Animation production begins with the storyboard and script. If the animation is to have its own audio track, the track may be created before the animation if the music is prerecorded (stock) and the Producer wishes the animator to synchronize the animation to the music. If the music is going to be composed for to be composed for the animation, the animation may be done first.

Objects: The creation of animation begins with the creation of objects. Objects might be simple "primitives" like a ball or box, or more complex shapes, such as a human figure or cartoon character. Objects may be given attributes, such as "bones" which will distort the shape to create complex movement. Other attributes include color, specularity (shininess), luminance, surface textures such as metallic or fur, weight, mass, moment and so on. Animation objects can, in fact, have as many attributes as real objects, the only limit is the animator's time and the computer's processing capacity.

Environment: Once the objects are designed, the animator places them in an artificial 3-D environment or stage. The environment is virtually infinite and can be as small as an atom or as large as the universe. The environment may be given a backdrop, a sky and ground. The animator may add fog, rain, wind, particles, smoke. She may add geographical, botanical and architectural features such as mountains, trees and buildings, although each of these features is really an object.

Lighting: Once the objects have been assembled in the environment, the animator may add lights. Lights may be ambient, like the glow of sunshine on a spring morning, or they may be spotlights, like the headlights of a car.

Timing: All of the above features to the 3-D scene, numerous and complex as they may be, would only produce a still life picture, however, without the element of time. Time is created by establishing a "keyframe" at the beginning of the animation. Additional keyframes are added, forward in time. Since videotape runs at 30 frames per second, a second keyframe added to the animation at one second forward in time, would indicate that the computer would have to create 38 in-between, or "tween" frames.

Keyframes: Let us say, for instance, we wanted a square box to travel across the screen from the left side to the right in one second, simultaneously growing from one inch to five inches as it moved. The animator would place a one inch box on the left and assign it to keyframe one. Then she would move the box to the right side of the frame, enlarge it to five inches and assign the new box to a second keyframe at one second forward in time. Then she would tell the computer to "render" or create the sequence. Automatically, the computer would create each frame, incrementing the change in the box automatically, and recording the frame on the computer's hard drive.

When the rendering was complete, the animator could press a key and watch the finished sequence play on her monitor

Obviously, few animations are as simple as the one just described. Complex tools assist the animator to execute a nearly limitless array of effects. The synchronization of a character's lip movements to voice, for instance, or the ability to allow a live dancer's movements to control an artificial character in the computer are commonplace.

Even to ability to replicate a human actor in a photorealistic environment is possible, making the actual presence of an actor unnecessary! Take note, however, that frames with such levels of realism take hours to render. The end result may end up being more costly than hiring the real actor to perform the scene.

Rendering: During the animation process, the client is invited to make comments and changes at strategic points or milestones. These are usually during the object design phase, before the environment is created - then again at the staging, where objects, lighting and scenery are assembled - and yet again, at the motion scripting stage, when keyframes are assigned to add the dimension of time. Clients who do not have the time to participate this frequently may only wish to see the end results, or "renderings," after which they may request changes.

As one might expect, changing an animation at the rendering stage may require more work and therefore higher budgets, but since all of the animation work is saved at various stages and layers, nothing is impossible. Animators sometimes execute "low resolution" renderings, with less detail than the finished product. This allows the animator to show her clients a preview of the results, without executing renderings that might require days to execute.

Once the animation elements and previews are approved by the client, a final, high resolution version is rendered, then recorded to videotape. At this point, the animation is finished and the results are either sent to the client or edited into some further work.