PART 2: The Japanese Animation Process in a Nutshell
I’m gonna talk a bit about the production process. Let’s imagine that you’re an animator, and you’ve been assigned to do a piece of animation depicting the swing of a baseball bat. How would you do it?
The industry standard way to do it is to first lay down your key poses, (your key drawings) and then gradually draw in the in-betweens. Your key poses might look like this: 1..2..3.. & 4… [Doing the actual movement] And then you draw the in-between drawings until the motion looks smooth enough. The key poses are the important thing, though.
The experienced animators will draw the keys, while the less experienced (or lower-paid) animators will draw the in-betweens. This way, you can make the best use of your top talent. But how do animators know what to draw?
They have various design sheets for characters, mecha, settings and so on. They also have a storyboard, which is a visual script of every cut (camera cut) in the episode, movie, or whatever. A director will delegate each cut to a certain animator, and that animator will draw everything that’s in the cut. All the mecha, all the effects, and all the characters.
Design sheets + Storyboard (Ghost in the Shell)
If there’s a scene that’s especially heavy with battle choreography or effects, then he might assign it to a specialist in that category of animation. So now that you have various key animators working on the cuts, how do you make sure all the cuts look more or less the same?
You have a position called the “animation director”, which is better described as the “animation supervisor”. He cleans up the drawings from the key animators and makes sure visual continuity is maintained.
Here’s a piece of key-only animation. This is just straight from the key animator. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYn_nDQQOTc
Noein To Your Other Self (Ryo-Timo)
It’s pretty rough and there are a lot of missing drawings. These keys go to the animation director, and then to the in-betweeners, and it looks like this:
Noein To Your Other Self (Ryo-Timo)
It’s a lot smoother and it’s a lot cleaner. And then it goes to coloring & compositing, and this is how it appeared in the TV show.
Noein To Your Other Self (Ryo-Timo)
The workflow is like this: You got the storyboard, The director assigns the cuts of the storyboard to the key animators… They make their keys, and send them to the Animation Director for clean-up… The finished keys go to the in-betweeners for in-betweening… And sometimes they go back to the Animation Director for another clean-up stage. And then, finally, they go to coloring and compositing. [More details]
(Simplified) Japanese Animation Process
So when we’re talking about these big-name animators, we’re really just talking about the key animators, and this is the product that they’re creating.
Tetsuwan Birdy Decode:02, episode 7
[Commenting the clip] On a sheet, they get to mark down where they want the in-between drawings to go, So they actually have a fair bit of control over the in-between process too.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
AMAZING article and samples explaining each part. What an amazing read.
Thanks so much for posting all of this and putting so much time into it. It’s clear you’re really passionate about animation and it’s history.
Lovely post – so informative!
{ 5 trackbacks }