Hey everyone, this is Sunsunsun—the guy who promised Volume 9 would go on sale simultaneously with the Feelings in Russian art book in July but completely missed the deadline.
Wow, I totally dropped the ball there. I definitely didn’t plan things right. I seriously underestimated the workload spike that comes with an anime adaptation. What? “Does getting an anime really increase the original author’s work that much? Isn’t it just supervising the script,” you ask?
…Ha-ha-ha. Great questions. Honestly, I thought the exact same thing until something I created got an anime adaption itself. So when I looked at other series and saw it was taking longer for novels and manga to come out after an anime adaptation was announced, I was skeptical and thought, Is the author really that busy? Don’t you just have to go to a few meetings?
So allow me to explain how things work for the sake of all the authors and manga artists out there who are currently facing the same skepticism from their readers! When a work is adapted into an anime, you might wonder what new tasks the original author takes on.
First and foremost, script meetings. Together with the anime director, producers, and other production staff, the author discusses the script written by the screenwriter, and conversations often end up sounding like a variation of the following: “This scene won’t fit into the runtime once animated, so let’s cut it.” And, “There are too many slow, static scenes here, so let’s change this part.” Or, “I’ll write a brand-new scene to replace it.” Even, “This filthy scene will never be able to air.”
These meetings happen multiple times for each episode, rarely wrapping up in just one or two sessions. Based on feedback from the meetings, the screenwriter then revises the script, which is then reviewed again in further meetings, and this cycle repeats until the episode is finalized. Since these are formal meetings, the author of the source material must thoroughly read the script beforehand and prepare their opinions to contribute effectively as well.
Alongside the script meetings, there’s also the casting process—that is, selecting the voice actors. The first step is the tape audition. Although called a “tape,” it’s actually an audio file. Voice actors perform several scenes excerpted from the original work, and their recordings are sent in. For the main characters in Feelings in Russian, about eighty auditions were received per role. Allow me to repeat that: eighty people per role.
We had to listen to all of them and narrow it down to a few candidates we liked. Of course, as the author, it was thrilling to see so many people eager to appear in the anime adaptation of Feelings in Russian. But honestly, I started to experience gestaltzerfall (misuse of the term, but it fits), and after a while it became hard to tell what was good or not.
Some of the audio files were over six minutes long, so listening to every single one thoroughly for a single character meant literally half a day of work. To manage this, the first round of screening was done just by judging the tone of the very first line, but even then, narrowing it down from eighty to about three to six finalists still took several hours.
Then, as the author, after selecting several voice actors that I liked, we held a meeting to decide who would advance to the studio audition, and then we listened to the performances at the studio audition and ultimately chose one person for each role. Honestly, this selection process with the audio tapes was more challenging than the meetings.
Since it isn’t possible to do this for every character, the anime production team handled narrowing down the final candidates for the sub characters to a few, and then we had meetings to choose who would play each role. During one of the meetings, I vividly remember someone saying, “Ah, no, this isn’t right. This Takeshi has hair,” which really stuck with me. Sure, his voice was a bit too cool for Takeshi, but rejecting him because of his hair was hilarious. Put simply, the meetings weren’t overly formal and had a pretty casual vibe.
Of course, it all depends on the production team and how involved the creator of the source material is in the casting process, though. Thankfully, for Feelings in Russian, the anime production side really valued my opinions, including casting. While I’m an amateur when it comes to anime production and left final decisions to the production team, I think they did a fantastic job casting voice actors who perfectly matched the characters!
Anyway, after wrapping up the casting and script meetings for all twelve episodes, the next step was recording. Each episode’s recording session took from two and a half to as long as five hours, and there were twelve of these sessions. Technically, the author of the source material doesn’t have to be present, but I attended all except one session that I absolutely couldn’t make. Of course, I did this remotely, though. That pretty much sums up what an author usually does in anime production which is probably what most people imagine as “supervising the script.”
But honestly, the supervision related to anime production isn’t that much of a burden. Sure, some preparation is required beforehand, but the meetings and recording sessions only happen a few times a month and last just a few hours each. You’re probably now thinking, “Sounds tough, but it’s only once a week or every other week, right? That’s not too bad.” And you’d be right.