PHASE III: PRODUCTION
Ok, you've got all the parts split up, your rules document is finished, and everything else is set up. Now you're ready to finally start Phase III: Production! So…what now? You can't just do nothing and expect animators to come to your project out of the blue, you need to put the work into spreading the word!
The easiest thing you can do is simply share links and info about your collab in places where you know potential animators have a chance of seeing it. If you're in animation-related discord servers, you can always post about your collab in a specific channel made for self-promotion. If you have an active Twitter or Bluesky account, you can make a post about your collab and use specific hashtags to get it seen by certain communities.
If you really wanna go all out with promoting your collab, you're welcome to put together an announcement trailer to let people know you've started. Although personally, I would wait to make a trailer until you have a good number of scenes completed, for reasons I'll go into later. The Reanimation Station Twitter account and Discord server are probably the best places to promote reanimated collabs specifically, so any post in those spaces is almost guaranteed to get someone to join.
If you're not getting enough people seeing your posts or sending applications, don't just wait for them to do so. If there's an internet animator or Youtuber you really look up to and want to join your project, contact them directly! Just make sure you go about it in the right way. I've found that the best method to recruit an animator you want for your collab is to send them a message either in the form of an email, or a direct message through social media like Instagram or Discord, if they have a public account that accepts messages on them.
If they don't have any place for you to send a message, don't even bother trying to find a way to reach out to them. In your message, make sure to explain who you are, what kind of project you're making, any important info they need to know about, and why you think they should join. If they see your message and respond saying they don't want to join, don't keep insisting that they do. Accept their decision, thank them for their time, and move on to the next person. If they don't respond to your message after a while, try resending it if you think it's worth another shot. But definitely don't spam the same message over and over again, know when to call it quits.
Above all, make sure to stay professional at all times when communicating with someone who hasn't joined yet. The last thing you want to do is give off the impression that you don't really know what you're doing, because that's only gonna deter people from trusting that your collab's worth joining. You also don't want to come off like a relentless online stalker who won't stop until the person joins your collab. Make sure to build that sense of trust early.
Now let's say you get a few applications. That can only be good news, right? You want to get every scene filled, so it only makes sense to accept everyone that joins, right? Not quite. This next part might seem controversial to some, so feel free not to follow it if you don't agree with me.
However, in my opinion, there are some applications you should accept, and some that you shouldn't. Most people who join reanimated collabs do so to practice animation, so you'll likely get applications from people who don't have a lot of experience with it. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, as collabs can be a perfect place to learn important techniques so participants can put them to good use in a future career.
The thing is, sometimes an applicant's example animations won't look very good, and that's when you have to make a tough decision. Obviously no one is great at animation when they first start, I can certainly attest to that. And the point of collabs is to see every scene interpreted in a different style, so you can definitely be more open to applicants if it means more variety. However, I personally think a standard of quality should be set to ensure that no matter who animates what scene, it'll look appealing.
My personal criteria for accepting applications is that the person's previous animation examples should exhibit a basic understanding of the 12 principles of animation, background design, and clean color and lineart. Not every scene needs to be frame-by-frame Disney quality stuff, but at the bare minimum, they should be pretty to look at, or contain a strong example of a unique art style, even if the animation of the characters themselves is pretty limited. If the applicant's examples don't meet any of these criteria, it's probably best to reject their application.
This might be a bit difficult to understand, and I'm sure many people's thresholds for animation quality will be different, so I'll explain my point with two animation examples, one that I think would be grounds for rejecting an application, and one that would be grounds for accepting an application.
https://youtu.be/dUcrZaZTolM?si=DP2omiWyRP3cK0hn
In this example, there are several issues with the animation. First of all, the quality of the lineart and coloring is very rough and unpolished. Secondly, there's little to no actual animation, only a couple of frames where the mouth switches from open to closed. And finally, the body doesn't exactly move as much as it just switches from pose to pose with no inbetweens and stretches the same drawing to indicate force being applied.
Overall, it's very stiff and weightless animation-wise, on top of the drawings not being very clean. If I saw this in someone's application as an example of the kind of animation they were capable of, I would reject them.
Now compare this to the next example: https://youtu.be/79CeGTxAP2Y?si=zUdHLoakUm24e2kW
This animation is still a bit rudimentary in some areas, but it makes up for that with choices that make it look much more appealing. There's good secondary action in the beginning with the tail, and the changes in facial expression and lip sync are interesting to look at. Finally, during the movement at the end, the poses are much more dynamic, and the decision to use tweening as an alternative to inbetween frames still creates a bouncy movement that's just as appealing to watch as traditional frame-by-frame animation.
