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What do you get when you combine the laws of physics, a computer and some Anime for good measure?  Plastic Pixel, of course.  Immersed in the development of their first project, The Fourth Power, Plastic Pixel is an up and coming Anime bonanza.  Mark Koch, Nyles Nettleton and Jerry Caraway have mixed a sci-fi story with some extraordinary Anime art and the result is breathtaking.  I recently had the pleasure of chatting with the brains behind the Anime and asked them the "what, when and how" behind their vision.  Here's what they had to say.

Anime: Who is Plastic Pixel?  What brought it about?

Mark:  Initially the team consisted of myself and a good friend, Nyles Nettleton.  We worked out the story for a year and I sat down for two weeks and put the story into writing in the form of a screen play.  I let a few friends read it and they were hooked.  They loved the story.  I found this quite surprising since I didn't expect it to come off that well.  This kind of reaction was encouraging, to say the least, and kept us motivated to move forward.

Our third cohort is Jerry Caraway.  Jerry emailed me out of the blue and had encouraging things to say about the web site. He also wondered about how an artist might get into this business.  I explained to him that our project was volunteer only and asked him to send some artwork samples.  Jerry's artwork made me drool.  He had an incredible style that was somewhere in between Marvel Comics style and Japanese Anime style.  His stuff was so good,  I offered him the title of Art Director.  Jerry has modified and embellished key scenes in the story to a whole new level.  I'm glad to have him on the team.

Plastic Pixel was formed in 1997 when we started working on the idea for our own animated feature.   I was inspired by a short film from "Shawn the Touched" at White Radish.  The film was a parody on anime, all rolled into a short 10 minute film called "The Item".  Shawn is a great friend now and gave me the opportunity to do some cleanup and in-between work on his next short film, "Apprentice".  Shawn gave me a lot of tips and shortcuts for my own animation work.  He was also very constructive of his critiques of my work.  We set out to create an animated short film.  I was thinking 10 minutes long.  But after a year of crafting the story and then writing it into a screenplay,  it turned out to be anywhere from 90 to 120 minutes long.  There were just too many details and situations in the plot to make it a short film.   We decided to go ahead anyway and see how far we could get.

Anime: Have you guys always been into Anime?

Mark:  The only anime I remember when I was a kid is "Speed Racer" and "Battle of the Planets".  I had no idea at the age of 8 or 9 that these shows came from Japan.  I have had a light interest in Anime since I collected comic books in the 1980's .  I used to see a lot of "strange" stuff at the comic book stores and came to learn that Japan had it's own thing going.  I became much more interested in Japanese culture after that.  It wasn't until about 1994 or 1995 when I saw Tenchi Muyo and Whisper of the Heart at BayCon Sci-Fi convention in San Jose.  I sat in on a couple of showings and was hooked after that.  I am a hard core Tenchi and Miyazaki fan.  I kinda got hooked on the "cute" stuff too. In Tenchi, the antics of Sasami and Ryo-Ohki had me on the edge of my seat and sometimes rolling on the floor. I needed more.  I lean more toward the melodrama based anime and don't seek out the action stuff so much.  I love a good story.  My current favorite title is "Card Captor Sakura".  

Jerry:  I've loved cartoons all my life.  I guess I really got into anime in 1993.  The opening animation for Macross 2 blew me away - it had a lot of energy.  

Nyles:  Since long before I knew it was anime - I grew up with Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, 8th Man, Speed Racer and many more.

Anime:  Okay, let's talk about "The Fourth Power"  What it is?  What was the vision behind it?

Nyles: Mark and I were bouncing around ideas over coffee for a year or so before the company started.  The vision?  Creating something very cool that wasn't just a retread of everything else.

Mark:  I was learning to draw the anime style and had recently got completely hooked on anime.  I showed some of my crudely drawn sketches to Nyles and we started to chat about them and gave these characters some personality traits.  Over the course of a year the characters had "lives" of their own.  I would describe the process as collaborative role-playing.  I even played as one of the characters on Ultima Online.  Also, We would both act out various characters ( when nobody was looking ).  We got really good with imitating raccoons ( yes there are two raccoons as characters in this story ).   That activity really helped me get inside the head of my characters and bring them to life.

