Beauty in Motion: Part I
The Art of Anime
Introduction
(This series of articles seeks to cover only the visual aspects of anime production, and said aspects of production are not exclusive to anime)
Animation is a medium of expression that evokes a spectrum of emotions through its expertly-crafted images. Employed for entertainment in the same way that every other modern audio-visual work is, animation has evolved from organised sketches on sheets of paper to photo-realistic rendering using supercomputers. Inevitably, the traditional hand-drawn animation that Disney pioneered has now been dwarfed by 3D computer animation, primarily because of its wider appeal to audiences. Yet, hand-drawn animation is still flourishing today, as Anime.
Anime is the widely used word to refer to animation conceived of and produced by a collective of Japanese creators, usually marketed toward a Japanese audience. Anime is a markedly different medium of art and entertainment, firstly because of cultural differences in its content and secondly because of the techniques involved in its production, which is an amalgamation of older and modern ideas.
Concept art and Art direction
Envisioning what’s to appear on-screen begins with the scriptwriter collaborating with the director to decide upon the tone of the work. Once this has been taken care of, they approach concept artists — creatives who are exceptionally skilled at translating words to images that depict worlds that feel tangible and lived-in.
A concept artist’s role is paramount to whatever heights the production ends up striving for, since it is their interpretation of what’s on paper that is going to lay the groundwork for the entire team. Concept artists deal with scenic panoramas that try to capture the landscape that the story is set in, evocative glimpses of its civilization by way of the world’s architecture, brief vignettes of its people going about their daily lives and routines, and so on.
After the concept art is done, the director surveys the results at hand and provides feedback to the concept artist to tweak and iterate upon. Once the director is satisfied with subsequent iterations, they join the art directors to decide upon the overall colour tone. Colour can greatly enhance the moody ambience that the art portrays, and they set out to choose dominant colour palettes, saturation, hues and such. The art directors then proceed to tint the concept art with the palette selected.
Character Design
With the concept artist providing a rough framework of how the author wants his characters’ general disposition, these sample sketches have hundreds or even thousands of corrections and changes made to them to suit the director’s style and praxis.
These non-specific and rudimentary outlines of the character envisioned by the concept artists are then worked upon significantly in order to be drawn by animators, mainly to allow them mobility and versatility when their movement is depicted. This process involves the animators drawing the said character from all possible angles, expressing all possible emotions and actions on a handy piece of paper called as a character design sheet. This new design on the sheet tends to vary from the original sample sketches derived from the concept art depending upon the direction the designer takes.
A character designer spends countless hours trying to come up with the required character design and often around hundreds of character design sheets are produced in the process. Character design not only involves laboring over concisely drawn characters, but also making them feel tangible and believably real.
Storyboarding
Once the concept art and character design are finalized, it’s time for the art directors to decide what the animation is actually going to look like. The cut numbers, actor movements, camera positioning and movements such as zooming or panning, and the length of each shot in terms of seconds and frames are just some of the factors that the director should work out. All this is decided in the storyboarding stage, where a storyboard, typically drawn on A4 paper by separate storyboarders, consolidates all this information in the form of simplified mock-ups called ‘animatics’. This is a surprisingly intensive process, especially for traditional hand-drawn anime, as it generally takes at least 3 weeks to storyboard a normal length TV anime episode.
However, storyboarding is extremely important because it helps the animators and directors work out any screenplay issues before the more arduous process of making the final animation begins. After all, removing or adding a single storyboard is much easier than modifying a finished product. Changes are made to both the storyboard and the soundtrack to make sure that they sync up.
Although one might think the contrary, storyboarding is an art in itself. Directors are generally very involved in this process, with each having different styles and unique methods. In fact, a lot of them kick-started their careers as storyboarders.
The next set of keyframes of Beauty in Motion will be pushed for production soon. Stay tuned for more on Anime Production!
This article was written in collaboration with Venkat S and Adhithya Sundar.
