2517


I had a few ideas on how an animations are produced documentaries of western
animation, but I was curious of how the process works in Japanese animation.

What are the typical order and steps undertaken by a studio or committee in
producing an anime? Do any prominent studios do things differently?


CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-15T16:46:02.080
2506
2017-09-19T17:13:33.533
63
question
anime-production
What are the steps involved in producing an anime?


There is a really excellent blog post on Washi's blog titled "[Anime
Production - Detailed Guide to How Anime is Made and the Talent Behind
it!](http://washiblog.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/anime-production-detailed-
guide-to-how-anime-is-made-and-the-talent-behind-it/)" that covers pretty much
the entire process that includes references from Studios like I.G., AIC, and
Sunrise.

Here's a flowchart from the link that describes the process: ![enter image
description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qeRzT.jpg)

So you have the pre-production and planning phase, which can happen either
from an original author or a production company:

> This process depends on who’s pushing for an idea and who is backing it up,
> it can be animation studios themselves along with sponsors, but many anime
> are adaptations of manga or light novels, in which case, publishers front
> costs (including the costs of having it shown on TV stations). The
> production company (e.g Aniplex) gathers staff, sponsors, and looks at
> advertisement and merchandise. While many people describe studios as being
> cheap, only around half the budget is often given to the anime studio, with
> the rest going to broadcasters and other contributing companies. The
> broadcast costs are surprisingly high – according to blogger, ghostlightning
> – at about 50 million yen for a late-night timeslot across 5-7 stations for
> a 52 episode series. You can see why anime can be an expensive business. For
> example, Full Metal Alchemist, which had a 6pm Saturday slot had a total
> budget of 500 million yen (before additional costs).

This part of the processes then becomes mostly planning, designs, and putting
together the staff. When it's time to create the first episode, then the
prodcution phase starts:

> The first step is to write the episode scripts. Following the episodes
> synopsis/plans, the full scripts are written, by either one person for the
> whole series or by several different writers based on the outlines from the
> overall script supervisor (staff credit: series composition). The scripts
> are reviewed by the director, producers, and potentially the author of the
> original work before being finalised (after 3 or 4 drafts, often). The
> episode director, supervised by the overall director then takes this
> backbone of the episode and must plan out how it will actually look on
> screen. While the director has the final say and is involved at production
> meetings, the episode director has the most hands-on involvement in
> developing the episode. This stage is expressed as a storyboard (a visual
> script), and the storyboard marks the beginning of actual animation
> production.

Storyboarding:

> Often the storyboard is created by the director, this means an episode is
> truly the vision of that director. But usually, mainly in TV-anime, separate
> storyboarders are used to actually draw them. This is because storyboards
> usually take around 3 weeks to do for a normal length TV-anime episode. Art
> meetings and production meetings are held with the episode director, series
> director and other staff about the episode should look. Storyboards are
> drawn on A-4 paper (generally) and contain most of the vital building blocks
> of an anime – the cut numbers, actor movements, camera movements such as
> zooming or panning, the dialogue (taken from the screenplay) and the length
> of each shot (or cut) in terms of seconds and frames (which we’ll explain
> later). Because the number of drawings available for an episode is often
> fixed for the sake of budget management, the number of frames is also
> carefully considered in the storyboards. The storyboards are roughly-drawn
> and are really the core stage of deciding how an anime will play out. Cuts
> refer to a single shot of the camera and an average TV-anime episode will
> usually contain around 300 cuts. More cuts don’t necessarily imply a better
> quality episode, but it will generally mean more work for the
> director/storyboarder.

The post then covers the layout and the animation process, then finally, the
composition and filming:

> It is commonplace for the frames to be completed on a computer. After they
> are drawn and checked, they are digitized. Once they are on the computer,
> they are painted with a specified color palette by painting staff (generally
> a low paid job). They use the shading lines drawn by the key animators to do
> the shading colours. This digital equivalent of the ‘ink & paint’ stage of
> production, which used to be done by hand, has allowed some more interesting
> visual styles to come through in the colouring, such as the use of gradient
> shading or even textures. These would have been too difficult to do back in
> the day. It has also saved considerable time and money in the process. These
> become the final “cels” that go into the animation.
>
> Once all the frames are coloured and finished, they can be processed as
> animation using a specialized software package. “RETAS! PRO” is used for
> approximately 90% of anime currently aired in Japan (for drawing sometimes
> too)! Before the use of digital ‘cels’ (digicels), drawings (printed onto
> cels) were actually filmed over backgrounds. Now, cuts are completed
> digitally, and the background art can be added on the computer. Initially,
> when digicel was first being picked up by studios (around about 2000), it
> had real problems matching the fineness of detail in hand-drawn and painted
> cels. But nowadays, anime studios have really perfected the digital cel,
> giving us anime with just as much detail and more vibrant colouring. The
> digicel age has now streamlined the production process such that repeated
> cels and clip/recap episodes are basically a thing of the past. Some still
> prefer the rougher look of pre-2000, but I’ve certainly moved on.
>
> ...
>
> After compositing is completed for all the cuts, they have to be to the
> timing required for broadcast, so that the episode doesn’t lag overtime.
> With the completion of the editing step, the episode moves out of production
> and into post-production. I won’t go into much detail on this, but it
> essentially encompasses adding sound (dubbing), both the music and the voice
> recordings, and final editing (cutting the episode with space for
> advertisements). Visual effects may also be added at this late stage too.


CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-15T19:24:50.317
2517
2013-02-15T19:24:50.317
91
2506
answer