Make a story line based on your final concept and how you want your animation to look. This story line can be anywhere between one to five pages and summarizes what happens in the story. Once you finalize your story line, expand this into a full-blown script.
Make concept artworks, character designs and background designs for your animation based on your story. These are not only essential to the animators and other artists who will work on the production, these are also helpful materials for the voice actors who will make scratch voices for the animation. Scratch voices refer to the dubbing or recording of the speaking lines of each voice actor as required by the script. These are used by the animators to properly match the lip movements with the actual lines delivered by the voice actors.
Provide the animators with the scratch voices for the characters they will animate. The animators then use any animation program for the process of making the visual elements move. Some of the widely-used animation programs for both professional and amateur productions include Adobe Flash and After Effects for 2D animation and Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max for 3D animation.
Composite the animated elements, backgrounds and special effects of the movie using the animation program. Compositing refers to the combining of all the initially separate still and animated elements like the characters, props and sets to generate a final video.
Edit the animation using a video-editing program. Often times, extra or extended versions of scenes are made by the animators and other artists involved in the production process, then these footage are trimmed down come editing time. Once the final edit is released, the sound department gets a copy of the video so they can finalize all the sound requirements of the film.
Re-record the speaking lines in the entire film, if necessary. This may require calling back the original voice actors used for the scratch voices or new actors who best fit the voices of the movie's characters. There are also times that the production decides to use quality scratch voices that there is no need to re-record or dub new speaking lines.
Combine all sound requirements including dialogue, sound effects, atmosphere sound and music together to make the final audio mix for the movie.
Lay in the final audio track to match the movie's visuals found in your video-editing program.
Render your edited video complete with all sound requirements. Rendering refers to the production of the final video after all visual and sound effects are applied.
Export the final copy of your movie from your video-editing program. Use your preferred video file format, which can typically be any of the popularly used formats like MP4, AVI or MOV.