With most other kind of jobs, creativity and day to day work are not taken in the same breath and it was believed that creativity could not earn a person a monthly salary but this belief is totally upturned in the case of Animation industry. In the booming market of cartoons and animations, one can easily satiate his/her creative spirits and along with that take home a handsome pay packet.
There are different stages in the production of Animation where the work and required skill set is totally distinct from each of the other stages. Depending on the company structure these stages are done in parallel by different teams (by working on multiple projects on the same time) or by a single team. These stages include idea development, pre-production, production and post-production and the technical skills required are different in each stage.

In idea development stage the characters are created along with decisions like which real life person to model the character on (in case of 3D). 

The ideas are then converted into layouts in the pre-production stage. The important activities in this stage include scriptwriting, storyboarding, character development, backgrounds, layout designing, animatics and voice etc which all require different set of technical skills along with a good creative mindset. 

In the next stage of production the actual result of the story is visualized in the production stage which is a blend of animation, in-betweening or tweening ( this is the term used to describe the creation of intermediate frames between two main images to give the appearance that the first image flows smoothly into the second one), scanning, compositing (combining images from different sources to create a finished frame of animation), background preparation and coloring.

Final sound recordings, colour editing, testing and special sound effects are all added at the post-production stage. Other activities in the post production stage  include editing, special effects (SFX), color correction, compositing, voice and music editing and rendering. Rendering is the final touches to an animation scene, in which the data is converted to the raster image or animation.
This is the generic flow for 2D and 3D but there are some changes for 3D due to the different nature of product and involves some different set of work . The various steps included in the making of a 3D animation movie can be quickly summarized as
 
Story ? Story Boarding ? Character Sketch ? Concept creation ? Modeling ? Environments ? Rigging ? Character and Mechanical Animation ? Storyboard Animation ? Lighting ? Texturing ? Dynamics ? Voice Recording ? Digital Editing ? VFX ? Final Film

Though a person can work across multiple stages, people also tend to develop expertise in some of these areas and become specialists in the same and the final product is the result of team work between all these specialists. Hence Animation career is a broad area and one needs to clearly understand one's skill and choose a specialization best suited to them.

You might also like following articles