Hermina Stanciulescu

my mind thrives on solving problems

I am a storyteller

But I’m also deeply connected to reality and I know you don’t just want to tell a story for your brand, you want to connect with your viewers, help customers find you and provide your services and products to the people that need it most.

My work process

Picture this: We are at a race car. I am the pilot and you are my copilot, my creative partner. I have the skills to get you where you want but I still need a few directions to get you there.

The story you want to tell is important to me but I know it’s far more important to you. For this animation journey to go as smooth as possible from start to finish, I divide the work process into smaller stages to better control the outcome.

Feedback is king, clear communication is our road and a selection of tools to help us on the way is our disposal: Procreate, Photoshop and Illustrator for sketches and designs, After Effects, Procreate Dreams and Premiere Pro for all de editing, frame.io for feedback and Milanote for planning our road map.

Storyboarding

Starting with the script, I devise a sketched storyboard. Paper and pencil to keep it as simple as possible.

If you don’t already know what that is, imagine a series of sequential images that illustrate what it’s being said in the script in a simple, sketched manner. Much like a comic book.

But we’re not making a comic book, we’re making an animation, you might say. Agreed!

This is the preparation stage where ideas can be explored, replaced and redrawn easily and fast. This is the time to create the concept. No worries, we’ll get to the animation too in a minute.

This leads me to the next step: the animatic.

animatic

What is that, you may ask.

With the storyboards ready, I create a scratch VO for your script as a placeholder, in case we don’t already have a professionally recorded one, and time the images to the voice. This way we have a very rough but extremely helpful concept of the animation.

But I’m not paying you for an animatic, I want a fully finished animation. What are you trying to pull here?

True! But in order to get to that fantastic animation at the end, this stage is as precious as finding the map to the treasure.

Let’s say I sketched multiple ideas and the last animatic you saw is the direction we’re using.

Perfect!

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design

Now it’s time to go into details and illustrate the boards. Make a new animatic with those boards and check how everything looks now. Is our idea working? If we need to change some other things, let’s change them now because we’re getting closer to the point of no return. Sounds gloomy but it’s not. This is just to know that any major changes need to happen before the animation starts.

Since the animation stage is the most complex and time consuming part, any major changes required here mean automatically going back to the beginning of the process, which in turn adds more time and costs to the project. Don’t the Storyboard and Animatic stages sound better now?

We’re set on the sketches, we tested the pace of the animation with that amazing and life changing animatic so now we’re ready to make things come to life.

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1st pass on animation

Warned and prepared with all the illustrations ready, we move forward to the first pass on the animation. At this stage, things start to come to life. And we’re getting closer to the end of the journey. But not yet. This is the point where we need to add the professional recorded voice over.

Why 2 rounds of animation you may think. The first stage is for animating the key elements and transitions to make sure each scene connects perfectly with the next one and the pacing of the animation is just right.

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2nd pass on animation

While the first pass is for big things, the second one is for finishing touches, adding sounds effects, polishing every detail of animation until it feels just right and smooth like we want it.

Final render, packaging and delivery are just around the corner.