Introduction

What Ordinary Animator is and how it fits into your creative workflow.

Ordinary Animator is a web-based production platform for creating animated episodes. It brings together the tools you need to go from story idea to finished video: world-building, screenplay, storyboard, AI-generated imagery, voice synthesis, and timeline rendering.

What you can make

The platform is built around the episode as the primary unit of output -- a short animated video with characters, dialog, music, and composed shots. Episodes belong to a project (your series), and each episode is broken into scenes and shots.

How it works

Everything in Ordinary Animator is organised around a production pipeline of nine phases -- our way of looking at the journey from idea to finished episode:

  1. The Foundation -- premise, world rules, and season structure
  2. The Cast -- your lead and supporting characters: story role, backstory, personality, and arcs
  3. The Story -- story arc, beats, structure, and the world it lives in: locations, props, and minor cast
  4. The Script -- write the screenplay, review it, and let AI break it into every element it names
  5. The Visuals -- visual style and reference art for every character, location, and prop
  6. The Sound -- dialogue (rendered or recorded), music, and sound design
  7. The Boards -- shot planning and storyboards: framing, camera intent, and who is in each shot
  8. The Shoot -- generate the image and video clip for every shot
  9. The Final Cut -- edit, polish, and publish the finished episode

You don't have to work in strict order. Most creators move back and forth between phases as the project evolves.

The AI layer

Ordinary Animator integrates AI at every stage:

  • Media generation via ComfyUI -- cloud or local -- produces images and video from your characters and locations
  • Voice synthesis converts dialog lines to speech via ElevenLabs, Google voices, or ComfyUI workflows
  • The AI Assistant can answer questions, navigate to any entity, and help with production tasks via voice or text

Technical requirements

  • A modern web browser (Chrome recommended for local ComfyUI)
  • A Google account for sign-in
  • Optional: Comfy Cloud subscription or local ComfyUI install for AI media generation

Next step

Follow the Quick Start to create your first project and generate your first shot.