hi,
guys. just been watchin akira and i have a question about the ligh effects. there are some like lights from helicopters etc or building lights which seem to be just colour effects. but there are certain times like headlights from the bike or the light which switches on in the begining. how did they do that ? any idea?
just rewatched Akira - question bout light effects
By skinnylizard | Monday, September 12, 2005 at 10:51pm
#1
just rewatched Akira - question bout light effects
the japanese can do anything.
no idea,this film was made in the 80's haven't got a clue how they where so advanced back then.
damn their godlike skills.
i'm interested too if anyone cud answer.
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yeah. i was watchin it with my guys and telling them that you better not bitch about work coz you guys dont do jack. i showed them the film and they all shut up when they saw bitsies being hand painted.
the japanese some of them have talent which is not of this earth.
Has to be one of my favorite movies too.
The light effects are pretty simple once you knowhow they did it. Because every frame is shot on film you can controll the exposure of every frame as well. For the areas that you wanted to have headlights or neon lights you need to make a matt. One that is all black except for the area of the light.
You then will take a couple of passes of exposing your frame of film, with and without the matt. Tricky because you need to keep rolling back your film.
For Akira they had a lot of matts to animate on top of the bikes and such. You could say travelling matts!
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i dont get it. how does the exposure give you the light effect (i.e. colour) you want?
The area of the matt that is clear Ie. the light, gets over exposed when you crank the film frame back and re-expose it. Because the matt is black over everything else the rest of the image doesn't get any more light. As for colour you can add coloured gels to the part of the matt that is for the light.
The same works for the streaking effect when the bikes are flying through the scene. It comes down to a % of exposure on the film for each pass you make. It is an " in camera " effect.
I hope that helps a bit more? It can be kind of hard to explain.
Basicaly you are trying to over expose the parts of the image that you want to glow like a light and changing its colour by adding a colour gel to it.
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wow. thats quite interesting. amazing the stuff they used to do back in the day. can you tell us more about what else they did (and forgot to mention in the making of)
awesome stuff.
Oooo how old I feel! Back in the day. I'm not sure what is on the dvd extras. Believe it or not I don't own this flick. Yet.
I'm not sure there is a whole lot different in animation between now and 20 years ago. Maybe if you had a specific question?
I've been working in animation since '86 so I have been lucky to see a lot of changes over the years but they have mostly been in technology.
They all tend to get blurry though.
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself. My Blog: Strange Thoughts
Whew. Thanks for the info. I do NOT envy those camera operators. That's a pretty intense way to shoot an animation.
It's funny that with computers and all, you'd think you'd see more of this type of thing and better! But perhaps when you take the human element out, the tiny little bits of imperfection that a computer doesn't put in (or when it does, it looks like a computer made a mistake), you loose some of that life that films like Akira had. You also loose the "awe" of knowing something was done by hand. I'm much more impressed by the craftsmanship in things made by hand tools than I am with anything you could ever do with a laser mill.
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That's not to say that people haven't found ways to make the computer keep that human element (Pascal's work springs to mind), you just have to work a little harder to get it back in.
Producing solidily ok animation since 2001.
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Now with more doodling!
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oh well when the film came out most of us were in middle school :p but thats a really cool bit of info. how bout the scene when the bloke in the death mask is riding with the Testsuo character giving chase. the guy ahead the clown hits a wall the camera is in front and the guy goes flying. the camera moves with the image there is no zoom out or zoom in. its quite a weird effect. the guy continues to fly into the camera , not too slow, not too fast. then they cut to a sideways shot of him rolling.
the scene is right before Testuo bangs into that freaky blue old looking kid.
im not an animator. just a producer but i love to know how these things were done
I'm not an animator either. I'm an editor/production manager.
I think I'm going to have to re-watch the movie to answer that question. A good reason to finally buy it!
I suspect, if my memory is right, that it is an animated BG and the character animation was on ones?
If you check out his latest film, Steamboy, there are some animated BGs in that as well. At first glance you think they are CG with a camera move but after watching it a couple of times I'm convinced the camera move was animated. If you've seen the film the shot I'm thinking of is early on when the kid is trying to escape his house, from the bad guys. There is a shot looking strait down the hallway from outside the front door. As he runs towards camera,the camera pulls out form down the hall to outside. In physical terms it moves about ten feet or so. I'm pretty sure the BG was animated for this shot! That's talent!
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oh the guys seem to have talent to throw away. thats for sure.