Staging is how you direct the viewer’s attention to the shot. For the aim of grabbing the viewer’s attention, animators use poses and actions of characters, their placement in the frame, background, and other elements of the scene. In this way, animators convey to the viewer the mood, reactions, emotions of characters in a particular story. Staging helps to inform an audience about narrative as well.

Staging involve multiple elements such as pose/action, camera shot, timing, and scene. The goal is to use all the elements to set the stage to clearly communicate the story of a sequence of animation.