Iron-Blooded Orphans: Mechanics and World

>>14922129
so that's the origin of barbatos' YEAAAAAAAAAAAAART pose

what a shitty design

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>But I think that the viewers were drawn in by the image of the Barbatos holding the mace in the first episode.

Arisawa - I'm the one who drew the key animation for that scene, but I struggled with it. I wondered how to deal with the problem of the lead mecha striking a cool pose at the end of the first episode. I think that this has been a tradition since "Mobile Suit Gundam SEED". That, and I have a desire to really let the Gundam strike a cool pose (laughs).

>As a design, the Barbatos was really made for cool poses, though.

Arisawa - It has a silhouette that's easy to portray from a variety of angles.

>Have you ever had other mecha animation directors accidentally draw it in cool poses?

Arisawa - Yeah, we have. Each animation director for "Iron-Blooded Orphans" has a different way of portraying Barbatos. If I become too aware of that, I run the risk of being bound by that fact. That's why I think it’s appealing to let each animation director's individual personalities shine through in an anime. We all have a common impression of Barbatos in that it's not something that lightly flies about in the air, but wields a mace with these heavy movements.

How do you draw appealing fight scenes while keeping them in line with the setting?

>IBO doesn't have beam weaponry, but in my opinion, the animation of the mecha scenes had an element that left an impression on me.

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Arisawa - I can agree with that. But there’s a lot of melee combat, so there are parts where there are two or more mobile suits on screen at one time. From an animation standpoint it makes things more difficult, so that was definitely one of my concerns. Though it’d be difficult in its own way with beam weaponry (laughs). I first thought that fight scenes without beam weapons would look plain, so I made sparks fly out whenever the mobile suits clash into each other. In this series, in addition or red or orange sparks, we also make use of blue sparks. Those blue sparks are the top layer of the Nanolaminate Armor getting shaved off, so I wanted to express that in a way that looks flashy.
During the compositing phase, we use a dry brush technique to add in these blue effects. In addition, there aren’t any explosions (of the Mobile Suits?) in IBO. Because the pilots would die if there were (laughs).

>You can really feel how much things hurt during collisions.

Arisawa - By doing things like the suits shake and swing by the force of impact, we can make the (the fight scenes) satisfying to watch.

>Was that something that was decided by meeting with the director?

Arisawa - I remember asking him “well, what if we did it like this?”. In this series, I wanted to let the light of the thrusters be translucent but doing so turns it into a different kind of animation (Note: meaning that it’s the composite team as opposed to the key animators who have to take care of it) so it adds just another little burden. But after talking about it with the director, we ended up making use of it.

>Mecha anime have some sort of promise of traditionally “cool” elements like poses and beams, so it must have been a great challenge to draw mobile suits like that.

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Arisawa - And that’s why I really struggled with that at first. But that’s why I was flexible in my thinking. I’d run a lot of things by the director, have him tell me it wasn’t what he was looking for, fix it, and get the OK. I would start to figure out how much wiggle room I had in matching Mr. Nagai’s vision, so bit by bit, it influenced the way I drew Barbatos and all the other mobile suits.

>Would you say that you got that across in the final battle?

Arisawa - Since episode 24 had the highest number of shots, I really put my best into it. With all the mass produced suits appearing in the inner-city battle, plus suits like the Grimgerde showing up, things got crowded.

>As a I fan, I was really happy how the animation quality was appropriate for a finale. I’m sure this will extend into season 2 as well, but is there anything else we should look forward to?

Arisawa - There will be plenty of new mobile suits showing up. The second season will start off with a mobile suit battle so I’m in the middle of thinking of how to draw that right now. I’ll be doing my best, so please watch it when it comes out!

And that's that. As someone who's just discovered Arisawa's work, I gotta say I'm a fan now that I know what parts he's responsible for. Take a look at his sakugabooru tag: https://sakugabooru.com/post?tags=hiroshi_arisawa

>>14922129
Something tells me Nagai has no idea how mecha animators/designers work.

Just curious, but who else was interviewed? I can't seem to find scans.

So the cool parts of IBO are done by him?

>>14922151
There's an interview called Mecha Designers Meeting, split into two parts. First part deals with the beginning of the series up to arrival on Earth. It's got Naohiro Washio, Kanetake Ebikawa, Gyobu Ippei, and Kenji Teraoka all together.

Second part deals with all the Earth stuff to the finale. It's got all of the above participating except Teraoka for some reason.

There's another one with STRINGS, which seems to be the graphic designer/design team that designed the logo, the episode title eyecatches, and the BD boxes.

Another one with Ten'i, who seems to be a guy from Bandai. So I assume it's about the gunpla kits.

Last one's with Tatsuyuki Nagai himself. The Arisawa one is the shortest at two pages. All the others are too long for me to bother with at the moment. I'm sure they're full of really interesting info but my Japanese just isn't there yet. Arisawa's took me a couple of days to finish.

I found the scans on E-hentai for some reason.

>>14922153
Basically, yeah. There are other nice looking parts by Obari and Sakiko Uda though. You'd be blind to think IBO doesn't have at least a few nice looking cuts. Though its quality drops pretty damn hard a lot, too.

>>14922169
So it's true that the shitty ones are done by interns then?

>>14922169
>scans
It's not that odd. Bunch of artbooks get scanned there.

>>14922129
Get that suit a hamburger, STAT!

>>14922129
Could you translate or post some ippei gyoubu stuff if there is any?

>>14922184

Shitty interns generally fill in the blanks between key frames.

Well that certainly sheds some light on the discrepancy/inconsistency of the quality.

>>14923854
seconding this.