About Our Process
PHASE 0: Script doctoring and key layout
Before we get down to work, if you want, we propose an analysis of the script. A new, fresh and experienced look at the project helps to improve it and translate it into images. After all, a storyboard is a drawn script and cinema is told with images. Let yourself be carried away by our experience and everything will go smoothly.
PHASE 1: Planning
Based on the script and the specific guidelines you provide us about your project, our team of story artists will draw a rough animatic, created with Toon Boom Storyboard Pro software. We add a pre-audio and sound effects if necessary. A supervisor reviews and adjusts the scenes that are then pitched to the director. You’ll just talk to him and we’ll coordinate the artists. Easy, right?
PHASE 2: Cleaning and painting
Our clean-up and paint artists will polish the scenes you’ve approved, adjusting the characters to model, adding different gray values if necessary and special effects like lightning, smoke, light effects… As in each phase, before reaching the client, the supervisor will check the work and adjust the details so as not to lose the essence of the initial idea.
PHASE 3: Revisions
Animation is always a race against time. Our revisionist team takes care of those adjustments at the last minute because of changes in time, dialogue, or simply because the director’s vision has changed. This ensures that the pace of the other departments is not affected, and delivery dates do not have to be postponed.
We make storyboards and animatics for all types of projects
At AupaStudio, we specialize in storyboarding and animatics for animation of all styles and genres.
With our extensive industry experience, we are well-versed in the advantages and limitations of various techniques, allowing us to achieve optimal performance and productivity in every scene. A well-executed storyboard can save a considerable amount of time and money in the total cost of a production.
Our strength as a storyboard studio, compared to several freelancers, is that we have our own supervisors and a production team so you can receive the material already filtered and have just one point of contact. By dividing the work among different teams, specialized into different phases, we consistently meet deadlines while maintaining exceptional production quality and finishing.
All projects are directed and supervised by Aitor Herrero, a storyboard artist with more than 30 years of experience in the industry.
The production team is led by Ambra Malanca, experienced producer with a background of many different productions and fields.
Aitor Herrero
Aitor Herrero has participated as a storyboard artist in plentiful animation projects. He began his career in 1990, creating storyboards and handling the production design for the series ‘Mimi & Mr. Bobo’ (26×26′ / MB Producciones). Since then, he has worked as a freelancer, creating storyboards for many international companies.
For ten years, he balanced his professional work with teaching at the Spanish animation schools Primer Frame and Barreira, educating more than 200 individuals, many of whom are now accomplished professionals. He mentored a number of student short films, many of which have achieved numerous selections and awards at international festivals.
In 2016, he founded AupaStudio focusing on overseeing the projects, and creating new projects for productions, such as the pre-school series ‘Jasmine & Jambo,’ (Best International Series at the Ecran Jeunesse festival in Paris and Best ibero-american series at Quirino Awards) or ‘Urke’, an adult animation project currently in pre-production, with the support of Ibermedia Next.
Ambra Malanca
Ambra Malanca has more than 10 years of experience in productions of different fields and countries.
In the first years of her career she worked in animations studios like Maga Animation (Monza, Italy), N9VE studio (Barcelona, Spain), 2d3D animations (Angouleme, France), where she learned all about team coordination, production tracking and scheduling, internal and external communication.
She then changed her occupational field moving to product and marketing for videogames in Miniclip (Genova, Italy) and then project management for VFX in Alps studios (Torino, Italy).
From 2022 she has joined AupaStudio as head of production, bringing her multi-area experience, happy to share the same mindset and values of efficiency and personal well-being.