I was with our director, Iino-san, in the editing bay watching the finished product...
And there's a part where Senku says
"it's been a year since the experiment began. It felt shorter than I imagined."
And the director remarked how he felt the same way.
I'm Katagiri Shusuke, I work as a producer at TMS Entertainment.
This is my 16th year in the industry.
It's nice to meet you.
Basically one day, everyone in the world is turned to stone.
And then later, the protagonist Senku manages to be restored somehow,
In that world, 3,700 years later, where civilization is long gone,
he tries to rebuild civilization, starting with just the basics he can get his hands on.
Hello, I'm Iino Shinya.
I'm the director of Dr. STONE.
I didn't write the original story.
My job is to get as close to the original as possible.
I see.
So it did happen to everyone.
Since this is an adaptation of an existing title,
I had to familiarize myself with the source material,
and then recruit the kind of staff we'd need for the animated version,
and make sure the quality of the finished product lives up to our standards.
Along with, in terms of business stuff, managing budgets and whatnot.
That about covers it.
There are various departments that work on an anime, like the people who draw...
There's the recording of the voices and the sound effects.
All of the sound production.
Then there are all the drawing that the animators have drawn,
There's also other art such as background art.
We have various sections working on different parts of the anime,
and saying that I check on everything might sound a bit impudent,
but that is basically what I do.
I wanted to try and work with younger talent who didn't have as many titles to their names.
I partly wanted the challenge of handling it with that kind of fresh outlook.
I was the assistant director for Made in Abyss about six years into my career.
It has been about five or six years since I started working as an episode director.
I think the thing that caught my interest the most about Dr. STONE was the theme.
The theme heavily deals with science
and that's not something you see often in shonen manga.
With this show, we looked at it from a variety of angles,
and came to the conclusion that original material would be a poor fit for it,
so the anime is generally a pretty direct adaption.
I think this goes for any series dealing with fantasy
but Dr. STONE is set in Japan 3,700 years in the future.
In that case, what does the background look like?
What about the townscape?
I think that was the first thing I thought about.
The first thing you do when making an anime is come up with a project outline.
And for something like this, that means studying the original manga,
and then, as soon as you know the episode count you're working with, whether it's 13, 24, or 25,
You figure out how to pace the material to fit your production.
Now, that's not nice.
Shouldn't you say "Nice to meet you" first?
Shut your mouth!
Save your introductions for Hell.
So we have these storyboards...
And the first thing we need to make scenes are these designs.
Character designs.
As you can see, we have designs for all kinds of expressions.
To an extent, they can keep all those drawings more consistent
by referencing these designs while they draw.
When we were in the talks to animate Dr. STONE,
I started doodling Senku's face,
thinking about his various expressions.
And going through the usual expressions I would go through
but their were about two to three times more expessions in Dr. STONE.
So to keep up with that kind of passion, I thought I had to get pretty worked up, too
So...
I don't think it's that visible on the outside
But to match how emotional and expressive Senku and the others get...
Like when their faces completely fall apart...
In order to keep up with that myself
I tried to expand my own limits.
I have a lot of fun when I'm drawing these expressions.
So we have the art designs to show our animators how to draw specific locations.
As you can see here...
For example, the character should be about this size in comparison to this tree.
The size of the character in comparison to things like houses and trees...
That's what these designs are for.
The size of the character in relation to this tree is shown here.
We hold meetings to make these.
So when we meet to make these art designs,
We decide whether a character should be bigger or smaller in relation.
This series has a lot of settings,
so we do our best to show the complete view of this world.
So there are a lot of shots where we try to show that the background is the focal point.
But with that, I think there are a lot of different ways we can show that.
So I try to concentrate on that.
Okay, so a single anime episode typically consists of about 300 shots.
I mean, this is hot 316, so obviously there are more than 300, but...
We used a higher number of shots in the first episode.
So, inthis shot...
Senku lifts his hair away from his face,
faces the camera, so to speak, and closes his eyes.
So I'm going to explain how this shot was made.
It starts...
with these rough drawings.
These tell us which character is used, what backdrop is behind them,
and how the character is moving.
These are drawn first. We call these "layouts."
The composition of the shot, as I described earlier, is drawn in these layouts.
