An animator pauses to check her drawing against the previous one.

Behind the Scenes at AIC:
The Studio Tour
by Charles McCarter

Mr. Watanabe began our tour with the outer office; this is the place that many of the writers and planners meet and do much of their work. It is a very busy area, piled high with stacks of manga, scripts, story boards, and other aids. Mr. Watanabe pointed out a bookshelf which contained a large number of TENCHI MUYO! scripts.
The next stop on the tour is a room with a large number of desks. This is home of the key animators, who pencil the main drawings in animation sequences. Also included in this area is the cel production director, who oversees the general look and feel of the cels for a given show. Their work spaces are filled with all sorts of anime items, both professional and commercial. There are character spec sheets, illustration guides, and a wide variety of other drawings tacked up on the walls of the desks. In addition, you can also see lots of UFO catcher dolls, models, and the like. The animators seem to be big anime fans.
We also saw Mr. Kitazume Hiroyuki, who happened to be eating his lunch. In fact, it wasn't until Bill MacPhee pointed him out to me that I realized who he was. In America, he is a famous character designer, but here in the studio, he is just another employee working hard on a production (Since he was eating his lunch, we kept our conversation with him brief).

Clockwise from top left: Pencillers hard at work / Inbetweeners checking animation fluidity / Creating a cel / What comes out of the machine is a cel; this one is from PRETTY SAMY.

Inbetweeners are next. These are the people who supply the 'fill in' animation between the main frames. What this means is lots of repetitive drawing, with only slight differences, but these people didn't seem to mind. CD's were stacked everywhere;



Preparing the paint. The paint must be the appropriate consistency or else it will run and ruin the cell.

all of the animators had their own personal cd players or walkmans, ostensibly to help pass the time as they busied themselves with their painstakingly detailed work. They barely noticed that we were walking through their office, although several of them did look up when the camera flash went off.
At the time we toured, they were busy inbetweening the first episode of PRETTY SAMI. All of the animators seemed to be working on the same project.
After the drawings are completed, they are taken downstairs to a machine that puts the drawings on acetate--essentially creating the cels. The paper and acetate are run through and the machine puts ink on the cel according to the pencil lines on the page. Each cel has to be run through this machine; sometimes it has to be done twice to ensure that the lines are dark enough.
After the cels are created, they go to the cel painters for inking. Cel painters have a very difficult job because cels are so delicate and easy to



The main animation camera. This one can do pans, zooms, and other special effects.
ruin. If a cel is scratched in a place that will be on camera, it is unusable. Cel painters are also responsible for maintaining continuity of things like flesh tones, hair colors, and the like.
After the cels are painted and allowed to dry, they are arranged in the shooting order and are taken down to the camera room. Upon first glance, the animation camera looks like something out of an old science fiction movie. The camera we saw in operation (pictured) was a moveable camera, which means that it was capable of doing pans and zooms. These are not easy to operate, and require a computer system to facilitate operation. The cameras are kept in the basement for two reasons. The first is earthquakes--the basement is one of the steadiest places, and the camera is a very very expensive piece of equipment. The other reason is very practical--the basement is about the only place it fits. The cameras are very tall, and the ceilings in the other floors of AIC are just too low to allow for an animation camera.
After the tour, we were lead back up to the production office. We thanked Mr. Watanabe and Mr. MacPhee for allowing us to interrupt their work and take up so much of their valuable time. They gave us some cels from the PRETTY SAMY OVA series, which we in turn have decided to pass along to some of our lucky readers.