Object

What is it anyway?

How to Recognize it

Notes and additional info:

Settei Sheets

Character design sheets

Usually shows characters front, back and sides with different costumes and facial expressions/emotions

Very rare to find originals, most sold are copies

Story boards

Rough layout of each scene for an episode, movie or story line.

Collection of very rough sketches in panel format lay out of the story scenes

Also very rare to see originals, again most sold are copies

Timing Sheets

Chart graphing out dialogue and timing for a single scene.

Usually on blue or green card paper with sequence numbers, dialogue and timing index

Great info for location of each image/cel/sketch in a particular scene. Often comes with a full cut scene

Layouts

A sketch of the whole setup showing characters plus backgrounds in context

Sketch has black box or frame showing the edges of the scene with episode/scene number on top. Usually rough in appearance.

One per cut scene. Original are rare. All layouts are done by the key animator.

Genga

Drawings of the characters done by key animators

Sketch cleans up and makes corrections to the roughs with sequence numbers circled somewhere in the middle of the sheet

Sometimes these come with a cel, but not often. Gengas done by key animator or experienced artists.

Shusei Genga

Done by animation supervisor.

Usually comes on thin tinted yellow, pink or blue paper. Partial drawings are common. Sometimes the supervisor re-draws the entire image

Normally only part of the genga is drawn on these sheets. Ie, just the corrections

Douga

Cleaned up sketches that are scanned for digital coloring or copied onto acetate for cel painting

Very clean lines with sequence numbers in upper corners. Sometimes colored in the back to designate shading/shadows

Usually comes with the cel. A circle/triangle around the sequence number indicates it was drawn by the key animator.

Cels

Painted acetate images created for filming in a sequential order

Images is painted on the back side of the acetate. Sequence number is usually in a corner.

Cels are sometimes created in several layers for each photographed shot. Up to about 5 layers can be done (stacked) for each shot.

Rilezu Cels

Post production cels not used in the production of the show/story

Only one cel per scene painted with studio permission by a Rilezu studio.

Created for collectors of computer graphics anime shows. Only one cel is done per scene.

Reproduction Cels

Image from the story reproduced by the studio

Hand painted reproduction cels look like real ones. Machine ones are screened on to acetate. Usually has a ratio number like 36/100 which means the cel is number 36 of 100 authorized copies.

Multiple copies are available of a single image and if hand painted tend to be expensive.

Cels sold as Chroma Cels are also in this catagory. Chroma cels are machine reproduced and thus fairly inexpensive.

A one of a kind cel or limited creation cel.

Created for printed promotional materials. Examples are DVD covers, posters, magazines, or trading cards etc. Sometimes done by an artist to show their skill with the particular drawing style needed. Much more detailed and of larger cel size.

The holy grail of cel collectors. Extremely rare and commanding prices you don’t want to think about.

Also amazingly beautiful. (No I dont own this cel but would give non-vital body parts to own it!, used as an example only)