Production I.G.

TV

OVA's

Games

• Surveillance
• Yarudora

Innovations

The film "Ghost in the Shell" marked the first ever overlay of computer generated visuals onto a hand drawn background. Surprisingly, many of the digital looking effects in the film were laboriously hand produced.

Production IG's advances in digital cinematography techniques have been credited in no small part to Effects Director Hisashi Ezura (江面 久), Director Hiroyuki Kitakubo (北久保 弘之), Animator Norifumi Kiyozumi (清積 紀文) and Toshihiro Kawamoto (川元 利浩) who joined Production I.G. in the spring of 1996. Their first application of digital techniques was presented in the animated cut sequences for the Sony PlayStation game, "Ghost in the Shell".

The first feature length animated film to use this digital manipulation by Production IG was "Blood: the Last Vampire" released in 2000. This found the comprehensive usage of digital technology in a largely seamless manner. From this production onward, digital effects were used in almost every one of their projects including "Sakura Taisen: the movie", "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex", "Minipato", and "Innocence".

With the advance of digital compositing, the discrete layers could be edited in groups, and lighting effects could be applied to the entire frame, or to each layer selectively. This greatly helped the production of Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" by creating a depth of field previously unseen in an animated feature. In "Blood: the Last Vampire", this also contributed into having a deep, and hitherto unseen active background supporting the foreground characters.

More recently, further development and experimentation has allowed for the seamless addition of computer generated images, objects and characters into a traditional hand-drawn scene. For example, the Tachikoma Think-Tanks of "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" are 3-D computer models composited into the scene. This has allowed for repeated mechanical objects to be unified in appearance.

Production I.G has created a position called the "Screen Architect" who builds the atmosphere and feel of a scene. This is accomplished by creating a storyboard which has the same effects as the finished product applied to it. Prior to digital image manipulation, the application of effects such as lighting, blurs and shadows was done manually and consumed much time.

This allowed the production crews to visualize and unify the visual feel of a film. Combined with digital compositing, this further strengthened the power of post production editing and allowed for fine-tuning of the final product's visual presentation.

Digital colorgrading allows for multiple layers to be edited at once, and was used in "Blood: the Last Vampire" to build a very specific unified color palette. Within the limited color palette, specific colors were enhanced to draw the attention of the viewer in a way difficult to paint in the cel.

The subtle nature of the manipulation is the power of colorgrading, as it contributes to the scene without being noticed. It continues to be used in Production IG's films without being overtly noticed.

The less obvious digital contributions into an analog scene include lens effects such as the fish-eye lens, motion blur to more vividly portray movement, instability in the focus of the camera, unstable light exposure, lighting effects such as shadows, and gun muzzle flashes.