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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

300 frames a month? Even if they are key-frames that still only comes out to 5 minutes of footage. No wonder it's dieing. Everyone else (not Japanese) is using animation software to create an entire movie. In this day and age there is no excuse to still be hand drawing cells. Proper wireframing can get you an entire scene rough cut in a day. Even less if you have an asset library built up.

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It depends on how the drawings are used. You can easily squeeze ten seconds of footage out of three finished cels, if it's a wide pan over a couple characters talking in the distance -- which is both efficient and cinematic. And this type of shot is common in anime for precisely this reason.

Gainax is one of the past masters/worst offenders in this regard, including: a sequence near the end of Evangelion where they just shot the back of a bunch of old cels; a off-screen sex scene near the end of Evangelion where a shot of only the background plate is held for at least a minute; back-to-back clip shows in Kare Kano, where they show cel counts for each prior show to pad for time -- one episode had 2300 cels (that's total cels, not just keys).

As far as I can tell, most anime studios these days are using animation software to some extent or another. It's a very rare situation (e.g. Miyazaki) when old-fashioned cels are used, and it's at very high cost.

Nowadays, especially on lower budget stuff, you can spot blatant motion-tweening.

"300 sketches"

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