Gryphon wrote on apr-09:
>>Animation approaches impossibility for many reasons, not least of
>>which is that it essentially involves twenty-four pieces of
>>very-carefully-painted fanart per second. :)

I got to paint a cel at Katsucon 007 this year, in Steve Bennett's (Studio Ironcat) workshop. For future reference: when shading from light green to dark green, the intermediate color is *not* brown. :) (We mixed our own colors from black-white-red-yellow-blue acrylics.)

Megazone replied on apr-09:
>Well, very few anime are made with 24 unique sells per second.
>Probably more like 8 for a lot of them.

Also at Katuscon, Scott Frazier (anime industry vet and contributor to the RETAS 2D digital animation package) commented that, although a 22-minute ep at "two-up" (12 fps) is ~15000 frames, "Dragonball Z" runs ~1500 (lots of reuse), and the all-time economy-winner was "Evangelion" #26 at ~65. I haven't seen the latter half of NGE to confirm, but after "Death & Rebirth" I believe it.

Effort is proportional to technology used and desired quality. Consider how many frames of a typical anime involve pans across detailed backgrounds, or slides/zooms/rotates of "sprites" (to use an old term from 2D computer animation). Consider the compact vector animations of Macromedia Flash.

There *are* amateur anime-style producers out there, e.g. "Shawn the Touched" of White Radish.