CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Whilst I am raising credit to go to Full Sail, I may start working on my manga skills... In other words, GET SOME of those skills...I just plain suck right now...

I was thinking... If I got good enough in my manga drawing skills, I figure I could make a very short anime... You know, like 5 or six minutes...

I got to thinking of what that would take, and realized...

If I was able to draw one image a minute, and scan it in another minute, and if I went full frames (30 fps) it would take me about three minutes if I was really really good on photoshop to color each image and place it in the background and move everything one frame forward... So, that would be 5 minutes alltogether for a frame... and then of course, to get a full second would take AT LEAST 2 and a half hours... That's 2 and 1/2 hourse per SECOND of animation... And that's being very conservative...

I realized that it would take me about 600 hours (meaning up to 75 days of 8 hours of work straight) to make a 4 minute animation... That's giving myself 5 minutes a pic, and going full frames...

Doing 10 frames a second, the standard for TV animation, would of course take 1/3 of the time, although you must adjust for the background drawing time which would not change... 25 days of full time work to make 4 minutes of animation with no clean up, no lip sync, no nothing... Just first draft photoshop colored animation...

Making an animation would be VERY hard, to say the least... Maybe I'll stick to a manga until I get into my Computer Animation (3d) classes...

I think in a lot of anime studios they hire a several people to write out the frames.. Akira certainly did anyway. If you got an idea manga is the best place to start, nearly all anime works started off as a manga.

Generally, the anime characters are more simply drawn than the manga characters because you can take more time on manga because there's less to draw... Plus, there are all sorts of tricks... Most TV animation don't use lipsync, they do "lip flaps" instead, which is much easier to animate (especially on a non-linear editing system... you may get 15-20 seconds of animation by just 4 or 5 drawings for long periods of talking...)

I really wonder about those anime that are released once a week... How on this green earth do they get enough people and work fast enough to get that much done?

I heard that the average work day is like 12 hours in Japan, though... And 6 days a week... That being said, it wouldn't require as many people as it would in the US... Animation is much cheaper to produce there because they can easily be paid less and they work more hours... In the US, it's all "Worker's rights" and 40 hours is standard, otherwise you get paid more... Well, usually, not always... like my Dad doesn't get paid a cent, just gets free rent, but he's only supposed to work 20 hours, he works like 50-60 hours weekly and he's 71 years old and gets paid NOTHING... No overtime, no benefits... Just free rent... 60 hours of annoying backbreaking work is worth a bit more than free rent, in my opinion...

I really wonder about those anime that are released once a week... How on this green earth do they get enough people and work fast enough to get that much done?

I think I remember reading somewhere that they have several episodes (sometimes the whole season) already made before they even show the first episode. Then, while those are airing, the company is busy producing the second season.

huh, i'm still here?

Yep it takes alot of work to make Animation. But I'm trying to work on stuff just like you Bob. I'm gonna get my degree in Game Design. But God gave me the dream to Open up A Game Studio Devoted only to making Christian Games then when that takes off I'm gonna open up the Animation branch, certainly it's gonna be devoted to only making christian anime. But yea it takes alot of Talented people to do animation. But these studios have alot of artists that draw the frames inbetween the main ones there called inbetweeners. Yea and I mean they get alot not so many on TV shows but alot when they do movies. The main artists only do the Keyframes. Anyway Bob start learning how to draw now like I am. Just try everything you can to learn I'm finally getting somwhere after like four years.

Aquaboy, unless you're viewing uncompressed AVI format of the anime, you'll NEVER see anything frame by frame. i mean it. why? because it's called compression. they DO draw it hand-to-hand, as long as they aren't even touching CG.

please goto google and look up MPEG compression, and AVI and their differences, and think about why you see those 'between' images.

What he's talking about is automatic interpolation... That doesn't exist in hand drawn animation... Only in vector graphics like 3d animation and flash animation... Hand drawn and bitmap animation requires every frame to be drawn up separately

For the older animation, and to some extent current animation, it was done on clear cells. The background was first painted, then a clear plastic sheet was placed over it. Usually you have one sheet per character. This allows you to use the same animation of a character 'talking' on multiple backgrounds - with multiple characters. If you use layers in photoshop, you get similar results.

Oh, yeah, I know about cells... Hannah Barbara used to go a step further and draw permanently into the background the parts of the characters that wouldn't move in that scene... That made for some pretty mockable animation...

If you've ever seen Blue Seed, one of the Omake makes fun of the whole animation process... It's so funny... "NO! Be carefull! That ground is drawn on an animation cell!" I think blue seed is worth it just for this OMAKE...

A step UP in quality from traditional plastic cells is the multiplane thing that Walt Disney invented... It places the background in separate pieces of glass varying distances from the camera, with the animation cell placed on the appropriate plane, and the glass plates were moved at different speeds to give it a more 3d effect, and the foreground could be blurred out (since it's not the focus of the camera)... A lot of anime uses this, or a similar effect in photoshop (or whatever paint program they use.)