How Japan makes Anime

How Japan Makes Anime

The piece of Art/Japanese Animation also known as anime is not as simple as how it looks.

It all first started was when Otogaki Manga Calendar, also known as おとぎマンガカレンダー

was first created/drawn Anime. You might be wondering why I used the term "drawn" for anime.

Because each and ever single motion that you watch on your screen in Anime is a hand drawn picture.

Yes my friend,Animators put so much effort and time into expressing a single story for us.

A single episode runs at 23 frames per second and they use a single drawing for 2 frames which means that they have to draw 15 to 16 thousand pictures per each episode including the back grounds frames which are drawn separately and then merged afterwards!

But they don't just go for drawing frames at the beginning!

1.Script

First a script is produced by the developer of manga and is afterwards reviewed by the directors of the anime.

Sometimes directors have to make small changes to convey the story correctly,those changes were not actually there in the original story/Manga,but they are so small that they don't make any difference in the story line.

2.Storyboard

After the script is finalized,the directors and animators make storyboard of each scene which gives an Idea of how the actual scene would look like in that fantasy world!

It contains small drawings and dialogues of Characters standing or sitting in different angles!

3.Backgrounds

After the story line is complete,few artists make some rough drawings of how the actual background or landscape should look like and once they have finalized it,they send the finalized hand drawn backgrounds to the landscape department where they digitally re create the art and color them.

But back in the days,most of the anime like Naruto,Bleach etc. used to have hand drawn colored backgrounds.

3.Key Animation

After that,the animators start animating all the scenes in the story board.

So they start animating with key animations.

Key animation is basically the first frame,the middle frame and the last frame of a scene or a character doing some thing.

4.In-between animations

In between animators just draw the left out frames of the key animation by taking a reference from the key animation and make sure that the animation looks fluid.

Afterwards,the frames are colored digitally.

5.Special Effects

After everything is done and the episode is edited and almost complete,the episode is given to the special effects department who add the effects/particles that can't be drawn correctly by drawing such as Smoke,Fire,Aura,Fog,Chakra etc.

And after that,the whole anime episode is complete.

That is the reason why anime is so costly to make.

A single episode of an anime has a budget of around a 100,000 US dollars.

Which is really expensive but 2004's Steamboy was the most expensive anime film on record at a whopping 20,000,000 dollars making it the most expensive anime of all time!

Thanks for reading guys!

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