Postby TMBounty_Hunter » Fri Oct 23, 2015 7:38 pm
The easiest way to explain it would probably be to contrast it with Miyazaki.
Miyazaki doesn't really write scripts, he just starts straight on the storyboards which already set up all the shots, the framing, how long each shot lasts, etc. Only after that do things start getting delegated down the chain of command, but even then everything will eventually come back to Miyazaki for final approval before the next step is take and time and effort are potentially wasted. The animation director(who's desk is right beside Miyazaki and shares a shelf) usually delegate down the various cuts to animators. Senior animators might help guide the junior ones, they do their assigned cuts and then it comes back to the animatior director. He either decides on his own if something is unsatisfactory or when it is it goes on Miyazaki's shelf, but eventually every sheet of animation will end up on that shelf. Miyazaki thoroughly goes through all of it and either corrects it himself, gives direction for corrections or occasionally just does the whole thin from scratch himself. Everything goes through that one man before it's scanned and goes for coloring. He'll regularly go to the background and coloring departments to give his approval or direction. There's quite a few of long time department heads but everything goes through him from animation to sound/music/voice. Everything.
That's probably what people think the average director is like, but Miyazaki's approach is far from norm in the industry. It's also why his movies take so long, cost so much and make him say he'll retire after each one. It's incredibly taxing and far from the industry's definition of "efficiency".
By contrast Anno is perfectly fine with letting a lot more people be involved with the decision-making and direction process. He knows his co-directors and they know him so it's quite easy for them to share the duties and in general work as a committee instead. The script is hammered out by multiple people. The storyboards are drawn by multiple people. Imageboards (kinda like elaborate storyboards to explore ideas) are contributed by lots of staff. The layouts, which determine the final framing, are drawn by lots of people. Even before any animation work begins it's not just Anno and his 3 co-directors shaping the film but quite a few other regular staff as well. When work does actually begin the co-directors are there to spread the load of final approval. The Q Groundwork books have thankfull added the "Director Correction" blue sheets and you can occasionally tell with a fair degree of certainty which ones are Tsurumaki because his style is leaking into the sketches. So all of that work of approving tons of 2D animation, and also now the billions of animatics they work through before they settle on 3D animation are done by multiple people. This is what most of the industry is like. Because the majority of the work is weekly TV shows there is always multiple teams working concurrently with co-directors or episode directors steering things collectively to make the deadlines.
It's also interesting to try and figure just what things Anno can personally be bothered with. He doesn't seem to be too fond of drawing humans, he'd much rather get involved with ships, aircraft, and other tech. Also cities and buildings. There's tons of layouts in the 2.0 CRC of the cityscapes all drawn by Anno. There's also a copy pasta from the interview section that constantly gets brought up with respect to Mari that Anno just basically dumped the whole issue onto Tsurumaki and went off to play with toys he likes instead.
Overall, Miyazaki can be said to direct pretty much every second, every pixel of every frame.
Anno on the other hand has a general idea of where he wants to go but it is a co-op game of doing cool stuff with long-time friends to get there and really awesome side-quests aren't rejected even if it derails things.
That's a bit of an exaggeration for both cases, but hopefully a useful one.
A mini note on Mahiro Maeda who was added as a 3rd co-director for Q: He actually has the longest history with Anno out of the 3. He was doing some design work and contributed ideas to Ha but was brought on fully on-board afterwards and looking at Animator Expo seems to be extremely comfy at khara.
"Hooray for other things!" -NAveryW
Arcadia's legacy wrote:Yeah, what exactly do these two actually DO during the production of these films?
/changes you want?