And the first thing we need in order to make these layouts...
are these storyboards.
Hello, my name is Kawajiri Kentaro. I'm the assistant director for Dr. STONE.
Basically, my job is to make sure that I get
the key points from the manga like the characters'
expressions and nuances so that the rest of the workflow goes smoothly.
I make sure that all gets outputted into actual anime.
Right now, I'm doing some storyboards for Dr. STONE.
After that, the director will make corrections, brush it up,
and then let us know what direction he wants us to go in.
The storyboards are basically the blueprints of the animation.
All 300 or so shots in the episode are explained in detail here.
This one, shot 316, is right here,
and even at this stage, the rough idea of the scene is all drawn in.
The character named Senku is standing in front of this sort of backdrop
He lifts his hair out away from his face and looks straight forward.
All those directions are written here.
These drawings are the blueprint of the scene.
And based on these blueprints, the storyboards,
the layouts that I just explained are created.
Basically, I concentrate on the whole picture.
I put in corrections on how I want the whole layout to look.
What I write in this column
are basically instructions to the animators.
Like for this shot, I'd like a pan shot.
where the camera moves up.
Or with this shot, where I'd like the rock in front
to move down while the rest of the shot is panning up.
This episode happens to have a girl named Suika in it.
And in the episode, she puts on glasses for the first time,
and she's able to see everything clearly for the first time. She's then moved to tears.
So at the part where the glasses are completed and she puts them on...
She's then able to see sunflowers extremely clearly for the first time
I wanted to make sure there wasn't much dialogue for this scene,
and that the emphasis was on the music.
That was my vision for this scene.
So I increased the amount of shots
and have Suika, who's seeing these sunflowers for the first time, move up a little more.
And then she sees the sky, the dog, and Senku and the others.
After that, she starts crying.
And overall for this part, I wanted to make sure there wasn't any dialogue.
Just music and of course the characters' acting.
That's what I concentrated on for these scenes.
So here, we have directions on this layout, asking for a bit more emphasis
And as for the character's movements...
There's a direction asking for him to brush his hair back from farther forward
by catching it with his thumb and then sweeping it back from there.
So today...
First, I was checking the layouts that some animators brought me...
They're already checked by the episode directors
but I then take a look and check over those myself.
To make sure there aren't any issues.
One person can't make 300 shots of animation alone,
So for one episode, we typically have about 20 animators drawing the animation.
Since there are 20 of them doing the 300 shots in an episode,
that means you'd have 20 slightly different versions of the same character,
So we have what's called an animation director to keep everything consistent.
And the animation director...
gives us this green sheet.
So the animation director revises this drawing... into this.
The difference is very clear, isn't it?
The animation director has revised the hand in this drawing.
We actually have...
a drawing of the character in mid-motion here,
and the completed motion drawn here.
So the entire sequence is revised in this way.
And with these revision,
the drawings for the 300 shots drawn by 20 people on a given episode
are all brought together cleanly.
And the next stage, once they're all brought together,
is the key animation.
This very first drawing starts the shot
And from the first drawing...
we then have this drawing from mid-shot...
and then this drawing that ends the shot.
You can see what's happening when you see them all lined up in order.
There's the start drawing,
the mid-shot drawing,
and the end drawing.
In animation terms,
these are the key frames for the action of raising his hand to here, and giving his look.
The animation that goes between these frames is called the in-betweens.
They fill the gaps between the key frames.
And the process of filling them in looks like this.
This is the start drawing.
Now we reach this mid-shot drawing...
Can you tell? Here's the mid-shot drawing...
And finally, we reach the end drawing.
And just this small bit of animation includes many individual drawings.
So then we fill these in. This what we call in-betweening.
Next, we come to the coloring stage.
The in-between are drawn in pencil or digitally,
so they're just black and white,
but now we begin the process of filling in the colors.
We have actual example models to follow.
So we add color to each shot based on the color in these models.
We base it on these color models.
It's basically the same as a coloring book.
So this is the coloring process,
gives color to all the these drawings...
and it becomes animation.
Can you tell? Just as the directions in the storyboards say...
Senku is looking down, he sweeps his hair back, and opens his eyes.