Something like this video displays a good amount of potential to make a creative reinterpretation of a scene in a reanimated collab, and because of that, I would accept an application that has this as an animation example. And of course, anything that looks better than this would have an even greater chance of guaranteeing an accepted application.
Ultimately, you would have to make this decision with every application on a case by case basis, and it'd be up to you as to what minimum level of quality you'd be willing to accept. I understand if you don't want to be mean and turn people away just because you don't think their animation is “up to your standards.” However, I personally feel like the best reanimated collabs are ones where every single scene is realized to its fullest potential by people who have mastered their own animation medium or creative art style. Any scene that looks like it was made by someone who hasn't had enough practice with animation could detract from a person's viewing experience, even in a video where they'll constantly be adjusting to seeing different animation styles every few seconds. So I would say to be careful about how many people you accept into your collab and focus especially on those you know will do a good job with whatever scene you give them.
Of course, this is all just my own personal opinion, and if you disagree with any of my views on quality, you're welcome to go by your own methods as you please. Alternatively, if you see potential in an animator's work but you don't think their animation is quite up to the standards of being accepted, feel free to accept them anyway and take the time to teach them different techniques. If they're open to trying something new, it might just wield a better result.
That being said, if you're gonna be rejecting any animators, make sure to be careful with how you do so. The last thing you want to do is hurt someone's feelings by calling their animation bad or saying they're not good enough to join. Getting rejected from an animation collab shouldn't be a big deal, but you never know how people will react to the news.
So, in your response, instead of just telling them outright that they've been rejected, try to give them constructive criticism on their animation examples, and explain what about it made you decide not to accept them. Make sure to let them know that they still have potential to get better at their craft, and they're always welcome to send another application if they feel their animation has improved. That way, they still have something that motivates them to keep practicing animation, instead of possibly making them decide to quit for good due to low self esteem.
There's a response that one of the cohosts of The Spongebob Squarepants Movie Rehydrated used to say when rejecting applicants, which became a bit of a meme in the reanimation community, so I'll leave it here in case you want to know what a good rejection message looks like:
“While I enjoy your work, I don't think it's quite the level necessary for this project. But please, continue working at your craft, because you have enormous potential! Thank you so much for applying and keep on creating!”
Before I move on to the next topic, I want to add that you should set a limit on how many scenes someone can ask for. The goal with a collab is variety, so you don't want to see the same person's art style appear multiple times. If you make the limit of scenes only one per person, that'll be the best way to ensure maximum variety, but that should only be optional. If you want to let people take two or three things, that's completely fine as well.
If variety is still an issue, you can encourage them to try out a different art style for each of their scenes so they all look different from each other, but again, that should only be optional. I wouldn't recommend letting anyone take more than three scenes maximum, because not only does it mean saying the same person's style over and over again, but it also takes away the opportunity for more artists to join if everyone takes more than one scene.
Ok, so let's say you've accepted one or more animators onto your collab. You responded to their animation, you gave them a scene, so now you can just sit back and wait for them to finish it while you focus on recruiting more people, right? Not quite. The truth is, lots of people are procrastinators, especially animators, so if you don't give them any incentive to finish their scene by a certain date, they're probably going to keep putting it off and finding excuses not to work on it.
Of course, it's not right to assume the worst about every animator who joins a collab: many of them do put in effort to finish their scene as soon as they can, and if they take a while, it's often because they have real life commitments or issues preventing them from working on it. But if you have enough people on board, you'll inevitably come across someone who takes a very long time to work on their scene and doesn't have a good excuse as to why. Whatever the reason, it's extremely important to set a deadline way before you even start letting people take scenes.
But like I mentioned in Phase II, what if you don't know what the deadline should be? After all, everyone works at different paces, and it's almost impossible to determine one specific date that everyone should finish by, right? Well it shouldn't be, if you go one of these two routes when it comes to determining deadlines.
First, you could establish just one deadline for everyone who works on the collab. That way, everyone has a specific date to work towards, and there's no confusion for whoever joins. However, you could run into an issue if you make the deadline too close or too far away from the day you first start the collab. If you make the deadline, say, one or two months from the day you started, you run the risk of making people rush to get their scenes done on time, which can lead to stress, crunching, and burnout.
On the opposite end, if you make the deadline too far away from your start date, such as a year or more after starting, participants might have more of an excuse to put off working on their scenes until the last minute, and by the time you reach that deadline, some of them might have forgotten about the collab entirely or neglected to even start. My advice if you go the one-deadline-for-everyone route is to make it anywhere between six to nine months from the day you first start. Even then, you might still run into some other issues, such as people who joined the collab later having less time before the deadline to finish compared to everyone else.
