Interview with Christophe Ferreira, Justin Leach, and Katrina Minett at Otakon 2024

Christophe Ferreira began his career as a dougaman at Telecom Animation Film under Yasuo Ootsuka and Kazuhide Tomonaga, passed from project to project and position to position, took a detour outside the industry into comics, ducked back in for color scripts and storyboards on Hirune Hime, and now takes the director’s chair at Orange for an adaptation of Scott Westerfeld’s novel Leviathan.

Needless to say, when I saw Otakon had invited him as a guest, I had many questions for him – and he was kind enough to let me ask a few.

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Notes on Leviathan at Otakon 2024

Director Christophe Ferreira, Qubic Pictures producers Justin Leach and Katrina Minnett, Orange producers Yoshihiro Watanabe and Kiyotaka Waki, novelist Scott Westerfeld, and vocalist Diana Garnett came to Otakon in order to tell us about their cartoon called Leviathan, and now I’m here to tell you what they told us.

-but not everything, because the panel was an hour and a half, and this is a sakuga blog.

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Sonny Boy’s visual identity – creative freedom as a way to convey the artistic intent

Anime, just like pretty much any other creative medium nowadays, is heavily commercialised, hence a lot of the decision making is done by the producers and not by the creative staff themselves. Sometimes there are exceptions to that state of things, when the producers give the artists free reign and total control over the project. Sonny Boy is such an example: a show envisioned, directed and written by Shingo Natsume, who explicitly stated before the broadcast that this is the first and probably last time when he’ll be given such freedom to do whatever he wants. He even called his work on the series downright selfish and egocentric, because he wanted to include in it as many elements important for him as possible. This freedom became a key factor shaping the entire project, including its visual identity.

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My Hero Academia Production Notes – Season 7 Staff Overview, OP12/ED12 & #139

The sixth season of My Hero Academia‘s anime adaptation was a Herculean effort; adapting some of the manga’s most demanding content, and succeeding with flying colors. It’s a rebound from the less-than-ideal circumstances of the prior season so stunning that it makes for an understandably tough act for Season 7 to follow. Now that we’re […]

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The artist_unknown OPfest: Winter 2024

Welcome to a new column on this blog where we take advantage of the piecewise format to finally produce blogging that embodies the true spirit of the unknown artist. Ideally, future iterations will see increasing variety in participants, as people are matched to their specialties and interests. The nature of openings is such that there will always be something relevant to talk about. This season just happened to be loaded, and thus, a tradition has been born!

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Trying to Bridge the Gap between US and JPN Productions: An Interview with Will Feng

Join us as we interview Will Feng! An animation producer affiliated with Studio Trigger; he produced their video game openings (Shantae, Indivisible, Omega Strikers) along with scouting out overseas artists James Gilleard and Jasmin Lai for BNA. Get to know his early animation experiences working at Titmouse, what motivated him to work in anime in […]

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