Gedo Senki (Tales from Earthsea)

29th December 2005

Pre-11 - Supposed to be No. 11 but...

It's a little late, but Ghibli finished work for the year today, so, while it wasn't much, we put on our own party at the studio.

Sorry.

I've enjoyed the party so much, I've dropped completely off the pace and ran out of time to write the diary.
I invite you to look forward to tomorrow.

30th December 2005

No. 11 - Just Learning By Doing

Finally the year is drawing to an end.
For production of "Tales from Earthsea" too,
four months have elapsed since September, when we started animation.
At the present time, we're right on schedule.

This installment is the final update for the year.
As a final wrap up,
I'd like to introduce the work I do each day.

From the time I got involved with production of "Tales from Earthsea" to now, I have been:
creating the plot,
involved in producing a script,
drawing storyboards,
and at present I am checking the layouts (this is the equivalent of live action camerawork) that the key animators have drawn, and drawing layouts myself.

To tell the truth, when I first started, forget about layouts - I didn't even think I would be drawing storyboards.

I was a complete novice in regard to animation, so even though I could draw pictures that captured the images in my head, I was overwhelmingly short on the specialist knowledge relating to animation and film.

For example, I didn't even know the terminology for camerawork. So I created my own idiosyncratic expressions: "pan up"[1] (direction to move the camera focus up) was "camera up", and so on.

When I think about it now, not only I who was doing the drawing, but Producer Suzuki who chose me to do it, were both acting recklessly. However, my personality is, whatever the situation, to learn by doing, so first I started work for real, then progressed through trial and error, received advice from all of the staff, and along the way learned the job.
I think that was a good thing.
Probably if I tried to "study from books before starting drawing" or something like that, not only would I be unable to draw storyboards, I wouldn't be able to start creating a movie.

This is the last of the diary for the year.
Up to now I have told you why I decided to direct "Tales from Earthsea" and given you an idea of what sort of things I think about. From the new year, I will return to writing a real "diary" and tell what happened that day.

With that, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

Translator's Notes

[1]: Note for editors: In case of mojibake, this is supposed to be an up arrow. I couldn't find how to do this in English, so I inserted one from the Japanese character set.