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| The Art of Anime Video |
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Anime is an art form that originated in Japan and South Korea and has
gained popularity world wide over the past twenty years. The first Anime video was introduced to the Western hemisphere during the 1980’s and this led to a great demand for this kind of feature.
The series cartoons did not arrive until the birth of television stations such as The Cartoon network. Before such stations, Anime video fans were restricted to feature animated films. Akera and Ghosts in the Shell helped to pave the way for Anime video fans of today. We can easily recall the Hanna Barbara cartoons that continually used a looping background. This inevitably led to the room that goes on forever while Fred Flintstone was running through the living room. This technique significantly saved background drawings and allowed the cartoons to be turned out quickly. In an anime video, the animators did not seem to take shortcuts with their backgrounds. Instead they took shortcuts with their characters. An interesting animation technique that is readily found in an Anime video is the reusing of a small character movement in several sequences. The animator will use the same reaction animation for different scenes in the anime video. This is a typical time saver for the animator. The animators would take the character in an action pose and merely slide it across the screen using action lines to show movement. Using this technique as a shortcut forced the animator to include great detail with the action scene. Without a lot of detail, the viewer would notice the tactic and the scene would lose the overall effect. Character posing in an Anime video is very important. Many art students will use Anime posing as reference because it is extremely dynamic. The best reference for a practicing artist is to watch an Anime video or two. This will direct them as to dynamic posing. Another way the animators of an Anime video utilizes a shortcut is to actually merge characters. If the scene’s deadline is approaching and the animator is behind schedule it is not unusual to take a desired pose from another character and change it into the character in the scene. These little shortcuts are part of reason for the massive number of Anime video out there today. The animation can be produced in record time. The next time you watch an Anime video, look out for the little shortcuts here and there. Sometimes they are as interesting to watch as the storyline. |
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