The Fourth Power revolves around the mathematical concept of the fourth dimension.  I had read most of Rudy Rucker's ( a sci-fi author and math professor) fiction and  non-fiction books.  One of the non-fiction books was a "Fourth Dimension for Dummies" type book entitled "The Fourth Dimension" (details).   The concepts in that book blew my mind.  Eventually my new anime characters and the fourth dimension stuff collided in my mind and came out as a sci-fi story. 

The Fourth Power is about a girl who is one of the first humans to be able to manipulate space to the next higher dimension.  Traveling in the fourth dimension allows you to travel faster than light without violating the theory of relativity.  A fourth dimension being can bend 3D space, making distances shorter.  This theme is prevalent in many sci-fi stories.  Frank Herbert's Dune called it "folding" space.  Star Wars called it "hyperspace".  In this story, this ability is genetic and most races eventually evolve this ability.  The story, though, is less about space battles and more about self discovery.  I hope people like it.

Anime:  How does the work get distributed?  Who does what?

Mark:  We are a tight knit group of three people but we all live in different places.  In 2000, I moved from California to Denver, Colorado.  Nyles still lives in San Jose.   Jerry lives in Dallas, Texas.  Jerry usually sends me his illustrations by regular mail.  Nyles
just uploads a file or two to me.  We all keep in touch via email and that seems to work just fine.

The visual style we chose involved hand drawn and inked characters over a 3D rendered background.  This style is getting more popular in anime (like Blue Submarine) and even Disney films.  Jerry draws everything by hand.  Nyles and I, being two computer geeks, build all the sets in 3D.  This not only helps up divide the work up but also lets Nyles and I do what we do best on our computers and let's Jerry stick with paper and pencil.   Jerry's artwork is scanned into Photoshop and composited in either Illustrator (for the comic) or AfterEffects for animation. We are currently looking at Macromedia Flash for future animation work.

Anime:  How long have you been drawing?

Mark:  I have drawn on and off since high-school ( we're talking the 80's here).  But passed up art school to go to engineering school.  I became an engineer.  I got into airbrush though for a few years and most of my stuff was abstract on big canvases.  I don't consider myself a great artist though and often wonder how things would have been different had I went to an art school.

Jerry:  After I graduated high school.  Picked up a comic book and decided I wanted to draw.  When I got into anime it really kicked it in high gear.  Thanks to Masami Obari for the influence.

Nyles:  I don't.  I do computer graphics and whatever else is needed.  I can freehand a mean schematic though. :)

Anime: Any tips for aspiring writers and artists out there?  Tools, processes, etc?

Mark:  Your best tool is your imagination.  Feel free to think out loud with your fellow artists.  Listen to what your friends have to say and avoid negatively judging or criticizing other people's work.  Every artist strives to improve.  Re-enforcing the good things about other's work will help them improve and they in turn are more likely to help you improve too.

Also, practice, practice, practice!!!!   Draw every day if you can.   Also,  learn anatomy.  Learning to draw out of manga and anime books is a good start, but to really draw your characters from any angle and any action pose, you need to have a good understanding of the human body.  Drawing starts from the inside out of your characters.  Learn to draw a skeleton and work your way out.

Writers!   Write, write, write!!!  It doesn't matter what you write.  Good writing is a skill and skills are learned over time.  Write a paragraph while waiting for the bus. Write a few sentences before you go to bed.  It doesn't matter what! Write down a joke that you heard or something someone said to you today. Look out the window and describe the clouds in the sky. It really works!!!  Also, read J. Michael Straczynski's book "The Complete Book of Script Writing" (details).  Mr. Straczynski is the guy who wrote Babylon 5, but he also has written hundreds of TV episodes like "Murder She Wrote" and "Jake and the Fatman".

Jerry: [Get] a light table and just have fun and experiment with different techniques and mediums.  

Nyles:  Discipline - make sure you have a regular time to work on your projects.  Otherwise, random life tends to get in the way and all of a sudden the day/week/month/year is over and nothing's happened.  A tool?  A good notebook, and spares.

Well, there you have it.  Quite the inspiration for those of us looking to find our niche in the Anime industry, isn't it?  The Fourth Power, by the way, is the first Anime project for all three and is expected to be released in 2004 as eight to twelve monthly issues.  Oh, and for those of you who think you don't have the time?  Nyles is a computer designer at Sun Microsystems, working with Plastic Pixel in his spare time and Mark has a full-time business providing various forms of media for his clients.