3 more Company Visits

Grasshopper Manufacture, the creator of titles such as Killer 7, Contact, No More Heroes and Fatal Frame 4. Suda 51, the head of the studio, is cool. No more questions.

On the way to Telecom Animation we stopped for a quick 15 minute lunch. Most people went to Mc D's but I decided to check out the ampm konbini and found they had a boss coffee with a mario kart toy capped on top. Waaaaaluigi. I also found out later that it's a pull back and go car.

Telecom Animation was really cool. We met with the head director of the company and pictures were okay anywhere in the studio. We started off by seeing some story boards and then moved on to see the key animators working. Currently they are working on a home video release of a Green Lantern movie for Warner Bros. They said they only work on one production at a time.

They key animation is done all by hand but the inbetweens are done about half computer half paper and pencil. The inbetweens are also partially outsourced. The inbetweening process was also being done very similarly to Toei.

Unlike Toei though all of the backgrounds are done in Photoshop on the computer. FX work done in After Effects along with compositing of character and bg art. Then it's edited using Final Cut.

Interestingly the studio has worked on some episodes of Spongebob but found those to be difficult because they didn't fully understand the jokes, so it was hard to know where to place emphasis in the animation.

Back during the Tiny Toons era everything was done by hand and the work began after receiving storyboards from Warner Bros. So all layout and key animation and beyond was done at Telecom.

After getting off the train in the area of Production IG, we went down to the super market on b1 of a department store. The sink in the bathroom was pretty cool because there was automatic soap, water, and a powerful hand dryer all inside the sink bowl.

At Production IG we were brought into a tiny room where a lady who worked on the administrative side of the company spoke with us about the history of the company and answered any questions we had. The best parts of the visit were seeing some of the character model sheets and bg art for 図書館戦争（Library Wars)　and the video she played for us which showed the production process of the cel animation era. The layering one by one of the cels and seeing how the layers stacked up upon each other was great.

We did get to see the animators working a little bit and saw the coloring artists working on kureiyon shinchan next. Overall though it wasn't nearly as good as the other visits since the company seemed to be very secretive and really didn't show or talk as freely with us as Toei or Telecom.

For dinner I ate at Mos burger and ordered the gobo burger which was sandwiched between two rice patties. It was really good.

Back to Toei.

Character coloring at the studio seemed to be pretty fun yet at the same time I could see how it might get a little monotonous. One of the ladies who was demonstrating the process had a short segment open of Luffy, Chopper and Usopp dancing. So when coloring Chopper she would have an already colored character model sheet open on the computer and eye drop the color and then fill it in. There are three layers: regular, highlight and shadow. Also to make sure segments are completely filled in she would mask the entire character in black and look for white dots. If there were white dots she would zoom in and fix the problem.

Special Fx work is done over the drawings once they are all colored in and composited with the backgrounds. Fx is done for every separate drawing and after seeing many comparisions with and without One Piece just wouldn't be the same without it.

I never knew how much work went into the fx of One Piece and how much of an impact it had on the final look of the piece. Also I used to think that since One Piece was an anime and done in a limited animation style that the process of making it might not be as complex as other pieces of animation. I already had great appreciation for the show, but after seeing all that went into making each episode I have an even greater one now.

Some examples of effects are the smoke animation from Crocodiles cigar, smeared makeup on BonClay's face, blood wounds on Chopper and the glowing shine from a blade.