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Vol 3 Issue 1
[BEYOND TV SAFETY]

Japanese Animation Camera Work (continued)


Backlighting, tokakou (toukakou)
Used for glows, flashes of light and other such things, backlighting is a very important part of anime. There are so many types of and techniques for backlighting that it would take a dozen articles to explain them all so I will only explain the most common type here.
  In order to create a backlit effect, the cel painters or production staff produce masks, cels that are painted black except for the areas to be lit. These cels are then shot in a separate pass, superimposing them onto the original cut.

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Backlight mask (A level)
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Character cel (B level)
Note: character cels are painted black on the back so that light will not leak through and placed on the mask when shooting so that the masked shape will match the outline better.
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Character cel and background are shot normally. (At 100% exposure)
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The film is rewound, all the lights in the camera room are shut off and light from a slide projector with a colored filter is shown through the camera stand. The new image is shot at a shorter exposure time, 60% in this case.
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The final image with backlight superimposed. (What the heck is that energy thing anyway?)

Backlighting should be shot through a diffusion filter so that the light spreads a little bit, giving a bit of a halo effect.
  For the strongest effect, the entire background can be replaced with backlighting. This is the effect that was the cause of the POKEMON (POCKET MONSTERS) photosensitive epilepsy seizures. They alternated red and blue backlighting at a rate that, when seen on a TV caused enough of a flicker that it made some kids sick. (The actual number is not really known but it is believed to be only 1/2 to 1/3 of what was reported. The way they checked the kids in many schools was to tell them that they could go home for the day if they said they felt bad. Needless to say a lot of kids felt bad.) This effect is not necessarily used in action or violent scenes and the reason that you don't see it as much in US TV animation is not because of the violence of anime but rather because backlighitng is not as commonly used in US TV animation. (Instead of special effects, some US TV animation induces nausea through terrible storytelling and hideous artwork.)


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Saburina

This is when a piece of white paper is superimposed into a frame or two. It is less strong than a backlight but stronger and covers more than a diffusion filter. This is normally used in cuts with explosions or flashing lights to strengthen the effect. Sometimes pure white and black cels are used to make the flashing effect even stronger.


Effects

Rain is most often done with cels that have been scratched with a cutter knife so the lights from the camera stand will highlight them. (It is OK to have horizontal scratches on cels but vertical scratches, especially large ones, will show up as white lines on the final film.) 5 or 6 of these cels are randomly used and the images are superinmposed into the film.
  Fog and mist are most often done with airbrushed cels created by effects specialists. Great care must be taken not to scratch the paint on the cels because it will come off very easily. Sometimes the airbrushed cels are double exposed.


Diffusion Filter

diffusion filtered image
Diffusion filters are used in many cuts to soften the hard lines of the elements and also to create a softer image. Sometimes diffusion filters are also used to diffuse the lightest areas of the images to give a more romantic or lovely look. (They often used diffusion filters on the cameras in the original STAR TREK series when they shot close up scenes of the female leads. Watch it sometimes and see the big difference betweeen scenes with and without the filters.) (The image to the right has a diffusion filter applied to the left side.)


Ripple glass

ripple glassed
Ripple glass has a surface which distorts anything placed under it. It is most commonly used for heat distortion (like the waves of heat rising off a desert or a fire), when character's vision is distorted because of drowsiness or drunkenness, jet wash, distortion from being underwater or similar cuts. The ripple glass really needs to be slowly moved throughout the cut so that the effect will be noticeable. There are other types of distortion glass, like diamond glass and spiral glass (both of which produce effects related to their names), that are used as well. A Japanese camera studio normally has a set of shelves full of different types of distortion glass picked up throughout the years, sometimes at strange places like construction sites or demolished factories.


Fade In/Fade Out, FI/FO

Fade In means to appear gradually. This is often done by shooting successive frames of a cut with increasingly longer exposures of the main cut elements. A Fade Out is the opposite - something gradually disappearing. Fade To Black is a type of Fade Out but they are all not necessarily like that.


Overlap, OL

A fade in or fade out of an element (or cut) which is replaced by another element. A BG OL means that the second BG is faded in over the first, replacing it.


Dissolve

A change from one cut to the next by simultaneously fading the first cut out while fading the second cut in. There is always 100% exposure, for example when one cut is at 40% exposure the other is at 60% and so forth.
  The main difference between an OL and a dissolve is that a dissolve is always at a cut level where an OL might be just one single element in a cut.


wipe
Wipe

A change from one cut to the next by a line or shape passing across the screen. A wipe is often a very ugly and weak way to change cuts so they must be handled with great care. Too many wipes and the audience will find it hard to concentrate on what is going on in the show.


para
Para

A para (the term comes from paraffin) is a cel with colored cellophane or airburshed paint on the edges or on opposing corners. This forces the viewer's attention on the area framed by the para. Most common colors are dark blue, red and black but almost any color can be used.


There is always room for improvisation and new ideas when doing camera.When I worked in a camera studio the chief cameraman regaled me with stories about one famous cameraman who would dash down to the neighborhood candy shop to get cellophane wrappers to create his own filters and other interesting tricks.

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