Chapter 4: Forgetting
Interview with Hiroki Sato, Producer
I myself am a great fan of anime.
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Challenges for new producers and directors.
・The Trigger
It's been over 20 years now. I am surprised again…
I may be remembering some parts incorrectly, but one day Anno called me out of the blue and said, "I'm thinking of doing another animation project, and you're going to be the producer."
I asked him, "What does a producer do?"
He said, "Well, I guess you just take responsibility."
That's how "Kare Kano" started.
Going back further, after "Love & Pop" production was finished, there was a period of time when Anno was considering whether or not to make an anime.
We had young staff who joined GAINAX because they loved "Evangelion" and wanted to make an anime like that.
So we decided to work with them to make the next work directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki.
Anno said he was going to be in the studio for the next year to produce an anime so we could give a form to Tsurumaki's (Kazuya) project during that time.
I had been helping with PR, merchandising, and other production work up until then.
But this is when I started working on production in full scale.
I remember that it was a writer from the Mainichi Shimbun's culture department, and at the time they were having a kind of meeting where Anno and junior high school students hold a conversation.
Perhaps it was because he was interacting with young people, but he suggested the idea of animating a Shōjo manga.
We talked about which Shōjo manga are popular nowadays.
At that time, the manga artist Kimiko Higuchi, wife of Takami Akai, recommended "Kare Kano".
Anno read it and decided to go with it.
Just as we offered production management to Tatsunoko Productions and Production I.G for "Eva," we offered Yuji Matsukura of J.C. STAFF to help us with "Kare Kano".
It was decided to go on-air in October 1998 under the production of GAINAX and J. C.
・Animating a Shōjo manga
At the beginning of production, Anno suggested that we do the art (background) in an interesting way this time.
We decided to do photography, location scouting, and interviews thoroughly.
A live-action location scouting team was assembled, including Masayuki and Morio Amagi, the producer of the live-action "Love & Pop" film.
We did about three location shoots at public high schools in Tokyo thanks to help from the Mainichi Shimbun staff.
Around that time, King Record and Hakusensha held auditions for both professionals and amateurs as the anime project was finalized.
The applicants flooded in, as it was the next work by "Eva" director Hideaki Anno.
From that time on, Fuyu Kimata actively helped us by attending theatrical actors. That led to our next production, "FLCL".
Because of all the preparations, we were late to start production.
However, it was more difficult after we started…
First of all, Anno's proposition was to "control all the rhythm with your timing and keep the realism of the lines."
It took a lot of time to do that.
We first edited the sound, adopting a take in which the voice actors were performing in good vibes.
Later we chopped up the whole film and adjusted the length (number of seconds) of each cut.
Using an editing machine called Steinbeck, the drawings were matched to the sound of the tentative film that had been shot.
Furthermore, we started the extremely hard work of matching the mouth movements as well, from episode 1.
If you do it this way, you can pursue the rhythm as far as you want.
As soon as Masayuki realized this, he started doing the same thing on his PC.
The work that followed became more hard...
If you use a PC, you can still do it, but at that time we were using analog shooting. So, we cut the film, put it together, checked it again, and corrected the timesheet for the main shooting.
Anno did this for each episode while also writing the script.
The Steinbeck was so big that it filled half the conference room.
At one time we had two of them.
We purchased two used units that usually only film editing studios would have.
But after 3 months, nobody use it anymore.
Wait! We bought them the other day and now we don't need them anymore? (grin smiles).
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