Chapter 120: First Day of Interviews I

"Good morning! I'm glad to welcome you all into the Tokyo Animation Studio!" Theo said over the microphone.

The candidates were a little taken aback after they saw three beautiful people on the stage.

Sam and Ryoko were stunning women.

And Theo was a handsome man.

"I'm Theodore, but you can call me Theo." Theo introduced himself.

But he didn't say that he was the owner of everything, it didn't matter if he said it or not.

"This is Samantha Walker, the Head Director of the Umbrella Corporation, the company which manages the Tokyo Studios. She will be helping with the procedures in the tests today." Theo said as he pointed at the blonde woman.

"And this is Ryoko Riverdale, the Head Director of the Tokyo Studios. If you pass the tests and interviews, she will be your boss." Theo said as he pointed at the blue-haired woman.

Everyone just nodded when they heard Theo introducing himself and Sam, but when they heard that the blue-haired woman would be their boss, they were stunned.

She looked so young!

How was she able to get such a prestigious job at her age?

Ryoko's classmates were even more shocked.

They knew her struggling story and now she was the boss of the studio?

They imagined that she was a normal employee, now, they were even more curious about what happened.

"As you may know, the Tokyo Studios is opening up for operations and projects. So, we have to fill our ranks with talented and hardworking people."

"We will open job vacancies in eight different positions."

"In-between Animators, Keyframe Animators, Supervisor Animators, Color Designers, Digital Painters, Special Effect Artists, Art Directors, and Painted Frame Supervisors."

"If there are people who pass the tests to any of these positions, they will be hired."

"You may have heard that the Tokyo Studios would pay $4 per drawing for the animators. But that amount is only for the In-between Animators. Keyframe Animators will receive $6 per drawing. And the other key positions will receive even more money."

"So, I advise you all to give all your effort to be hired in positions with more visibility and payment." Theo ended his explanation with a smile as he saw the astonishment of the candidates with what he said.

All of them were frozen after they heard Theo.

They thought that the payment they heard was for positions with more visibility in the studio, but it was only for the most basic employees!

To understand what Theo was implying it is important to first understand how an anime production works.

In normal animes, the process is divided into three procedures.

pᴀɴdᴀ Pre-production, In-production, and Pos-production.

The pre-production is a process that depends on who's pushing for an idea and who is backing it up, it can be animation studios themselves along with sponsors, but many anime are adaptations of manga or light novels, in which case, publishers front costs (including the costs of having it shown on TV stations).

The production company gathers staff, sponsors, and looks at advertisements and merchandise. While many people describe studios as being cheap, only around half the budget is often given to the anime studio, with the rest going to broadcasters and other contributing companies. The broadcast costs are surprisingly high – according to blogger, ghost lightning – at about 400 thousand dollars for a late-night timeslot across 5-7 stations for a 52 episode series.

You can see why anime can be an expensive business. For example, Full Metal Alchemist from Theo's past life, which had a 6 pm Saturday slot had a total budget of 500 million yen or 4.09 million dollars (before additional costs).

When the core staff is arranged, they meet and plan out the anime, work on series composition (how the anime will play out across each episode/throughout the series), and select further staff such as character or mecha designers.

One of the most crucial core staff is the director. To understand the role of directors, you could think of them as directors of a movie, but instead of dealing with actors, they deal with the animators who make the character's movie. Their involvement is generally to attend meetings and make decisions to manage the schedule, budget, and quality of an anime.

Following the early panning sessions, designs (character, mecha, costume, etc) are then created. Designs are an important factor in creating a good anime. Character designers either have the task of simplifying manga/illustration designs so that they are suitable for animation, or, in the case of an original anime, coming up with a new set of characters based on descriptions from the director/producers.

Character designers often continue to advise animation directors on corrections to animation that should be made to stay close to their character models (in which case they are generally credited as Chief Animation Director for the series).

Once the story and designs are mapped out, the first episode is tackled.

The pre-production is this but as Theo already knew everything about the first anime they would produce, he wouldn't hire anyone for the positions in the pre-production.

He was already a qualified movie director.

But he planned to hire people for the pre-production after he launched his first anime.

The production of an anime is divided into several procedures.

The first step is to write the episode scripts. Following the episode's synopsis/plans, the full scripts are written, by either one person for the whole series or by several different writers based on the outlines from the overall script supervisor (staff credit: series composition).

The scripts are reviewed by the director, producers, and potentially the author of the original work before being finalized (after 3 or 4 drafts, often).

The episode director, supervised by the overall director then takes this backbone of the episode and must plan out how it will look on screen.

While the director has the final say and is involved in production meetings, the episode director has the most hands-on involvement in developing the episode.

But Theo would work in both positions, so he didn't have to worry about it for now.

This stage is expressed as a storyboard (a visual script), and the storyboard marks the beginning of actual animation production.

Often the storyboard is created by the director, this means an episode is truly the vision of that director.

But usually, mainly in TV anime, separate storyboarders are used to actually draw them.

This is because storyboards usually take around 3 weeks to do for a normal length TV-anime episode.

Art meetings and production meetings are held with the episode director, series director, and other staff about the episode should look. Storyboards are drawn on A-4 paper (generally) and contain most of the vital building blocks of an anime – the cut numbers, actor movements, camera movements such as zooming or panning, the dialogue (taken from the screenplay) and the length of each shot (or cut) in terms of seconds and frames (which we'll explain later).

Because the number of drawings available for an episode is often fixed for the sake of budget management, the number of frames is also carefully considered in the storyboards.

The storyboards are roughly-drawn and are really the core stage of deciding how an anime will play out.

Cuts refer to a single shot of the camera and an average TV-anime episode will usually contain around 300 cuts. More cuts don't necessarily imply a better quality episode, but it will generally mean more work for the director/storyboarder.

But Theo remembered each scene and cut of SAO Anime, so his storyboard process would be much less lengthy.

After the storyboard is finished, the next step is the Layout Process.

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