In any animated series or feature film, the director will have a pre-concieved vision of how he/she sees the story play out scene by scene in order to be sucessful as a whole piece.
This is why Animators are provided with support material such as liecas (or animatics), storybords, reference videos, and other support material – so that we understand what the story is about, what our assigned section of the show is about and how the director sees it playing out. Animators need to fully understand how the characters are supposed to be feeling, thinking and acting.
During animation we sometimes run into issues when we’re trying to achieve the mood implied by the support material. At times the dialogue may be read in a different way or mood.
When this happens we’ll often consult with an Animaton Supervisor or Lead Animator for ideas. A common solution is to try and strike a balance between the support material and the dialogue.
On some productions, especially feature films, the director will be there to direct or help direct the voice actors. If the director is there at the record stage then he/she will be even more certain of how they want the scenes to play out visually (in animation).
Voice directors will deliberately instruct the voice actors to emphasize certain parts of the dialogue usually the vowels (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y). so that animators can strike character poses and hit accents on those vowels (an accent can be a slight head movement or hand gesture).
For a director to have initially read scripts and go through all the pre-production steps before animation, he/she will develop a very clear vision of what they expect from the character performance by the time animation begins.
This vision will get passed down to Animation Supervisors, Directors, Leads, and Animators through story boards, liecas, and conversations during meetings. The goal is to get everyone on track early on, with the feel of the production and what is trying to be achieved from a story and character perspective.
So much goes into an animated production and the director is usually there from the beginning – before production begins, and knows exacty what they are looking for before animators are even hired for the project. An important part of an animators job is to understand the director/creators vision for the production and make every effort to realize it.
