AnimAgents: Coordinating Multi-Stage Animation Pre-Production with Human-Multi-Agent Collaboration

TL;DR

AnimAgents is a human-multi-agent system designed to streamline and coordinate multi-stage animation pre-production workflows, addressing fragmentation and continuity challenges faced by professional creators.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-agent collaboration framework tailored for animation pre-production, integrating stage-aware coordination and element-level refinement.

Findings

Significantly improved workflow coordination and consistency.

Enhanced user satisfaction and creative control.

Effective in real-world animation projects.

Abstract

Animation pre-production lays the foundation of an animated film by transforming initial concepts into a coherent blueprint across interdependent stages such as ideation, scripting, design, and storyboarding. While generative AI tools are increasingly adopted in this process, they remain isolated, requiring creators to juggle multiple systems without integrated workflow support. Our formative study with 12 professional creative directors and independent animators revealed key challenges in their current practice: Creators must manually coordinate fragmented outputs, manage large volumes of information, and struggle to maintain continuity and creative control between stages. Based on the insights, we present AnimAgents, a human-multi-agent collaborative system that coordinates complex, multi-stage workflows through a core agent and specialized agents, supported by dedicated boards for the four major stages of pre-production. AnimAgents enables stage-aware orchestration, stage-specific output management, and element-level refinement, providing an end-to-end workflow tailored to professional practice. In a within-subjects summative study with 16 professional creators, AnimAgents significantly outperformed a strong single-agent baseline that equipped with advanced parallel image generation in coordination, consistency, information management, and overall satisfaction (p < .01). A field deployment with 4 creators further demonstrated AnimAgents' effectiveness in real-world projects.