Beyond TV Safety

Japanese Animation Camera Work (continued)

The Moves

Fix
This is the most common cut: where the camera doesn't move.
Sliding
Very common in anime, particularly TV animation, this is sliding a cel (or cels) across the field of view. This cuts down on the number of cels needed and gives a more dynamic feeling to things.
Fairing
The fairing or cushion is the acceleration or deceleration at the beginning/end of the movement of an element in the cut. Animators specify it on drawings and time sheets with a little sketch like this:

Let's say this UFO is accelerating from a stop. The first few images on the cels will be very close together but the distance between them will grow on each successive frame.

The timing for this move:

Played in succession the UFO will appear to be speeding up.

This can be done with a cel sliding to a stop or at the end of a pan or many other places. It is rarely a good idea to have movement—any movement—slam to a complete stop or jerk suddenly into motion so this is an important part of animation.
The only time the fairing is specified in anime camera is when the enshutsu or director wants to do something different than the standard. (Anime camera operators also add a fairing automatically unless told not to.)

Pan
From panorama. This is effectively "turning" the camera so that it swings to another viewpoint, creating a panoramic effect.

A pan can be left to right (or vice versa) and up or down. Pans can also be done at an angle but this is less common.

Animated Pan

pansu.JPG (16587 bytes)

Zip pan (ryu pan)
This is not so much a pan as it is the usage of a long pan background. The background has lines instead of clearly defined images and is used to give an impression of dynamic movement. For the sake of cut to cut consistency, the ryu pan BG is normally made up of colors that would normally be in the backgrounds for that sequence. Sometimes a ryu pan is used in part of a normal pan to give it added speed for that section.

Ryu pan BG

An Image BG is usually just a wild splatter of colors that is used in cuts dealing with emotional content, the inside of the character's head, New Type heaven, other dimensions or any other cut where a normal BG image wouldn't work right or isn't necessary. It can be used just like a ryu pan. The colors do not necessarily have to be the same as the ones used in the normal backgrounds for that sequence and are often totally different in order to add more contrast to the cuts they are used in.

Image BG 1

Image BG 2

Both ryu pan and image BG backgrounds are often repeated (see follow) and are also used multiple times in a single show and kept throughout the production of a series.

Overlay, Book
A book, or overlay, is a non-animated element painted on background paper, cut out and mounted on a cel or painted in the same style as the background with acrylic paints on a cel. This book is placed in front of an animated element in the cut and sometimes moved across the field of view to become an animated foreground element. A fixed book is used in cuts where doing the object on a normal cel would look strange.

Overlay/book