Hello everyone and welcome back to The Word Count! The short, concise and fun way to learn about the words that the Oxford English Dictionary will probably be adding in a couple years time.
This week we look at another exciting word! This word is the one that is always in motion. Like how the world is in motion. Packed full of emotion. We’re going to look at the word Genga 原画 but none of its many, many siblings just yet. Honestly we need to keep these articles short!
Here we go a genga!
Genga is a word that we can actually split into two bits to understand what it means. The first bit the Gen 原 means ‘Original’, hopefully my friends from the US don’t start calling this ‘Ranch’. The second bit ga 画 means ‘drawing’, so Genga 原画 literally means ‘Original Drawing’. Though in English, this became Key Animation because Genga are Key points of movement in a piece of animation.
Now these key frames can be at different intervals as well. You can have more or less keyframes in a cut and both have their benefits! Broadcasts on TV are at about 24 frames per second and you can either have keyframes on every frame, half the frames or a third of the frames or even less often!
Anime is typically animated on threes, or one keyframe every three frames. But you can also have anime animated on ones, or a keyframe every single frame! Animating on ones produces very smooth animation, like you’re pouring honey on toast like Winnie the Pooh. Ace Precure animator Nishiki Itaoka is known for his love of segments of smooth animation on the ones which have always been a real crowdpleaser!
But wait! There’s also merit in animating on the fours or less, where the keyframes appear much less often. This kind of animation is more sharp and cool looking! The animator Yoshinori Kanada was someone who loved doing this kind of animation, and followers of him are also known as Kanada-school animators with Masami Obari, Hiroyuki Imaishi and more recently Yuu Yoshiyama being key followers of the Kanada-school.
Lemon and Genga Tea is good to drink if you have a cold.
The funny thing is, this isn’t even the whole story because if it was, then the article would already be over.
You see, genga is actually a multiple step process. There are two parts to genga that allow it to become a whole that are absolutely necessary for it to exist. The Layout and the Clean-up. These two parts also have multiple checks from other staff in the production to make sure that everything is good to go.
It would be good to go through all of that too in this article but we’re trying to keep these nice and brief, so all of this will have to wait for another time!
