#multiplane

my ocs

My goober characters

There's this neat visual effect in Saint Seiya, and I can't figure out how they made it.

I've been interested in lighting effects in cel animation for a while. the stuff they could do with only analogue tools was really cool, and i've never been able to find good writing about it in english. this is an art from that is not practiced any more, and not a lot of writing about it has made it to the internet, so some of the advanced stuff might be lost technology.

this is from 1988. same year as akira, which has a lot of fancy lighting stuff, but well before the pinnacle of technical multiplane tricks in the mid-90s. and it's just a regular-budget tv show. how'd they do that??

I guess it's just multiple layers of film of light caustics from water, like that's where it comes from, sure. but you don't usually see video elements in moving backgrounds. so maybe they used some kind of video mixer masking trick to get it into the shot? but there's bloom on the characters, and you can't add bloom using an 80s video mixer, right? so they must have had some way of printing the video frames onto cels in order to put it in the multiplane? but that sounds so labor intensive. whatever it is, once they figured out this technique they started using it for everything. every character just has this aura all the time now. so it has to be pretty simple. i'm missing something.

famously in Star Trek TNG they also used video elements of swirling water mixed together to make the transporter visual effects, and that was around the same time. But they had way more money, and frankly this is more impressive! the transporter effects were just blurred masks; this is some other shit.

Multiplane camera!!