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 Visuals Build the visual style and reference art for every subject -- characters, locations, and props. (Visual development, or visdev.)
6 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.
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 Edit, polish, colour grade, and publish the finished episode. (Final polish and publishing are still being built out.)

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

Each acceptance criterion has one of these states:

State Meaning
Pending Not yet confirmed.
Approved You've confirmed this criterion is met.
Skipped You've explicitly decided to skip it for this episode.
In progress Some of the items underneath are resolved, but not all.

A phase or step rolls up the state of everything inside it, so you can see at a glance where work remains.

Template and per-episode progress

The plan's structure -- its phases, steps, and criteria -- comes from the project's workflow definitions (the plan template). Each episode keeps its own progress separately from the template, so the template can be updated 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.