When you've decided to start a start a project there are certain guidelines to follow to ensure your project achieves success. I'm going to try to cover the workflow of an animation short film project in this post. By having a workflow ready at the beginning of the project you immediately know what to do and what to do next, which can be a real timesaver. I'm going to present this tutorial in an itemized form where I present a workflow with explanation of each step.

1. Assemble your team.

   When assembling your team you have to think trough what kind of personalities you put together. One of the most important criteria for a project to work properly is that the team members are able to work together in an efficient way. A rule of thumb when searching for team members is that you should try to fill the whole circle of qualities needed in a team and choose people with different or opposite qualities. For example a strict producer would work well with a creative person willing to take a lot of risk for his or her ideas. You should try to find persons so your team has all these abilities: Sense, systematic thinking, idea seeking, impatience, discipline, creativity, intuition, use of emotions, a mediator in conflict and human-oriented.

2. Plan your production.

   The next step is to plan the three following steps. This is done by creating a well thought out project plan. Getting to know what your recourses are is the first step. When you know that you should be able to mold your first draft of the production plan. This draft should be grinded into your final plan trough iterations of feedback from the team and reevaluating of the plan. The plan should include pre- and post production, and optionally the finalization part of the project.

3. Pre-production

   It's in this part most of the creative stuff is happening, and where you would think that the creative persons would be in charge, but think again. Every creative idea would lead to a certain amount work in the production and should therefore pass through the filter of a ruthless producer. This part is all about being creative, but still ending up with something feasible.

4. Production

   Now the time has come to put all the ideas into life. In this part it's important that all the team members stick to their deadlines so the production never comes to a halt. Having someone to have full overview over the production is important, and this person should be used as a link of communication.

5. Post-Production.

   This part is fairly similar to the production with the exception that it's harder to recognize all the work produced. The team is now familiar with different things being produced each day from the pre production stage until now. It's important for the team to understand that the project is still moving but that the workflow has changed and the people now at work are refining and fine-tuning the end result.

6. Finalization

   In this last part of a project it's easy for some or all of the team members to be tired and exhausted. Someone may find it hard to collect enough energy to complete all their tasks. It's in this part of the project that it's important for the motivators in the group to work their magic.  Wrapping up can be hard, but it's always easier when someone's there to spread some joy. Keep that in mind.

The most important lesson to learn from this tutorial is that each part of the project almost always takes up more time then planed, and this should always be taken into consideration when planning your project.