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Color Coordination (Iroshitei)

The Color Coordinator decides all the colors for everything that will be painted/colored by the shiage department in the show and creates an iroshitei hyou (color model pack) that the staff can refer to when painting. This job requires not only good color sense but a good memory, as the CC should be able to keep an idea of what the colors for the whole show look like in her head so that when questions come up about small details and things not in the iroshitei hyou she doesn't need to pull all the models and think about it. There are 327 commonly used Taiyou Shikisai (Taiyo Paint Company) cel paints but they have over 1,000 in their catalog. Each color has a code number which originally was its equivalent to the DIC (Dai Nippon Ink Company) code. Color code numbers are usually a letter followed by numbers like GY-40 and RP-99. (Some companies use another paint company - Stack - but their paint is more expensive (and higher quality) and the paint codes are different.)
A good way of telling that you had done this job too long is when you lookiout a train window at a sunset or forest and find yourself determining what paint colors they it is composed of. Computers have made life a lot easier with 16.7 million colors ending the need for weird paint codes but now you look at that sunset and wonder what dpi you would have to scan it in to get good output quality.

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Cel Painting/Computer Coloring (Shiage) (lit. finishing)

The shiage department takes the inbetween drawings and adds color to them either by transferring the lines to cels via a trace machine (which basically bakes carbon lines onto cels) or scans them into a computer system to color them via whatever software the company is using. This department had an extremely high turnover rate. 90% of the new hires used to leave by the end of the first year, mostly because there was very little money to be made and painting cels is not particularly interesting. Computer systems have helped a lot and now we have had to change the way we hire people for the shiage department. The old requirements were "ability to paint a cel (by any means possible)" Now, since they won't leave as soon, we want to hire people with more then rudimentary intelligence (only Cro-Magnon or higher on the evolutionary scale) and who don't try to eat the mice, keyboards and such. (Before, we let them drink all the cel paint they wanted but a mouse costs more than a case of paint. Some of the staff are upset about this loss of important latex in their diets so we've been looking for another way. So far we've tried feeding them Nerf balls, leaving old bicycle tires around the studio for snacks and sending them to Mistress Alexandra's Rubber Dungeon but they say they still aren't satisfied. Any ideas would be welcome.)

Special Effects (Tokushukouka)

These artists (often part of the shiage department) are responsible for special effects cels (rain, mist, smoke, snow, wind, etc.) and for the masks for the backlighting (toukakou). (Backlighting is used to make explosions, fires, jet exhausts and such to glow.) There are a few special effects specialists who are now working with graphics packages like Adobe's AfterEffects and Photoshop and MetaTools' FinalEffects to put some pizzazz in digital productions as well. This is often abbreviated as tokko.

Inbetween Check (Dougakensa)

Cel/Coloring Check (Shiagekensa)

The staff that check the inbetweens and cels. We abbreviate these as douken and seruken respectively.

Camera (Satsue)

Camera Director (Satsuekantoku)

These folks shoot all the cels, backgrounds and other elements one frame at a time to film. They live in the dark and listen to weird music. After a really gruelling session they have to "decompress." We shine lights on them, increasing the intensity a little bit every few hours so they don't burst into flames or melt when they walk out into direct sunlight. Shooting an entire movie in a week (this has been done!) is a lot like the Abyss - people slowly going into High Pressure Nervous Syndrome, weird aliens floating around (the production workers), insane, sweaty guys with too much power (the directors) and they can't escape even if they go crazy and try to run away.
Camera is one of the most important parts of Japanese animation. Most Japanese productions use a lot fewer cels than American productions so they make up for the loss of fluidity and movement by using more camera movement and different effects. The lighting effects can be absolutely stunning and there are some highly skilled cameramen around. (I met one older camera director who once went and bought bags of candy in cellophane wrappers just to make weird patchwork filters.)

Editing (Henshuu)

Same as its counterpart in live action movie and TV production. (This is totally unrelated to a couple of similar sounding words which you hear all the time when watching anime: henshin (transformation) and hentai (perverted).

Weird Anime Company Anecdote #239 (collect 'em all)

Since a lot of work was being sent to Korea in the 80's and early 90's and a studio couldn't afford to send somebody every week (or twice a week), a group of studios decided to join forces. They would take turns sending somebody to Korea who would carry all the work from the group over and the finished work from all the Korean studios back. The companies would have to pay only the overweight baggage charge of their portion. (This was not just a couple heavy suitcases - it could be as much as sixty very heavy boxes full of painted cels.) The studios would drop off their work to the company that was sending someone over; when I first started working on the production staff, one of my jobs was to carry and pickup that work.
Once I carried a couple boxes of key animation (genga) for the third Locke the Superman OVA episode to Madhouse, the studio that was carrying work over that week. The next day they called up and said that there had been a "problem" and that they had the work we had tried to send over and that we should go pick it up. It turned out that the boxes had slid off a conveyor belt and was dragged into the machinery underneath. Our keys (which took a month to draw) and all the animation supervisor's corrections - about 3/4 of the entire show) were shredded! The Madhouse staff handed me a box with partially chewed paper and a box full of confetti of varying sizes. There was nothing else to do but try and put what we could back together so the director and I recreated most of the show - like it was a huge jigsaw puzzle - and "edited" it together with cellophane tape. It took three days before we got enough of it done to know how much of the genga had to be redrawn. (All during that time we would be holding some character's face and saying, "Ah, whose face is this and where is the body?!" or making mistakes and putting the wrong arms on characters and things.)
After we got it back in shape enough to send out (with a lot of prayers) we took the remaining pieces and stuffed them in a pillow that was too mushy and flat in the little dorm room we had in the studio. (They're probably still there...)

Sound and more next time.