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Trigger Provides Little Witch Academia Production Materials to National Institute of Informatics
posted on by Kim Morrissy
Studio Trigger is providing production materials from the Little Witch Academia 2013 short to the National Institute of Informatics (NII). Trigger is providing almost every asset used in the anime's production, including storyboards, background art, character designs, color templates, 397 digitally colored animation cuts, and 383 in-progress cuts, which comprise of key/in-between frames, time sheets, and layouts.
The NII is using the data in order to research new techniques to increase the efficiency of animation production, such as automatic image creation (supplementing in-between frames, high-resolution images, automatically generated 3D models, etc.) and data management.
Trigger provided the materials to the Informatics Research Data Repository (IDR), a dataset sharing service operated by the NII's Center for Dataset Sharing and Collaborative Research (DSC), on Tuesday. It was introduced to researchers at the Special Interest Group on Comic Computing on Wednesday.
The studio was able to provide a comprehensive amount of material for the research project because it owns the sole rights to the short, including the original story and production assets.
The Little Witch Academia project began with a 2013 anime short as part of the Anime Mirai 2013 initiative. Fans supported the second short via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that raised US$150,000 in six hours, and eventually US$625,518 (four times its original goal) in one month. The Little Witch Academia: The Enchanted Parade sequel had its world premiere at Anime Expo in July 2015.
The series later spawned a television anime that premiered on January 2017 and concluded with 25 episodes in June 2017. Netflix debuted the first 13 episodes outside Japan in June 2017, and added episodes 14-25 in August 2017.
Source: Animation Business Journal (Tadashi Sudo)
