Gedo Senki (Tales from Earthsea)

9th May 2006

Number 85 - A glance at Mr. Okui of the Imaging Department[a]

Before checking the rushes[1], I always check the final picture on the monitor belonging to the Director of Photography, Mr. Okui.

I think this has already been mentioned in the production diary, but when Mr Okui is working, to stop light reflecting from the monitor, he drapes a blackout curtain over his head like a lion dance[2]. When I see this, I am driven by the impulse to paint the monitor red and draw eyes on it.

Leaving that aside...
The characters, who have been coloured by the ink and paint department, and the backgrounds, which were painted by the art department, are combined into one picture by the imaging department. After Mr. Okui makes any final additions and adjustments it is a finished picture.
In other words, Mr. Okui is the final exit in the picture making process. In the sense of a last bastion, he is a defender. In the sense of a final exit, he is a forward. In the sense of directing the picture creation, he is a midfielder.[3]

Mr. Okui is not someone who says a lot.
But he arrives at work at 9:00 every morning, he does his work fast and reliably, he is someone everybody relies on.

When Mr. Okui is doing a monitor check[4] he always glances at my face over his spectacles, the meaning of this wordless glance is something I didn't understand at all at first, but I slowly came to understand that there are two kinds of glance:
The "This is OK, right?" glance and the "Is this OK?" glance.

Of late, he has started saying fairly concrete things to me, so the necessity to decipher the meaning of glances has disappeared though...

Translator's Notes

[a]: Actually, this is probably "Mr Okui of the imaging department's glance" but I adopted the better sounding title.

[1]: Remember, these are the rough cuts they assemble before editing.

[2]: In the Japanese lion dance, shishimai (獅 子 舞), the mask sits in front of the head and a 'hood' on the back of the mask goes over the head.

[3]: This is a soccer (or football) reference. For those not in the know, forwards are trying to score goals, defenders are (as their name) defending against attacks by the other side, and mid-fielders are trying to control play in the middle of the field and set up attacks and break-throughs. Soccer is now the most popular sport among young people in Japan, and possibly even among Japanese people overall.

[4]: I assume this is checking that the monitor is optimized for what they want to do and showing the correct colours.