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 with eleven phases:

  1. Project Foundation — working title, logline, genre, tone, world rules, and season structure
  2. Character Foundations — major characters: story role, backstory, personality, arc, and relationship swimlanes
  3. Story & Narrative Development — story arc mapping, episode discovery, screenplay, and editorial review
  4. Asset Readiness — visual properties, reference images, and AI generation prompts for every character, location, and prop
  5. Audio & Performance — dialogue rendering or recording, music selection, and sound design
  6. Shot Planning — scene objectives, emotional beats, and shot count estimates
  7. Storyboarding — shot list, framing, camera intent, and character participation per shot
  8. Shot Strategy Selection — shot type, character count, motion requirements, and rendering method per shot
  9. Shot Composition & Image Generation — AI image generation and composition approval per shot
  10. Shot Animation & Video Generation — video generation and motion approval
  11. Episode Assembly & Delivery — edit assembly, colour grade, final review, and publish

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 Agent 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.