 30 person crew. Flash is probably the easiest and quickest animation program (2-D), but there are other programs that are beneficial such as After Effects (2-D and 3-D) and open source 3-D programs. Stop motion and puppetry are also an option, but they require more crew/designers/set up but can be more fufilling for the less computer savvy.

Since your post was dated back in April, you may have already gotten help with this, but if you need more, I have produced animated films and a tv pilot in numerous formats if you have any more questions. Good luck!

 

[BrioCyrain]

The guy above has some good points-

but also, I am a creative director at an animation company. During my experience you can do a few different routes to create animated serials.

It seems most of the time your studio will design a concept and plot behind it and then you take it to a sponsor network, but some companies will not always get what they want because usually sponsor networks have certain requirements and censors that they want in your animated series.

If you agree with them then most likely you then hire a production crew to take the concept further with designs and storyboards(storyboards are basically a "comic" that shows the animators what the animation is supposed to look like).

Then after the screenplay and storyboard is finished you then take or give the script and storyboard to the animation studio of your choice (Which is nowadays done overseas in Asia...this is either Indonesia, India, China, Korea, Japan, etc).

Be warned though, different countries usually have different general rates for different types of animation. At this point I found an Indonesian company called Javalight to be the cheapest studio overseas with good animation quality.

From what it seems from anime you can either do the voice work in advance or have it dubbed in after animation is completed.

Then usually after animation is done, you usually take it to a post-production studio to add in the audio and music compositions.

Well, that is what I know, if anyone can explain better please do so.