Socks.

E- sorry for the large images, forgot to change the upload settings to downsize my massive pics. Also- As you can tell I have ridiculously large images that take about 5 min each to upload on the Dtoid up-loader thingy on the right. and that requires me to do them one at a time, whereas in photobucket I can set it up to upload the huge batch, shower, come back and be done and happy to link away. I forgot to change a single photobucket setting to downsize the images and I'm very much sorry for it, but honest mistakes happen. I'm trying to be as quick as possible with the fixing, but the hotel has one Ethernet jack to share between 2 people, so patience would be appreciated. And QRAZ- try Chrome. That way when I make a slip you can kill the single process tab and not "kill your internet".

So today we didn't do much, in fact we were allowed to sleep in to recover from all the intense awesome of the last 2 days.



To counter not doing much (all we really did was visit Toei and go to Nakano Broadway) I do have a fair bit of information about Toei Animation for anyone really interested....oh and pictures of Toei...LOTS of pictures.



Actually, I lied, not too much info on Toei. They gave us a REALLY cool tour, and they were REALLY cool about letting us take pictures (I'm almost sure that no other company is gonna let us do that and I appreciate it)
- They showed us the new Onepiece Intro in the review room with REALLY good sound...I teared up when they left Vivi
- We saw a video for a REALLY cool 3-d animation that they're doing in colaboration with Disney called RoboDz. It has a Mexican samurai robot, evil Hercules beetles, sleeping robot old dudes, and spanking machines. Its coming out in the US in Feb and I'm really excited- it looks AMAZING.
- Some mangaka like to visit often to see how close the anime is to the manga (we were told Akira Toriyama constantly visited, wheras Eiichirō Oda, not too often).
- Toei is about 50-50 in male to female worker ratio. The directors are mostly men, but there are a good handful of female directors on projects
- Toei uses tablets for just about everything....really cool Wacom tablets.
- There are 5 animation teams at Toei, each working on a different show/movie. These teams range from 35-40 key animators per team. There are about 350 animators at Toei (combining the comparitavely small TV teams and the huge Movie teams)
- There are a lot of young animators at the company (in the mid/late 20's), but also older people (45-50) so the average age for animators is at about 30.
- Nowadays, Toei tries to have as much control as possible when their shows go overseas to get localized. They are trying to keep the animations as close to the original as possible.
- Key animators are expected to focus on the work at hand and not too much on their personal work. If an animator is doing a fast and high quality job, they are grouped with other similar animators and form 3-5 animator super teams that get the same amount of work done as a 5 or 7 animator team.
-CG is used most of the times for backgrounds. Also- companies often hire Toei for backgrounds to use in games.
- Out of the about 80 anime that come out weekly, Toei animates 5 of them. They also do 1-3 feature length animated films a year (they're currently working on 3 for 2010)
- Original ideas come from producers who then talk to animators to see if they're willing to animate it. Then the higher ups are brought in before a decision is made to go ahead with the animation
- While animators do like working on long running shows, they get tired of drawing the same characters for a long time and thus the teams are shifted and shuffled ever so often.
- 3D animation is VERY expensive. That's why episodes of RoboDz are 3 minutes long. They're trying to convince the brass to at least attempt 1 full length 3-d animated motion picture just to test the water against Pixar






(Awesome poster they gave me for being enthusiastic and kind)

After that we went to the Nanoko Broadway, which is basically like a giant flee market but its stores. There you can find all the capsule toys and random figures opened, but a little priceyer because you know which one you're buying.









A few things
- I'm walking a lot as I take pictures, so there will be shaky cam. Its hard to stop in the middle of a crowded place to take a picture of something silly so expect "the blur" (get it, its a pun on how bad my camera skills are)
- Its going to be company visits for the next few days so expect to be hearing more tidbits of random information about companies and less about how awesome eveything is.
- The japanese haircut is going to take a while because I need some free time when a salon is actually open and i'm not busy.
- Krispy Kreme is just as, if not more, awesome here as it is in the US.







- Did I mention that SF4 is amazing? Well it is.







- the link is to big to get url'd

http://s490.photobucket.com/albums/rr266/CDMJapan08/Pics%20by%20Irv/Tueday%20the%202nd/