Hoichi the earless, Mimi-nashi-Hoichi is one of the most beloved Kwaidan stories in Japan. Hoichi is a blind and talented musician known for his “Heike story”. One day a samurai came knocking on his door, asking to come to play for a noble person. Hoichi follows the samurai and…
Client: Ted-Ed Animation
Director and animator: Masayoshi NakamuraWriter: Jeffrey M Angles
Producers: Abdallah Ewis, Gerta Xhelo
Sound designer: Zak Engel
Narrator: Adrian Dannatt
Poster
Process
As usual for this scale of project, I start with a sketchbook; thumbnails of sequences, scenes, and characters. The challenge was that you need to build the whole world, yet not enough photographic references to draw from. I drew a chunk of references from Kwaidan(1964) Hoichi the Earless film, though I still needed to come up with plenty on my own. It was also quite different from the last TED-Ed “Ice Cream” film where I can have various different visuals one after another. This was more story driven, but still needed interesting visuals from one after another. At the beginning I’m overwhelmed with the amount of work, and underwhelmed with the ideas that I could come up with, but I keep going over and over until things started falling into places.
I started with a few concept arts to get started, then I went back and forth with storyboard/animatic and style frames. I presented animatic (slide show-ish video with storyboard frames on the voice over script) and style frames to get a greenlight. But while in the production, I kept adding and revising new scenes to bridge 2 scenes. I kept seeking better ideas/solutions until the last minutes. That's something I could’ve done only because I was the only animator, and TED-Ed was generous with the timeline.
Here are some of sketch to design to final animation examples.