You could also go the second route, which is the one I personally prefer. Instead of making one deadline for everyone, give each person an individual deadline based on the day they were accepted into the collab. This will definitely take more time and effort, since you need to organize more information for however many participants you plan to have, but in my opinion, it's more worth it in the end.
Having an individual deadline for everyone will incentivize participants to be much more accountable when it comes to finishing their scenes, and everyone's progress will be more organized as a result. For this method, I would recommend making a participant's individual deadline three months from the day they get accepted, since it gives them enough time to plan things out while keeping them on track to finish by an earlier date. However, if you don't have the time or energy to manage so many different deadlines for so many people, you're welcome to stick to the first route.
Whatever you decide to choose for the deadline, make sure to keep it separate from your planned release date, since you'll still need time to edit every scene together. I'll get into that more in Phase IV. Also, be open to extending the deadline whenever you need to, both for individuals and for everyone. You never know if one or more participants are unable to finish by the deadline for whatever reason, so instead of forcing them to finish under a time crunch, it would be in their best interest to give them a little bit of extra time so they can finish at a more comfortable pace. If, for any reason, someone needs to drop out of the collab and give their scene to someone else, reset the deadline for whoever takes that scene.
You also don't want to just give someone a deadline and then not check up on them until that day. In order to make sure everyone is making progress on their scenes, I strongly recommend planning check-in dates. These are dates ranging anytime between the start of the collab and the final deadline, which are meant to get every participant to show you whatever progress they've made up to that point. Check-ins are extremely helpful, because they help you determine who's actively working on their scene and who isn't. If someone doesn't have anything new to show during a check-in, you can privately message them to figure out what's keeping them from working on the scene, and find a solution to the issue before their deadline approaches. It's also just cool to see previews of what everyone's cooking up.
If you have all that stuff prepared before or around the very start of production, the rest of Phase III will go a lot easier. From this point forward, I can't really tell you how the rest of production will go. It's easily the longest and most tedious phase of making a reanimated collab, and there's no telling how long it'll take before every scene is complete. It could range from anywhere between a few months to a few years, depending on the scope of the project and the rate at which scenes are being taken and finished. It'll all be up to you how your collab goes, so at this point, I just want to leave you with some important advice for being a good host throughout production, as well as how participants should behave overall.
The most important thing to remember during the production phase is that every single person on the collab is working for free. They're volunteering their own time to work on something with other people, with animation practice being their only incentive for doing so. These projects are entirely optional to participate in, so as a host, you should take that into consideration and use it to guide every single interaction you have with participants.
Don't be too harsh when people don't follow the rules, don't talk down to participants like they're beneath you, don't use anything as leverage to coax them into working faster for you, and double check every message you send to make sure none of them are rude, immature, or condescending. The last thing you want is for people to think you're a jerk, because that's gonna make things a lot less fun for everyone.
Do be friendly and casual with participants, treat everyone like equals. Do be understanding when they come to you with worries and issues. Do be willing to find solutions to work around any limitations with yourself or your participants. Do make sure to put as much attention as you can on responding to applications and questions in a prompt manner.
And above all, DON'T GIVE UP ON THE COLLAB! When you start a reanimated collab, you make a commitment to see it through to the very end. There shouldn't be any good reason to cancel or abandon it. If you do, you render all the time and effort other participants put into their scenes completely useless. They took free time out of their own lives to make something for no monetary gain, and if the thing they contributed to never sees the light of day, all their work will have been for nothing. Nobody likes the feeling of working on something only for it to go to waste, so you have to make sure, no matter how hard or tedious it gets, that you'll stick with the collab until it's finished.
It'll take so much of your time and energy, but the final result will be worth it. And remember what I said in Phase I, if for some reason you absolutely can't find time to host the project by yourself anymore, get other people to help you cohost or take over for you. As long as production continues to run smoothly and there's a guarantee it's in good hands to get finished, that's all that matters.
But it's not just the host that needs to know good tips for production: participants are just as responsible for keeping the collab fun and productive. If you're animating a scene for a reanimated collab, make sure to follow every single rule in the host's rules doc as closely as possible. Treat the host and everyone else with respect, be open to whatever criticism they may have of your scene, don't be afraid to ask the host any and all questions you have, try your best to finish by your deadline and respond to every check-in with new progress to show, and don't do anything that'll make the host's job harder than it needs to be.
