White Radish FAQ
Last revised November 3, 2002Contents:
- What programs do you use to animate?
- How do you get the animation on tape?
- What's the deal with the stolen White Radish CD-ROMs?
- I've seen The Item for sale on tape elsewhere, but it looked different. Is it a bootleg or an earlier version?
- Whatever happened to Annie May?
- How did you get into anime?
- How did you become interested in creating animation?
- Where and how did you learn about it?
- What, in your opinion, is the first step of the animation process, and which is most important?
- How many people are required throughout the entire process (minus voice recording, sound, and music)?
- Please explain a general overview of the entire animation process (the process which you are currently using).
- What type of equipment are you using (software/hardware)?
- What kinds of pens/pencils do you use or suggest?
- How long does it take to make a single completed cel (roughly)?
- How dare you call your work "anime"? Anime only comes from Japan!
1. What programs do you use to animate?
There are four main programs we use to create the drawings for the animation. The most important one is Adobe Photoshop. I use Photoshop 5.5 to not only draw the frames (using a Wacom art pad), but also tween, clean up, and paint them. Prior to the Wacom, we drew the pictures on paper, inked and tweened them there, and then scanned them into the computer to be finished and painted in Photoshop.
The second program is Adobe Premiere. This program lets us composite the different layers of a shot (for instance, the character and the background, and any special effects), and create cycles of motion, such as talking mouths. Later, when all the shots are complete, we lay down the music, voices, and sound effects together with the animation in Premiere. I use an older version of Premiere because the newer version is less efficient and doesn't have enough useful features to justify using it.
Tied in importance with Premiere is Adobe After Effects. This program is very useful for compositing complicated scenes with many animated elements.
LightWave 3D is the program where most of the backgrounds are made. Sound Forge is also a useful program. We use this to record actors' lines, and process them if necessary.
2. How do you get the animation on tape?
Previously, I used a video editing board (the FAST AV Master) with a proprietary Motion-JPEG codec to create a video file that could be played real-time, and I recorded onto tape from that. Currently (as of 00-08-14) I encode a master video in MPEG-2 format and record the video to tape from that. I can also convert these to VCD-format MPEG-1 for the VideoCD editions.
3. What's the deal with the stolen White Radish CD-ROMs?
Sakura Soft distributed 200 copies of the CD-ROM before they went out of business. They did not pay me for any of the CD's sold. Currently, the CD-ROM is being legitimately distributed, so this can now be disregarded.
4. I've seen The Item for sale on tape elsewhere, but it looked different. Is it a bootleg or an earlier version?
Paradigm bought a few copies of the original version of The Item at wholesale in '96, when we had just finished it. I saw that they still had 2 copies at Fanime Con 98 or 99, and I noticed that they were version 1 (by the different cover). I offered to exchange them for the final release, which has better quality, visual enhancements and remixed sound (with added sound effects in some places, and restored lines from Bunni and Mecha which were missing in the first cut), but they never took me up on it. In fact, when I tried to ask them about it, the guy didn't know who I was, and must have thought I was going to buy it, because he actually advised me AGAINST buying it. He opened it up and said "Look how short it is! It's just a demo, don't bother." Geez, no wonder they hadn't sold them yet...
It would be hard for anyone but me to be able to tell a bootleg regarding our stuff so far. So far, none of our tapes have had labels on the tapes themselves, only the colour card in the shell. But it is in fact a legitimate copy. If you have a copy of Version 1 (which you can tell by the label on the side. Version 1 had a yellow glow around the words "The Item," and no other text. The remastered version has a green glow, and is labeled "Digitally Remastered Special Edition."), you're welcome to the upgrade to the final version, as stated on The Item section of http://whiteradish.com.
5. Whatever happened to Annie May?
The character of Annie May was created by Jerry Cheadle, formerly an equal partner of White Radish. Although the video Project Annie May was animated by both of us under the White Radish name, when Jerry left we agreed to let him have the full distribution rights to the video. For that reason, it is not available from White Radish. Any future Annie May videos, if any, would only come from him. His e-mail address, at last confirmation, is openskies@earthlink.net [not anymore], but at the time of this writing, there is no web site.
