The return of...

Last night Fran and I finished watching SHIROBAKO, which is an anime series about anime creators at an anime studio - it’s one of the best anime I’ve seen in years, incidentally, and deserves being written about (though I’m sure a lot of others have beat me to the punch…) Anyway, this is a non-spoiler post, but in the last episode there’s a scene where one of the characters gets this…

A “Dreamgast 4,” the box proclaims, which is funny for at least a couple of obvious reasons right off the bat. For those who are unaware, anime often contains tweaked “real world” trademarks that remain recognizable, so as to add a sense of realism, but are clearly not the actual represented product, like this “SUNY” boombox I found on a tumblr devoted to fake brands in anime:

Anyway, the other reason it’s funny (besides “Dreamgast” or the very idea of a Dreamcast 4) is the fact that the target was clearly chosen because the staff of SHIROBAKO (someone on it, anyway) is a Sega hardware otaku. Because after a second I noticed that the hardware depicted on the front of the box is a Victor Wondermega.

What’s a Victor Wondermega? It’s a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) and a Sega Mega CD (Sega CD) all-in-one unit released by Victor (aka JVC) in Japan in the 1990s, while that was a viable (?) system option. It’s pretty obscure (natch) and really cool looking, in a 1990s electronics kinda way.

Being that it was released by an electronics company, it has some enhanced functionality for music. Or something. I forget, and the top Google hit for it isn’t that informative.

The Wondermega was released in the U.S. by JVC:

As the appallingly-named “X’Eye.” Where do they get these names?

You’ll notice that is a different casing design than the original. At some point a revised Wondermega was released, which looks way less cool. That’s what we got in the West.

Since TV animation tends to have smaller budgets than feature animation, we are often times limited in the kind of animation we can do in terms of backgrounds.  Here are a couple workarounds I have to show movement in a background.  

The first is a tracking shot into cam where our Character is running without gaining away or from cam (but they could if you wanted) The foreground is the ground plane which is just a simple looping set of lines. The BG is actually a static image that would slowly drift down towards the horizon line imitating movement away from the background. 

The second is also a tracking shot where the character is more in profile. This one requires some soft focus and low detail background drawings (usually not a lot, maybe 3 looping images. I only used 2 here but the theory holds.

The last one only requires a single background layout, but we use the camera to imitate action as it pulls out over a static image.

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