Gedo Senki (Tales from Earthsea)

8th May 2006

Number 84 - My Tutor

Out of everyone in the studio, the person who most comes out and says all sorts of things straight up to me, without mincing words, is the colour designer Ms. Yasuda. These are sometimes thoughts, sometimes advice and sometimes scolding. She was also the first person to sharply identify things such as my directing habits and the essence of the current work.

I think that a lot of people know this, but she is a great veteran with more than 40 years of experience, someone who has been a pillar of Takahata and Miyazaki productions.

Initially, two young staffers were to handle the colour design, and Ms. Yasuda was supposed to occupy an adviser kind of position. I mean, she'd just signed off on 3 features for the museum and was fairly worn out.
But, because both I and the two young staffers were all light on experience, we got stuck in a position where we weren't going forward. In the end, Ms. Yasuda wound up being the front person for us.

Ms. Yasuda has taught me a real lot of things. Not just the fundamentals of colour design such as brightness, colour saturation, how to think about mixing colours and so on. But that if you think about what the material is, the colours you can use decide themselves. That colour is not just calculated figures, colour should be based on the emotions and atmosphere you want to express in the scene. That colour is not selected by adjusting numbers, it should be thought of as something created by mixing. And what a captivating[1] picture is, and so on and so on...

And it was not just colour design. She really taught me all kinds of things. Such as:
What to be careful of when painting-in character backgrounds.
The differences in orientation between Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki as directors, and what the differences in the resulting pictures are.
The differences between the era of using cels and paint, and the current era of using computers. And finally even the right attitude for work.

Even now, it seems like everyday I am being taught something by Ms. Yasuda, noticing something for the first time, coming to an understanding of it, and then being depressed about it.[2]

Recently, I have been writing about Ms. Yasuda a lot, but when I think about what would have happened if I hadn't met her, I realise that however much gratitude I feel to her, it can never be enough.
Ms. Yasuda is like a sometimes strict, sometimes gentle, tutor to me.

Translator's Notes

[1]: Japanese 'adeyaka' seems to be capable of several definitions. You can choose from: charming, fascinating, glamorous, glossy, beautiful, bewitching etc.

[2]: Presumably depressed at how much he has still to learn.