Each episode goes through several stages in pre-production: premise, script, dialog recording, and storyboard. The storyboards detail each shot and most of the layout, posing, and camera actions. After storyboarding, backgrounds are created or re-used, and the preliminary staging, composition, and color balancing is refined by the layout department, who ship the layouts to the animation department. After animation and animation revisions, the episode is further refined in post-production. The initial two or three dozens of background ponies were summarily approved by Lauren Faust, intended to fill the background of places populated by ponies.