Beauty in Motion: Part II
The Art of Anime
(This series of articles seeks to cover only the visual aspects of anime production, and said aspects are not exclusive to anime production)
If you missed it, here’s the link to Beauty in Motion: Part I
Keyframing
Keyframing can be considered the most vital part of an anime, and its significance is certainly justified. Keyframes are the frames that indicate the most important parts of an animation cut.
An example: if a character jumps up in the air, the frames that depict said character pulling themselves down for momentum, the instant of release, their ascent into the air, the moment gravity negates their inertia, their subsequent descent and landing would all be keyframes.
Keyframes are also responsible for conveying other dynamic data, such as lighting changes, colour coordination and merging during motion. The more detailed a keyframe is allowed to be, the more finesse it achieves in its portrayal of motion. Every perspective shift and demanding camera angle that distorts images to feel like live-action cinematography relies on expert keyframing. Storyboarding only conveys the bare necessity of the shot and it is up to the keyframe animators to depict the shot in all its dynamic glory.
Keyframing is one of the aspects of anime production that is still being accomplished by traditional hand-drawn animation, even while other parts of the pipeline have been domineered by digital technology. They also work as an unofficial benchmarking tool for animation quality, with a linear relationship between them that definitely feels accurate. Anime that is produced for TV in an episodic format usually tend to feature a limited number of keyframes due to time and budget constraints, while movie productions tend to have both in abundance. Hence, there always exists a marked difference in quality.
In-betweening
Now, just keyframes are not enough to make a full fledged animation cut. Keyframes mark only distinct positions or expressions of a character. To provide the illusion of fluidity and movement, some frames need to be added in between the keyframes. Hence, the name In-betweening (or tweening for short). However, this is often considered to be grunt work in the anime industry, mainly because of the lack of creative expression it offers. It is often outsourced to animators in Korea, or to less experienced animators, to whom clear instructions are given by the main animators as to the function of the particular in-between frames.
However, there are some key animators who will do the whole animation themselves, especially for visually evocative scenes. This is to ensure the lack of inferior in-betweens spoiling the effect intended by the key animator. Sometimes, for visually complicated scenes, this is a big deal as even casual viewers can appreciate the difference, not just animators.
Clean-up
I n traditional animation, the rough sketch is often drawn inexplicably. A clean-up artist polishes the rough sketch into the final drawing that is seen on screen. They employ various tools from key drawings to character design sheets to make the animation appear consistent and uniform. During this process, it is also made sure that the original intricacies and nuances that the artists devised are not tampered with.
A tremendously tedious process that usually takes as long as the rough animation has prompted production houses to employ computerised digital techniques that offer enhanced accuracy while greatly reducing the workload.
Painting and Background Art
Painting the finished frames with the information that’s been provided in the keyframes comes next. This process requires the involvement of the art director along with the painters and is also one of the parts of the production process that has embraced digital means earnestly. This is because the traditional method had a few limiting factors attached to it.
The older method involves using acrylic paint on separate sheets of cels (cellulose acetate), which are then arranged in layers and photographed using a fixed camera. While cel painting gives the image a very natural and inimitable visual flair, the process is fairly tedious and has been slowly phased out from the production pipeline in favour of digital painting.
Digital painting involves using digital illustration tools like Adobe’s suite of software (Photoshop, Illustrator and the like). Going digital has not only made the process more efficient, but also safer since shared storage options mean that there is no cause to worry about damage to completed frames due to some unforeseen physical disaster. Digital painting imparts a very sterile look to the image, but this is usually overcome using filters in post-processing.
An interesting anomaly involving painting is that the Background art is still done using traditional means, with watercolours being the primary utility. This results in a sometimes very noticeable dissonance between the static background and the animated foreground, which is now primarily digitally painted. Some productions take advantage of this eccentricity for some interesting compositions.
Here’s a dynamic summary of the combination of the above mentioned aspects of production:
It features: first the keyframes, then the cleaned-up keyframes with their in-betweens and finally the painted version.
The final cut of Beauty in Motion will soon be set for release. Stay tuned for more on Anime Production!
This article was written in collaboration with Venkat S and Siddarth Arvind.
