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.

Ordinary Animator uses AI to help you collect the details of your story and to explain and review what you create. It does not write the story for you. The AI is a tireless assistant that asks the right questions, fills in supporting detail, and reviews your work against your own instructions. The story stays yours.

What you can make

The platform is built around the episode as the primary unit of output -- a short animated video with characters, dialogue, 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, but grounded in professional pipelines like from Pixar:

  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 dialogue 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

Media generation: ComfyUI and full control

Ordinary Animator does not bundle its own image and video models. Instead, it builds ComfyUI workflows and manages the files they produce. ComfyUI is an open, node-based engine for running AI image, video, and audio generation -- the most flexible way to wire models together.

This gives you real power and control: when you need an advanced or custom setup, you have direct access to the full ComfyUI ecosystem through the back door. The trade-off is complexity. Ordinary Animator is built for creators who want that full control when they need it, while smoothing the common path for when they don't.

Technical requirements

  • A modern web browser (Chrome recommended for local ComfyUI)
  • A Google account for sign-in
  • 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.