More than anything else, communication is key. Being consistent with how often you ask questions and respond to questions the host asks you will ensure that your scene gets finished in the most efficient manner. Any lack of communication regarding how your scene is progressing will only cause more uncertainty and stress on the host, and I can say that from experience. You don't want to leave the host in the dark about anything, especially when it comes to valid reasons why you don't have progress to show during a check-in. That being said, don't divulge too much sensitive information about your personal life either, you need to keep certain things private to maintain your online security more than anything.
A good host won't get upset at you if you're honest about your lack of updates, but if they can't get ahold of you in any way for long periods of time, it's only going to make things more frustrating for them. If you go enough time without speaking to the host at all, it can and should be grounds for getting kicked out of the collab, and if you respond at the last minute once that decision has already been made, you should accept that there's no reason the host should keep you on the collab if you haven't been pulling your weight, so to speak.
Before I move on to the last two phases, I want to briefly mention the option I listed in Phase II for replacing the audio for a collab. Like I said before, if you are going to use the original audio, make sure YouTube will not immediately take down the video for copyright. If there's too much of a risk that they will, arrange for all the audio in the scenes to be recreated along with the visuals. Redoing the audio for a project is a greater level of work, especially if it's for a full movie collab, but has a much higher payoff if you can successfully upload it without a copyright takedown.
If you don't want the stress of micromanaging and editing dozens of audio clips, cast voice actors to redo the voices for the entire project. Hold auditions for volunteer voice actors, and make your casting decisions based on whoever can replicate the voice in the best audio quality. Find volunteer composers to recreate any tracks from the musical score of your piece of media, and make them sound different enough that they won't be detected by YouTube's copyright system. If everyone does their own audio for their scene, make sure you get each track separately. Having sound effects, dialogue, and music as separate tracks will make it easier to fix bad sound mixing once you edit everything together. Speaking of which…
PHASE IV: POST-PRODUCTON
Ok, let's say that everything during production went smoothly, and now, after however long it took, you have every single scene finished. Now the hardest part is done and you can move on to the second-to-last phase of this whole process: post-production!
Everyone already did their part to make all the scenes, now it's up to you to put them all together into one final video. First of all, I would recommend starting the editing process long before all the scenes are finished. That way, you can go along adding scenes to your editing project as you receive them, and you won't have to do all the work at the very end of production. Once a scene gets done, just download it, add it into your video software, line it up in the correct spot, and then you won't have to touch it again until the very end of production. Rinse and repeat every time another scene gets done.
At some point before all the scenes are finished, try to edit together a trailer for your collab using some of the finished scenes. A trailer will be very helpful for marketing your collab to newcomers and giving them a sneak peek of what to expect in the final product. That way, you'll have more people eager to tune in to the finished collab once you release it.
A trailer will also be very helpful if you release it during the production process, because you can use it to recruit more animators. If you put somewhere during the video or in the description that scenes are still open for people to take, it'll do wonders during the promotion part of Phase III. But assuming you waited until the collab was almost done to make a trailer, it'll still be useful in making sure the final premiere has more fanfare, instead of being buried in YouTube's algorithm.
Let's go back to the editing process. Like I said when discussing splitting scenes in Phase II, you can use any free or paid editing software to put together your final video; it all just depends on what software you're most comfortable using and how proficient you are with its interface and features. If you already have the full original audio for your collab, it's as easy as importing a scene, placing it on the timeline, and lining it up to the exact spot where it syncs perfectly with the audio.
However, you might run into a problem if you didn't split the original scenes correctly. I didn't mention this in Phase II, but when splitting a larger video into smaller scenes, you can't be sloppy with where you make a cut in the video. You need to make sure the beginning and end of an individual scene are cut at the precise moment, the precise frame that you want, otherwise it's gonna make the scene harder to edit together with others.
Let's say, when you split a scene, you do it in a way where you accidentally leave in a few frames that should be at the beginning of the very next scene you cut. It might not seem like a big deal, but for the artist that's supposed to reanimate it, having those few extra frames will make it confusing for them to figure out where they should stop animating. They might accidentally draw something different for those few frames even though they don't need to, or they might change the way their scene syncs with the audio.
Whatever the case, the best way to avoid mistakes like this is to make sure during pre-production that each scene is cut perfectly, at the exact start and end frame you want to. In case you're working with fan dubbed voices and music that doesn't match perfectly with the original audio, then it would be the best move to encourage artists to add a second or two of B-roll animation so there aren't noticeable gaps between scenes.
