#ryo-chimo

[yoshikirishima]

Wow, so turned out I was dealing with my busiest semester by far. I heavily underestimated how much school work I would have. I started this back in winter break, but I’m glad I finally got around to finishing it. 

This is drawn from a part of a cut from Yozakura Quartet, by Ryo-Chimo (or Ryo-Timo). The first one is me slowing it down, and the second is timed similarly to the original. The original is 24 FPS (drawn frames). Usually 12 FPS is pretty fast, and they will have some effects and background moving between those to make it look smoother while not having to draw so much, so that it ends up being sort of 24 FPS. The original cut of this did some of that, but there were some frames that were drawn “on the 1′s” (once per frame). The original is so fast that it really needed all the intermediate frames it could get (the effects and background moving). Unfortunately this meant my redrawing of it was going to end up choppy since I only wanted to draw the character moving. 

Yozakura’s animation is really quite a treat. Although the drawing consistency may not be very high, and the art style is low on detail, there are an outstanding number of drawings per episode (easily at least 7000-10000), which is way more than what would be considered good these days (2000-3000 for an action show, and 1000-2000 for anything else). This results in a show with lots of movement, expression, and life. Alright, next time I practice animation I won’t try to spend nearly as much effort on each frame. I did so for this exercise because I wanted to improve my drawing skills as well, but for now I think I’ll focus mostly on capturing the movement (and drawing rougher sketches). It takes literally 100 times as long to try to draw at this quality, >_<; Hopefully I can get at least a short cut done a week of basic movements X)

Random Update: Visual Novel project launched! Me and some good friends are working together. I’ll be working on character design, lineart, and music. May be posting things from that too. A short 2-4 hour game planned to be done by the end of summer. If time allows I’ll try to create some kind of short opening sequence or just something that loops and plays in the background on the menu screen, so currently I’ll be aiming to continue learning animation with the goal of being able to create something like that! /The first frame is drawn so badly, haha. It’s like I got better as I drew and learned from each picture. /Added a pause on the last frame to separate from the beginning. I guess it’s not too clear though. /Also it’s not supposed to loop but where I decided to stop drawing the cut, happened to be a decent area for the gif to loop! So that’s why the last and first frames don’t look right XP. Originally I was going to draw more of the cut but I stopped it short because I didn’t want to keep drawing with this level of quality. I stopped the cut in the middle of the movement so that’s another reason why the full speed gif looks too fast/choppy (you don’t get the full picture/cut).

[yoshikirishima]

Don't let the beginning fool you. This is a quick 1-minute compilation of Ryo-Chimo's sakuga in the anime Yozakura Quartet. He's so great at creating exciting but realistic motions. There's so much movement and energy! You can really feel the intensity, speed, and power of the character's actions. Also note how he sticks entirely to 2D effects. All the explosions, lights, beams, etc., are drawn and colored by hand. Anime these days almost always use 3D and CGI for the lights and effects, so it's great to see a new anime doing it the old fashioned way. (Example: At 1:01, when the man morphs his face, the morphing effect is done mostly by actually drawing the blurs and smearing.) I will be drawing the cut at 0:47 seconds as part of my animation studies. The reason I chose that cut is because it is a very fast movement, with exaggerated and stylish poses and facial expressions. It's really sharp, and I love this kind of animation, even if it's choppy. Also, I had a theory that picking a dynamic movement to draw would be several times easier than picking a slow movement where a character only moves a little from frame to frame. The reason? When you're animating a fast, dynamic movement, you only have to worry about the relative position of one frame to the next. You have a lot of leeway. You do have to make sure the poses are done well (add anticipation), so as to make the images flow from one to the next and feel connected, since the motions are fast and there aren't many transitional frames. Animating a slow or subtle movement is very difficult because the small differences between frames have to be very precise to get what you want, and the position of everything has to be spot on or else the final motion won't look the way you want it, with the character moving too fast or awkwardly at times. Drawing inbetweens would require you to look very carefully and draw just the character just in between those two frames (given the inbetween motion is desired to be right in between), and to have the distance from the parts of the character in the inbetween to the previous frame be equal to the next frame. This means you may have to redraw a lot of parts to try to get it right. I'm about half way done so far, and so far what I suspected is very true. In the future, I will concentrate on learning more dynamic, if "choppy" styles of animation, because it is appealing to me and is easier and faster to draw. There is a specific style that is taken to the extreme, and you can call it "pose to pose", as it focuses on the characters doing appealing or cool poses in the frames and doesn't care about how the character actually changes or moves from one pose to the next (no transitional drawings to connect poses to each other). A lot of animators specialize in this kind of style, like Hiroyuki Imaishi who directed Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill, another of my favorite animators. More on that later X)

[yoshikirishima]

Anime production goes through a *lot* of steps. This is a scene from Noein. This video shows some of the many stages it had to go through while in production before finally reaching the viewer. After the storyboarding and layouts, the key animators create the key frames (or genga), then it goes through a few checks, it's handed back to the key animators, then it's given for the inbetweeners to smoothen up the animations by adding transitionary frames, then it's checked and revise again, and so on, before you get to the final product. That's a lot of quality control and polish! Ryo chimo animated this, as well as some other really cool parts in the anime Noein. He used a very rough, pencil-sketch style to convey harshness. He's a very talented animator who excels at conveying high energy motions in a realistic and very 3D manner. Although this means that sometimes detail and drawing consistency is sacrificed, we get some exciting animation. He's an animator I love to keep an eye on, and I will be using his works as a central means to my study of animation.

[as-warm-as-choco]

Birdy The Mighty: Decode by Ryo-chimo (りょーちも) aka Ryōsuke Sawa. The character designer of Birdy The Mighty and Yozakura Quartet.

[as-warm-as-choco]

DENNOU COIL illustration by Animator RYOSUKE SAWA (KA for : Panty & Stocking WG, FMA: Bortherhood, Gurren Lagann, Madoka Magica & Yozakura Quartet character designer too )

Animation Staff Doujinshi : Dennō Coil (4/17)

[sushiobunny]

Ryo-chimo's redesigns for Yozakura Quartet are the most perfect example of anime art that is immesurably superior to the manga counterpart.

(Top is Ryo-chimo, bottom is Yasuda; but the anti-gravity boobs would be enough to tell you that...)