Professionals rarely start a project by jumping into software. They follow a workflow that makes room for planning, revision, and clear deliverables at every stage.
- A strong brief captures purpose, audience, technical specs, and deadlines in one place.
- Mood boards give you a shared visual vocabulary before any animation or editing begins.
- Scripts, including two-column AV scripts, align voice, visuals, and timing before a frame ever moves.
This lesson is a preview from our Video Editing & Motion Graphics Certificate Online (includes software). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
For someone new to motion design or video editing, the hardest part is usually not learning which buttons to press. It is knowing what to do next. A repeatable workflow answers that question by dividing the project into stages, each with its own purpose and deliverable. Both the motion design workflow and the video editing workflow move from concept to planning to building to polishing to delivery. They differ in emphasis, but they rhyme.
Stage One, the Concept Brief
Every project starts with a concept, and when a client is involved, that concept becomes a brief. A strong brief typically covers purpose, brand context, target audience, technical specs like format and aspect ratio and duration, and a timeline with real deadlines. Projects are almost never handed over as a single final version, so the brief should also describe the key milestones and what is delivered at each one.
Personal work still needs a brief. You can write one in five minutes by answering a short list of questions. What am I making? For whom? What should they feel or do afterward? Where will it be seen, a phone screen, a theater, YouTube, Instagram? And what is the deadline? Giving yourself a deadline matters, because professional work is almost always deadline-driven, and the habit is easier to build on personal projects than to learn on paid ones.
A simple example: a twenty second Instagram promo for a fictional cafe, targeted at local students, delivered vertical at 1080 by 1920. That brief alone is enough to start brainstorming ideas, either solo, with friends, or with help from AI tools when you need a starting point.
Stage Two, the Mood Board
The mood board is a curated collection of references that communicates direction. It captures tone, color, typographic treatments, pacing, transitions, camera style, and audio vibe. Motion designers tend to focus on typographic styles, graphic language (flat, collage, 3D, textured, volumetric), and animation references for timing and easing. Video editors tend to focus on cinematography style, lighting and color grading, and pacing.
Mood boards are not about copying finished work. They are about building a shared vocabulary that helps you make consistent decisions later. There is no wrong way to assemble one. Some designers use images, some use short video clips, some combine both. The board is for you and your team. Nobody else has to see it, which means it does not have to look pretty, only useful.
Stage Three, the Script
A script is the written plan for what happens in time. It can include dialogue, narration, key beats, and the order of information. Even projects without spoken words, like kinetic typography pieces, benefit from a script, because writing it down forces you to decide what appears, in what order, with what emphasis, and for how long.
If you have never written a script before, expect the first few to be rough. The only way to get better is to write short pieces repeatedly. A one-page maximum is a healthy constraint for beginners. For a thirty second voiceover, aim for roughly sixty to ninety spoken words, and then practice reading it aloud. AI tools can help generate drafts at specific durations if you give them a clear prompt, which is useful for quickly testing word counts.
Two-Column AV Scripts
Motion design has a specialty document called a two-column script, AV script, or split script. It is a bridge between writing and visual design. The audio column captures voiceover, music cues, and sound effects. The visual column describes what we see on screen and how it animates. A third column for notes is common when production details need to travel with the script.
The two-column format forces you to decide, moment by moment, what visual supports what audio. Beginners often underestimate this step. If the visuals do not clearly support the audio, you will feel the mismatch the first time you animate. It is cheaper to revise a split script than to rebuild an animatic, which is the point of doing this work early.
Workflows exist because creative projects without structure run over schedule, over budget, and over patience. A clear brief, a useful mood board, a short script, and a two-column plan give both motion designers and video editors a path from idea to delivery without missteps compounding. Make your mistakes in the cheap stages, where they are easy to fix, and save your energy for the parts of the job that actually move.
