Planing

IT REALLY RELIES ON SHEER NUMBERS ALONE!
With hundreds or even thousands of people working on it at the same time I really feel the pity for the enemy called "work time"! It could be really munched-up in a matter of hours!

Now - in order to have a huge number of people working on a fan-based project, there has to be a huge online fan-base for the thing - and what has a greater fan-base than the very thing that inspired me for all of this in the first place - TRANSFORMERS! (Generation 1 to be precise.) I mean - in every country there are literally thousands of TRANSFORMERS fans!

Now imagine this:

20 minute cartoon

done at 12 frames per second

=14,400 frames

and now the best part: if there is only miserly 500 of us - then EACH OF US DOES ONLY 29 PICTURES (FRAMES) -PIECE OF CAKE!!!
(also have in mind that most frames don't require you to draw anything new - just move the existing elements)

all frames shown in a table consisting of120x120 (that's exactly 14,400) fields

each field flagged with one of five colors representing status for that frame e.g.:
(White = Untouched)
(Green = Unfinished)
(Yellow = Reserved)
(Red = Work in progress)
(Blue = Finished!)

each field leads to the download/upload page for that frame (frame page)

on those pages there are 6 fields (for 6 phases of work as listed below*) - each containing thumbnails for .PSD (PhotoShop Document) files which are the changed, saved and uploaded actual frames (add-only) - not all fields have to be used (maybe you do all the phases so you upload only the finished frame - but maybe it's better to specialize)

* phases of work (actually layers in the .PSD file) are:
1. blue doodle (just stick men, objects and surroundings drawn as quickly as possible to show how objects move (animation notes), and simply labeled to know what is what)
2. gray sketch (this phase is necessary because transformers contain a lot of geometry - additional lines are needed, errors in drawing are unavoidable etc.)
3. black outlining (one just pays attention to what's correct in the gray sketch and puts lines there)
4. coloring (using pencil tool in PhotoShop, sampling colors from the common resource materials, and using '[' and ']' keys to change the size of pencil tool, painting on the layer placed below outline layer)
5. shading (using burn tool in PhotoShop... surely you noticed how there are darker parts on the colored surfaces in cartoons)
6. placing surroundings (backgrounds and other static elements from the common resources)

common resources (as already mentioned) contain reference pictures (from the original cartoon series), and in the other group all the stuff needed for our animation (pencils (you copy them to your PhotoShop so we all draw outlines the same), backgrounds and other static elements , palettes (usually simple colored characters) from which you sample colors when coloring etc. etc. etc. users could upload into common resources what they draw if they think that wold be useful elsewhere)

table fields (representing frames) would be grouped into scenes (multitude of frames grouped), all frame pages for frames from the group show same explanation text for what happens there

Of course detailed scenario would be made and reviewed before we get to work - each scene timed and frame-counted.
That's the visual part. Sound comes later.