Steve Bennett is hiding behind the Narumi Kakinouchi art book, one
of several art books that Studio Ironcat/IC Entertainment plans to release
in the next few months. Already they're selling Evangelion art books autographed
by Hideaki Anno. Kakinouchi's best-known works, the Vampire Princess Miyu
and Yui series, have been "selling like gangbusters" in the Ironcat translation,
said Bennett. Ironcat will reprint the first two Miyu graphic novels unflipped
in their original right-to-left page order. "Unflipped manga originally
was not selling very well, but the manga fans have become more sophisticated
book. Retailers are coming to understand that not all people read from
left to right. Even when we were flipping the books we were giving our
best effort in retouching." The Miyu theme continues from Ironcat with
figurines that will be sold through the Virginia company. Ironcat also
will debut an "AmericaManga" book in December featuring American artists
and another catgirl calendar, but there will be no animation from Ironcat
- yet.
Translator Neil Nadleman and animator Scott Frazier have
hours of stories to tell about the odd things that happen in the anime
industry and at conventions (ask them to tell the "cake" story one day).
They know their way around the industry and understand why things happen
and don't happen. Said Frazier, "Some series have a lot of strong planning,
as much as four years. Some are just thrown together. They come up with
an idea and two months later they're thrown into production. Movies have
a long gestation period, but tv series can be very very fast." Added Nadleman,
"There are very few series or shows that have good endings - it's like
they ran out of money." Frazier told the old story about how Gainax and
Production I.G. kept running out of money when they made Neon Genesis Evangelion,
kept finding new investors and then spent all of their money - and still
didn't have enough money to properly finish the series.
The most woefully undercovered part of anime conventions
on this site are music videos. Big crowds attend video contests, but the
videos don't translate well into still pictures. Still, the popularity
of those videos led this author to listen to the presentation of Jack West,
a leading creator of anime music videos. His recommendations for aspiring
video creators are to be creative when it's time to choose the music and
anime series you use to make a video. Shows such as Cowboy Bebop, Evangelion
and Ranma and music such as Linkin Park has been used so much that it's
been overdone, he said. West also feels that video creators have to be
very careful that they edit to the beat of a song, since something out
of sync won't get top votes from contest judges, regardless of the video's
other virtues. Some people choose music for the beat and sound, but West
thinks that a song's lyrics should mean something and the video should
tell the same story told by the lyrics. One obvious recommendation that
some video creators don't follow: save your editing work on the computer
as often as possible. West tells the story of a video maker who was making
a film for anime Central, only to have his PC crash and wipe out everything
- except the backup copy he had burned to DVD.
