The Production Pipeline

The nine production phases and how Ordinary Animator maps to each one.

Ordinary Animator is built around a nine-phase production model. The phases describe the logical order in which a production comes together -- from world-building through to a finished, publishable episode. The names are plain on purpose: what you see in the app is what you read here.

You don't need to work strictly in phase order. Most creators move between phases as the project evolves. The phases are a map, not a lockstep process.

The nine phases

# Phase What happens
1 The Foundation Set the premise, world rules, and season frame -- the creative blueprint. (The industry calls this development.)
2 The Cast Create your lead and supporting characters: story role, backstory, personality, arcs, and relationships.
3 The Story Map the arc and beats, lock the structure, and populate the world it lives in -- locations, props, and minor cast.
4 The Script Write and analyse the screenplay. Draft it in Fountain, review it, and let AI break it into every element it names.
5 The Sound Give every line a voice, then lay in music and sound -- TTS, live recording, or a voice changer, merged into per-character tracks.
6 The Visuals Build the visual style and reference art for every subject -- characters, locations, and props. (Visual development, or visdev.)
7 The Boards Plan shots and storyboard them: break scenes into shots and sketch what the camera sees.
8 The Shoot Generate the image and video clip for every shot. Run ComfyUI recipes to produce each take.
9 The Final Cut Polish the assembled cut and set the episode's opening and closing fades, run the final narrative / sync / quality pass, then export the whole episode as one video, publish it, archive the assets, and sign off.

Why The Sound comes before The Visuals

Dialogue and music are settled first so a scene's timing is already known before any shot is cut to it. Most pipelines you have seen board first, so this looks like a mistake -- it isn't. Hearing the episode as an audio play tells you how long each beat actually runs, and shots can then be cut to that rhythm instead of to a guess. It also means rewriting a line costs you nothing in shot work, because the shots do not exist yet.

Where each phase lives in the app

The Episode Plan

Each episode turns these phases into a structured checklist: within each phase, the work breaks into steps and acceptance criteria -- the concrete things that need to be true before the episode is done. You work through it in the Guide -- the guided, step-by-step view -- which tracks your progress and runs AI assessments against each step.

Acceptance criteria and status

A criterion is approved or it is not:

State Meaning
Not done Not yet confirmed.
Approved You've confirmed this criterion is met.

There is deliberately no third "come back to this" state. Work you have not done yet is already recorded as not done, and the guide bar lets you work in whatever order suits you without having to mark anything -- so a criterion you skipped past is simply one you have not approved.

A phase or step rolls up the state of everything inside it -- done, still to do, or part way through when some of the items underneath are approved and some are not -- so you can see at a glance where work remains.

Shared structure, per-episode progress

The plan's structure -- its phases, steps, and criteria -- is the same standard pipeline for every episode in the project. Each episode tracks its own progress against that shared structure, so the structure can evolve without losing any episode's progress.

Deadlines and the Schedule

Each phase can carry a deadline, set on the phase's page in the Guide and shown as a small date chip on the phase -- grey while it is upcoming, red once it is past due, and green once the phase is done. The Schedule lays those deadlines and your progress across every episode in production at once, so you can keep several episodes moving concurrently and see at a glance which is falling behind.