Addendum: At Fanime Con 2001, I met Jerry again, and he said he's no longer distributing Annie May for various reasons, and his e-mail address has also changed (I don't have the new one with me). There is also still no web site for his projects, which, as he told me at the con, are back to parody dubs.
6. How did you get into anime?
I watched shows like Voltron and Robotech, and was impressed by the different visual styles, as well as plots. I don't think I had ever seen a serialised animation before, except in mini-series. I liked the fact that it was telling a story that was clearly moving toward a resolution, rather than going on forever until it quietly disappears like most American cartoons. I believe I learned that they were from Japan when the local comic shop started importing Japanese books about the shows. From there I learned about more anime, and saw many tapes of raw, badly copied anime. Then companies started translating manga, and I snapped those up. In one comic's letter column, I learned of an anime club, Sasha APA, which I joined and learned much more. At this time I started attempting to draw in an anime style, but I had a long way to go. Eventually, I formed my own APA. Then I attended an anime convention for the first time (there had been no cons in California before then). I've been going ever since!
7. How did you become interested in creating animation?
I think it was the episode of Tom & Jerry that featured the "Tom & Jerry Cartoon Kit," which I saw when I was around 5, and realised that cartoons were made by people (although I quickly learned it wasn't done using a kit of cartoon characters and props.) I made my own cartoon kit out of a Tom & Jerry suitcase, which I filled with paper, pencils, erasers, pens, felt pens, coloured pencils, tape, scissors, rulers, and any other art supplies I found useful. It also stored my drawings. Eventually I outgrew the suitcase and moved it into a little student's desk -- the kind that has an opening top. Eventually I outgrew that, and moved into a full-sized desk which I still have.
Anyway, during this time, I was reading how-to-draw and how-to-animate books, and making little flipbooks out of little pads that I bought in bulk at flea markets with my allowance. The subjects of the flipbooks were mostly Tom & Jerry at first, but moved to a wider range of subjects. Unfortunately, all but 3 of them are lost/destroyed, mostly due to the time when I tried to convert the flipbooks to film, which required taking them apart and filming them one frame at a time. It was a long time before I got to see the result, and in the meantime I'd dismantled the rest of them and lost the original. The finished film was horrible, jerky, and way too slow. I despaired, and threw away the rest of the ruined flipbooks. If I still had them, I could scan them and make AVIs out of them.
8. Where and how did you learn about it?
I consumed every book and video I could find on the subject, and even used an old toy I used to have to study the animation frame-by-frame. It was a little toy that you put film cartridges into, and looked into a hole and turned the crank, and the cartoon would show. I went in slow motion and backwards over all of those things over and over. Eventually I studied animation frame by frame on VCRs. There was a long delay between my early days of animation and the 1994-up era, when I had been focusing on writing and still art rather than animation. The old flame didn't rekindle until I saw Jerry animate a little sequence of one of his characters. After that, I got back into it, and by then I knew enough about the process to do it the right way from the beginning (all learned from books and "behind the scenes" snippets.)
9. What, in your opinion, is the first step of the animation process, and which is most important?
Well, there are several first steps, all pretty much equally important. But to pick one, I'd go for the story. I'd say that any story you couldn't get around to finishing writing is a story you'll never finish animating. Write the story, then animate. It doesn't have to be in words, it could be just storyboards. In fact, for short works, you can generally skip the script stage and just storyboard. Another advantage of storyboarding is you can skip around and animate whatever parts you feel like at the time, rather than getting stuck in a sequence. Non-linear animating. In film it's called shooting out of sequence. Do not underestimate the importance of storyboarding. All the other animation groups (at least the ones who have actually finished anything) will back me up on this. Another important step is character design. Fully develop the designs before you start animating.
10. How many people are required throughout the entire process (minus voice recording, sound, and music)?
As many as possible. More people = done sooner. It can be done alone, it'll just take a long time. People come and go here, but we've generally had an average of 3 animators at a time, including myself.
