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Cat

Gousei (合成(ごうせい)) in anime production refers to partial hold. This notation is really important to douga artists, because it means you won't be drawing all of a cel. The cat example from bure article shows this – it's all a single cel, but only part of it changes - the rest is given gousei notation and remains the same between frames. That might seem a little annoying! Why does a layout artist get to force you to separate their cels when they could just do it on two? There are actually lots of reasons everything might be on the same layer. They might need all the parts on the same cel for movement that happens in between the gousei, they might be working fast, or just trying to keep layer clutter to a minimum. Whatever the reason, gousei is everywhere. So, how do we approach it?

It's pretty simple for the bure of the hissing cat... Draw the shaking portions separately as two different frames, then import the unmoving gousei portion for each. Just be careful not to shift the held portion of the drawing at all! Even a one - pixel movement will be really obvious. Just copy-paste and don't move it.

Unfortunately, it can get much more annoying. What happens when you need to draw something more complex?

Gousei example

This cut calls for gousei on Sophie's face and body, since that won't be moving. Let's set aside how to actually get a finished flapping animation on her hair for a moment and look at setting up gousei. You actually want to draw everything that stands still separately. Body, face, eyes, glasses.

Gousei1

Once you cut out all those still parts, you can trace the gousei and keys cleanly exactly like you'd expect–but you have to be extremely careful around the point at which they touch. There can't be any overlaps or gaps at all. If there are, the paint artist will have to clean up the work themselves or risk unfilled areas or overflowing color. Even if they do this, even just one or two overlapping pixels will cause the final drawings to flicker in a really distracting way.

Gousei2

(TODO: insert red cross and green circle to the image above - and float to the left the same image zoomed in as shown in the book version)

Make sure there's no overlap or gap–you and others will be referencing the gousei section for color fills, too–gaps are a no go! They can be filled even with the gousei and cels on separate layers using functions like "reference other layers."

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