Jason Webb's Japanese Anime Adventure 20/08/10

After I published Crystal Buddha at the start of July, my plan had been to push on with the writing of my next novel. However, after getting about 20000 words into it, I realised that the inspiration wasn't coming. I think the pressure to push Crystal Buddha up from 60000 words to 80000 burnt my writing brain out a bit. Anyway, as a change of pace and perspective, I decided to dabble with animation.

I'm interested in the Japanese anime style of animation and have the Anime Studio Pro 7 software, so I thought that perhaps if I turn some scenes from my next novel into an anime movie, that might help me better visualise the story and get some of my writing motivation back. I must admit though, I've never really done much animation before, so both background and character design is all new to me. Anyway, I'll let you know how it goes.

The first thing I wanted to achieve was to create some characters in the anime style, so, using a character that came with Anime Studio Pro as a basic template, I set about turning my girl character, Ryoko, into anime-form. Here's a scan of my original paper sketch, showing how I thought she'd look:

And here's Ryoko in anime character form in Anime Studio Pro:

Although the artwork for Ryoko was done, I still needed to add "bones" to her so that she could be easily animated. It was a start though, and I was pleased that I was able to get her looking on the screen how I thought she'd look. I did make a few minor colour changes and changed her shoes into something more sturdy than sandals, but that was more for the purpose of the story.

The process to add bones to a character with Anime Studio Pro can be either easy or difficult depending on how complex you want the animation of your character to be. With Ryoko, I went for quite a complex arrangement and added numerous extra bones for her hair and even the hood and little cord of her hoodie.

After getting Ryoko fully boned and animated, I put together this very short video of her in action. The video was really just to test a few concepts out, such as the rain effect, so I kept it short to save on rendering time. There's no sound on it, by the way.

The two main characters are based on the Ryoko character. I quickly changed eye, hair, and clothing colours on one of them to create a slightly different version. The background was also created by me, as was the rain, and the splashes on the ground. The uploading process seems to have made the video a bit darker than it should be though.

As my first attempt at anime, I don't think it's too bad. I'd still like to get the knack of creating more spectacular backgrounds in a Hayao Miyazaki style, but I'm not really a good enough artist or painter.

Check for the next episode of my Japanese Anime Adventure soon, to see how I get on.