Anime Production: How Anime Is Made
Have you ever wondered how anime is made? I’m asking myself the same question every time I watched an anime. after researching, I ended up with the right answer in details. Before explaining the process of Anime Production, let’s talk about the story behind Anime in few words and how it saw international success.
Short Story Behind Anime:
The word Anime is the Japanese term for animation, it began in Japan the earliest 19th century. Katsudō Shashin called the Matsumoto fragment, it is the oldest Japanese short film animation discovered in a collection of films and projectors in Kyoto ( City in Japan ) in 2005.” Video of the Matsumoto fragment “. Its creator is unknown. Besides, the success of the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs featured by The Walt Disney Company‘s, it has influenced many Japanese animators in the middle-19th century and to the world over years.Whilst some similar attributes in terms of animation technique, character design, and music. Over the last few years, Legal international availability of anime on the internet has changed through simulcasts of series on anime websites.
How animation is made? and how artists draw them? Too many answers that involve the creation of anime, so I’ll do a comprehensive overview simple and easy to understand the process of Anime production. I hope this article will be useful. In all, anime production requires many steps and stages, let’s start with this pipeline chart :
1. Pre-Production :
This process is the period before any real animating takes place, in further developing ideas and planning prior to the process of production. Regardless of the complexity of an animated film, it undergoes the basic pre-production steps that generalize the initial pre-production, sees below :
Concept Design: This is the first step we can not ignore, Designs are certainly an important part of creating a good anime. whether its forms of animation are Traditional, Stop-Motion and Computer Animation. all begins with the concept of Design. The success of the environment concepts such as Conceptualise, Design, and Execution a world of characters living reliably. The Basic Concept Design proceed storyline, script, and animation it includes also the initial sketches of characters and settings. The key to the success of the artwork is Thinking Technically to process in creating strong concepts and compositions for animation.
Storyboarding: Once the concept design is set, Storyline comes next to finalized using storyboards. A storyboard is a graphic organizer in the form of illustrations or images. Often the storyboard is created by the director. it is like a comic strip that is complete with dialogs. the storyboards would be entirely finished before an episode goes into production. usually, it takes around 3 weeks to do for a normal length TV-anime episode things that makes it too long before the production.
2. In-Production :
This process comes after the storyboards and animatics are set. It includes the cut number, the layout, the action, the dialogue, and finally, the running time (in time and frames). The layouts are only drawn roughly because they are handled by other artists in the next step of production.
Layouts: The next step is the layout process after approved storyboards, including art production and key animation. In the layout department, the artistic team is the one that collaborates closely with the director in finalizing the scenes, costumes, and appearance of the characters. In other words, developing a layout is about positioning the animated image or ‘cels ‘ that will be used in the cut and the background art that will be needed. Overall, the layout director is framing each cut and looking at overall composition.
Animation: Once layouts are done, the production assistant gives them to the key animators. They’re the ones who bring the images to life, in which the animator checks for consistency and quality of the completed cuts. If it gets the stamp of approval, they go to the in-between animator. The in-between frames are also checked/corrected by the in-between supervisor in order to make sure the quality and frames of the key animation.
Key Animation: The Key animators help create animated drawings according to the story. They must be talented and hard-working and be going well beyond the requirements of the storyboard. The anime industry is known for allowing these individual artists lots of room to express their own style. Almost 30 key animators can be working on a single episode of anime. While working, they place the background layouts under their animation to make sure the characters line up with the proper background elements. The animators are also able to check their sequences with a Quick Action Recorder in the backroom, which however is quite rare due to the tight schedules.
Second Key Animation: A new role was recently invented as a buffer between the key animator and the animation director: second key animation. It is a relatively new concept in anime. The persons inside are cleaning up the rough Animation before they’re passed on to the animation director to be checked. This step makes the process of drawing easy for animators.
Animation director: The animation director’s role is responsible for all the key animation, and in charge of all aspects of the animation process during the production of an anime. lastly, animation director may include checking and updating lists for each scene.
in-between animation: We have our approved key-frames for a piece of animation, but now to complete the animation, so that it moves fluidly, more drawings have to be completed to go between the keyframes. This is called in-between animation. In-betweening is widely regarded as drudge work in the animation industry. This is where inexperienced animators begin their career but it is repetitive, uncreative work, and the inbetweeners often have extremely high production quotas to be met. In-betweening is often subcontracted to the lowest bidder, which can result in shoddy work.
3. Post-Production :
After the frames are drawn and checked, they are digitized on the computer which they are painted with a specified color palette by painting staff. After the animation is done, the coloring team, supervised by the color designer, digitizes, cleans, and colors the cuts at the digital paint department and then to the photography department for the composition ( filming ). Once all the frames are colored and finished, they can be processed as animation using a specialized software package. In the end, the editor splices, combines, edits, and then develops all the completed cuts. The core directing team then reviews the completed episode and gives feedback or their final approval. Then anime is aired.
Review:
Overall, the anime process has 3 steps :
- Planning stage: where the basis of the anime is brainstormed.
- The layout stage: where everything like animation is worked on.
- The production stage: where the anime is ” vocalized ” and filming & editing takes place.
after those steps, the anime is aired.
Related:
Anime World Community 