11. Please explain a general overview of the entire animation process (the process which you are currently using).
First script the story. Then translate the story into storyboards. Assign shots to whomever's available in order of preference. Currently I'm the only key animator, so assigning shots consists of sending shots to the others to be tweened or shaded or painted. Then I take the finished frames and create backgrounds, and composite all the elements into a finished sequence. When I accumulate 650 megs worth, I archive them on CD. Sometimes I archive halfway, just in case, using multisession.
12. What type of equipment are you using (software/hardware)?
Hardware:
- AMD Athlon 1.2GHz
- 256 megs RAM*
- About 30 gigs of hard drive space**
- CD-RW
- Pioneer DVR-A04 DVD writer
- Wacom ArtZ II 6x8 graphics tablet***
- Scanner for roughs.
Software:
- Macromedia Flash
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Premiere
- Adobe After Effects
- LightWave (by Newtek)
- TMPGEnc MPEG-2 encoder
*Prior to April 2001, it was only 64 megs.
**Prior to May 2000, it was only about 12 gigs.
***They don't make these anymore. Equivalent model is the Intuos.
13. What kinds of pens/pencils do you use or suggest?
I stopped inking on paper early in the production of Apprentice, but prior to that I preferred the Faber-Castell Uni-ball .5. Cheap, disposable, and had a nice consistent solid black line. As for pencils, I personally prefer .5 mechanical pencils. I've been happy with the Pentel ones, with the transparent smoked barrels and the clicker on the side. I also use a separate eraser, a refillable one that uses the long skinny white erasers. But maybe it would be better if you had a poor eraser so you wouldn't be tempted to use it. Erasing interrupts the creative flow, and should be avoided. Just draw darker or start over, or leave it alone to fix later.
14. How long does it take to make a single completed cel (roughly)?
Bearing in mind that these are digital cels, not paint on plastic (and yes, we've been using all-digital cels since 1994, long before Blue Submarine)...it's hard to say, because it's never done in a straight line like that. Typically, the whole sequence is roughed out, then cleaned up, tweened, and shaded, then painted. And that doesn't count compositing. It also depends on the complexity of the cel. As a wild guess I'd say 3 or 4 hours.
15. How dare you call your work "anime"? Anime only comes from Japan!
Yes, someone really disputed my use of the word "anime" to describe my work. It's entry #19 in my guestbook. I've seen this sort of assertion before, and it hinges on accepting one's narrow definition of the word "anime" which doesn't cover all of its meanings.
First of all, "anime" only means "animation" in Japanese, and is used to refer to their own works, as well as foreign animation such as Disney. English speakers generally use the word "anime" to refer to animation from Japan. "Anime" is an imported word, and as yet has no official or dictionary definition, but the above can be accepted as "definition 1". Like most words in a living language such as English, there is more than one definition. Many people use the word "anime" to mean "animation recognisable as what comes from Japan." This is also a valid definition.
Second, anime is not created solely in Japan. Most of the actual animation is jobbed out to other, cheaper countries such as Korea. Some anime is financed by non-Japanese companies in other countries, such as the US. Some anime is directed by non-Japanese people. Some anime have character designs and storyboards from non-Japanese people. Some anime is based on written works from non-Japanese people. Anime is made by a mixed bag of nationalities, and there is nothing holy about the Japanese that makes them the only ones who can make what we call "anime," and as I've shown here, they don't. It's just silly to insist that anime is valid only if a Japanese person had some kind of hand in it (would cel-painting count?) Where do you draw the line? And more importantly, why are you trying to draw a line? Reductio ad absurdum!
Seriously, if you were to show my current work to a random person, and asked them what they'd call it, I'll wager they'd answer "anime." It's anime when you can't tell the difference anymore.
Lastly, there is no kanji in my work, nor Japanese names, nor Japanese cultural references. I'm telling a story here, not trying to emulate Japan. I draw in my own style, and that style is best described as "anime."