Animation and Motion Design Glossary
A guide to the language of animation, motion design, and creative production.
Business & Client-Facing
Animation Pipeline
Creative Direction
Brand Storytelling
Pre-Production
Animatics
Mixed-Media Animation
Visual Consistency
Art Direction
Motion Branding
Scope Definition
Creative Treatments
Styleframes vs Storyboards
Production Scheduling
Usage Rights & Licensing
Budget vs Complexity
Revisions & Feedback Protocols
Director's Treatment
Storyboard Revision Rounds
Frame Rate
Aspect Ratio
Delivery Specs
Sound Design
Voiceover Direction
Creative Craft & Animation Principles
Character Animation
2D Animation
3D Animation
Acting for Animation
Timing & Spacing
Cinematic Lighting
Layout & Composition
Design Frames
Storyboarding
Visual Development (VisDev)
Anticipation
Follow-Through & Overlap
Exaggeration
Silhouette Clarity
Performance Animation
Camera Language
Colour Scripts
Environment Design
Squash & Stretch
Staging
The 12 Principles of Animation
Solid Drawing
Appeal
Slow In and Slow Out
Arcs
Secondary Action
Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose
Technical, Production & CG
Rigging
Compositing
Rendering
Asset Management
Simulation
Camera Animation
Pacing & Rhythm
Feedback Cycles
Texturing & Shading
Look Development (LookDev)
Animation Curves & Graph Editor
Previsualisation (Previs)
Pipeline Automation
Render Farm
Alpha Channel
Motion Tracking
Match Move
Greenscreen and Chromakey
Rotoscoping
Stop Motion
AI-Native & Innovation
AI Animatics
AI-Assisted Animation
Look Development with AI
Generative Video Models
Image-to-Video Pipelines
Prompt Engineering for Animation
Style Transfer
Diffusion Models in Animation
AI-Assisted Storyboarding
Latent Space Exploration
Temporal Consistency
ControlNet and Conditioning Models
Video Localisation with AI
Synthetic Performance
Frame Interpolation
Upscaling and Super-Resolution
Voice Synthesis for Animation
Text-to-Video
Video-to-Video
Style Reference (sref) for Animation
LoRA Training for Brand Consistency
AI Roto and Matte Generation
AI Lip Sync
Looking for AI-specific terms?
Our AI animation glossary lives at Myth Labs
Myth Labs is our AI-native production studio. The Labs glossary covers production-grade AI workflows in more depth, from animatics to localisation.