Senku is looking down, he sweeps his hair back...
and he opens his eyes.
And that completes this sequence of animation.
Of course, this doesn't mean it's finished.
Now we get to what I showed you earlier,
which is done at the same time this is going on...
The layouts, the ones I showed you earlier.
The layout shows which character is present, where they are, and what they're doing...
Can you tell?
This is where the background is added.
We follow the episode director's directions
to fill in all these detailed areas.
So when we add this completed background
to the cel data that we animated a moment ago...
we end up with this cut, which I showed you in the beginning
The background data we saw earlier is here,
and the character data is here.
When those layers are put together, it results in animation.
The process that takes this long to make a single shot
is repeated about 300 times to complete an episode.
Things are about to get a little more tedious, though.
Distilling Wine for Dummies
This isn't really unique to Dr. STONE,
but I think the moment that's always the most exciting is when a piece of animation is completed.
Seeing the character actually move around on a carefully illustrated background,
you always go "It's actually moving!"
So I'd say those are the most exciting moments.
One thing I can say is that this is a meticulously detailed world in the manga,
and that by bringing it to life with motion and color,
it creates an even more vivid feeling for the world...
Which really gives it an epic feeling, which I think would be something worth seeing.
Sort of "This is how it turned out as an anime!"
Man, what a great view!
Perfect.
Another thing we had trouble with...
You can tell from looking here. The premise involves a world were civilization has been lost,
So they have shirts made from animal skins.
Which makes it hard compared to other anime,
Where you can sort of color-code the character wardrobes
You'll probably notice how there'll be the blue character, or the red one. We can't do that here
But it ends up looking kind of plain with these really earthy colors, in the woods...
So we had to come up with color flourishes to help bring the characters alive in animation.
Here we have Yuzuriha and she's wearing an animal skin, so it really is just a plain brown
So for the anime, you'll probably be able to tell when you see it,
We have her some red highlights to make her a little more feminine,
and basically did that with other characters too, to help them send out from one another.
It's set on Earth.
So I wanted the things that the characters touched
and interacted with in their daily lives to feel realistic.
I didn't want those things to seem fake.
I wanted the viewers to be able to recognize these things.
I thought that the characters living 3,700 years ihn the future
would also seem more realistic that way.
This is wood, yeah.
It's here so we can study the details, like the wood grains.
This is a mineral called galena that appears in the series.
Wait, this isn't galena. It's pyrite.
We get a lotof things like this.
We do all kinds of weird things.
I used this...
with some of these shells that we got...
and crushed them into this.
So here's the scene where they crushed shells.
I just wanted to say I tried.
The idea is to see what happens when you actually do something,
or prove that some things don't actually work in certain ways.
Of course, we won't be able to use every single one of these things,
but we'll use whatever we can get our hands on. Same with those mushrooms, too.
We try to obtain as many things as we can, to an extent, to serve as references.
There's this part...
where they go through the process of making glass.
They mess it up,
then Kaseki is brought in...
Kaseki pulls it, and they finally finish making it.
So to do this scene, we actually went to see this being done.
You can see it here. We actually visited a factory.
This is how it looked.
This is one of the things we did.
I actually...
have the finsihed product here.
So in the process of making these,
some mistakes were made.
Getting this part to stretch is crazy hard.
This was one of my failed attempts.
This was really scary.
That's me. I'm the one holding it here.
When I tried to pull it...
This tragedy happened.
This just shows you that we actually tried making things like this for reference,
which I hope will make you enjoy it even more.
I wonder... There's always the intent to have a celebration once production finishes.
Partly to show our gratitude to everyone who helped us, like "We did it!"
Sometimes having a goal like that in mind helps people do their best work.
We're making the anime, but we're fans ourselves.
So we want to help relay how amazing the series is to everyone,
and I hope people will check it out to see if we succeeded.
I'm hoping that the anime
will help the Dr. STONE series as a whole continue to grow in popularity.
How it feels? You know, if I had to choose, I'd always say there's a big sense of accomplishment.
"Okay, we did it! Time to deliver this baby!" I always feel pretty happy about that.
It's a slow but steady effort.
I'm going to beat fantasy with science.
This is exhilarating.