Beyond TV Safety

Japanese Animation Camera Work (continued)

Track In/Track Back (or Out), TU/TB

TU start

TU end

A track up (T.U.) is when the camera moves in to focus on a smaller area. A true T.U. focuses on an element and the camera moves up on that element, leaving the background unaffected. This is similar to a "dolly up" in a live action film. A zoom up is when the camera sits still and the field of view shrinks. The term "track up/back" has taken over the meaning of both over the past ten years in anime so everything where the camera moves in or out is a track.

Zoom Up start	Zoom Up end
TU	Zoom In

Crane Up/Down

This refers to the crane that live action filmmakers use to raise and lower the camera. A crane move can be approximated in animation by having multiple books and moving them up or down as the background is panned the same way but at a much slower rate.

Shake, Bure
Those quivering eyes and shaking images are done by tracing one image twice but with the second at a slight offset so there is a little movement of the lines. When these images are interchanged there is a slight but noticeable shake or quiver. When the whole cut shakes (as during an earthquake or from a shock wave) it is a Camera Shake.

Rolling

The camera or one of the elements bobs up and down. The animators usually make a Memory guide to help the camera operator do this.

Double or Multiple Exposure, (daburashi)

Multiple exposure refers to shooting a cut in the standard way, winding the film back and shooting again with an extra element added in. This is used for transparent elements in a cut. If the element is supposed to be 30% transparent the camera operator will shoot the image without the transparent element at 70% normal exposure then put on the transparent element and shoot the cut at 30% normal exposure. This gives 100% exposure for the cut. While this is effective for opaque and semi-opaque (usually airbrushed) elements, effects, like backlighting, cannot be done through multiple exposure because it does not appear strongly enough.

"Look over there! Omigosh! It's the floating disembodied head of the Skipper!"

BG	Cel
Base cut shot at 40% exposure.	Film rewound then cel added and composite is shot at 60% exposure.

Superimpose,

(su-pa-)

Superimposition is similar to multiple exposure in that the film is wound back and reshot but in this case the base image is shot at 100% exposure and the superimposed image is shot at whatever percentage the director wants, effectively multiplying it into the image. Light effects and anything else that needs to affect the layers below it need to be superimposed in order to show up. Superimposition is normally done with the base image plus a mask for the effect. (See Backlighting for an example of masking.)
All titles are superimposed.