Speaking of which, when editing every scene together, professionalism is key. You want to make sure there are no points where there's a tiny gap between two scenes, or an extra frame that didn't get deleted, or anything else that would make the final project less visually or audibly cohesive. Viewers will be able to notice sloppy edits, and it could potentially take away from the overall viewing experience. That's why you should take all the time you need to make last-minute edits to scenes, fix any mistakes you might have missed, and make sure the final video is as perfect as you want it to be.
Also, don't be afraid to make any changes to people's scenes. They might have animated their scene how they wanted to, but you should have the final say over how it looks in the finished video. If their lip sync doesn't match perfectly with the audio, feel free to change a few frames so that it does. If a transition between two scenes doesn't look right to you, make tiny edits to the start and end points until the scenes transition as smoothly as you want them to. If there's a small animation mistake in a scene, fix it! Overall, be willing to make whatever edits necessary to people’s scenes, reconstruct and refilm, and even redub audio if necessary.
When you finally have every single scene finished and edited together exactly how you want, there's only one thing left to do before you're ready to export the video. No reanimated collab is complete unless you've properly credited everyone who contributed. This obviously includes yourself as well as all animators who made scenes, but you can also include people that assisted in other roles, such as cohosts or admins, people who only made art for someone else's scene, and anyone else that served as good help during the duration of the project.
When crediting everyone, make sure you know exactly what nickname they want to be credited with, and how to spell or write it. Some artists may go by different names on different social media accounts, or they might prefer to use their real name out of professionalism or the chance of exposure. It's preferred that you get down these names during the very moment they first apply to the collab, when they introduce themselves and leave their social media links.
In case there's still any confusion later down the line, such as a person changing their name or handle before the end of the collab, make an effort to announce to everyone that they should list their preferred nickname somewhere so you can use it in the credits. Nothing's worse for an artist than the embarrassment of an incorrect or misspelled name being used to credit them in a project they spent a lot of time contributing to, so make sure all the names are perfectly correct.
Once you've solidified everyone's names, make sure to list them from first to last, in the order of when their scenes showed up in the collab. If someone made more than one scene, list them multiple times. For example, if someone made two scenes, one near the beginning and one near the middle, make it so that their names appear twice in the credits, once near the beginning of the list, and once near the middle. The complete list of credits can be displayed however you want to, whether you want to show one name at a time, or separate them into batches of names that are on screen for a second or two before switching to the next batch.
It's not enough to just keep people's names limited to the end credits. Viewers want to be able to associate any art style in the video with the artist who made it, and they won't get that if they just see them as a random name at the end. So on top of everyone's scenes in the video, you should add the name of the person who animated it in a corner of the screen. Incorporate it in a way that doesn't cover up any of the visuals onscreen, but don't make it so small that people can't read it if they want to.
I personally like to put a person's name in the bottom right corner of their scene, make the font small enough so the name only takes up a small fraction of the screen size, and lower the opacity just slightly so it appears more like a watermark than an important visual element. That way, people can still notice it and read the artist's name if they want to, but it's not big or bright enough to distract from the artist's visuals. Make sure to be precise with how you edit the names together as well; don't leave a name lingering into another person's scene before changing it to the next one, otherwise your edit will appear more sloppy like I mentioned before.
Finally, before moving on to the final phase, I want to mention one more thing you can do for post-production. I've seen some collabs decide to have all the animators draw “sonas” of themselves specific to the media they're reanimating. The Spongebob Squarepants Movie Rehydrated had “fishsonas”, where everyone drew themselves as a fish citizen in Bikini Bottom, just as an example. Once all or most artists make a sona, they all appear next to their names in the end credits, just for some extra pizzazz. If you want to organize something like this as a last fun thing for all the animators to do, go ahead.
However, I should add that doing sonas will mean more work on your end organizing all of them. It's very difficult to get every single contributor on board to make one, and if not everyone has a sona, it may be jarring to see large gaps without them in the credits. You also need to make your own set of rules and specifications for the sonas to make sure they all stick with a consistent visual theme, as well as having a completely transparent background and being in the same size and file format. If you don't think all that work is worth it, you can skip doing sonas. But if you think it'll be really fun and add a lot to the collab, go ahead and do it.
Once again, that's all I can fit in one post. To see the next and final post, go to this link. You can also go back to the first post with this link. In the meantime, check out these useful links for things I mentioned in the tutorial:
The Amazing World of Gumball Reanimated, my successful reanimated collab, the process of which I based this tutorial on.
Reanimation Collaboration Starter Pack by Connor Japikse, co-host of Shrek 2 Retold.
Reanimation Station Twitter Account