What an Episode Actually Costs: Inside a Malaysian Animation Studio
Izzah talks with a production manager about the budget and schedule of a 22 minute children's episode, from script to broadcast, and what gets cut when the money runs short.
Animating on Twos: Why Ghibli Looks the Way It Does
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Show notes
Animating on twos
Film runs at 24 frames a second, but most hand-drawn animation is drawn at 12, with each drawing held for two frames. Izzah explains why that is a choice and not a shortcut, and how Ghibli's animators decide when to go to ones.
- Ones, twos and threes, with examples you can feel
- The bus stop in Totoro and the power of a held drawing
- How Yoshifumi Kondo's character work set a house style
- Why the same technique looks cheap in one show and rich in another
- A sequence from Izzah's own television work, frame by frame
A foundation episode that everything else on the show will refer back to.
Transcript
Hi, I am Nurul Izzah Rahimi, I am a character animator in Kuala Lumpur, and this is Twelve Frames a Second, a show about how animation is made and why it looks the way it does. The name is the whole first lesson. Film runs at 24 frames a second, but most hand-drawn animation uses 12 drawings, each shown twice. Some people hear that and think it is a shortcut. It is actually the thing that makes a Studio Ghibli film feel the way it does. Today I will walk you through ones, twos and threes, we will sit at the bus stop with Totoro for a while, and then I will take apart a sequence I animated for a Malaysian children's show so you can hear me make the same decisions. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let us scrub the timeline.
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