So, they probably choose to reduce the clipping on the flashes from explosion blast in the expense of making everything else looks darker, which kinda of seen foolish, after all, explosion flashes are fast single frame shots supposed to look “blinding” anyway. I noted that on the original broadcast which had a much better exposure, the light flashes from explosions tended to clip from overexposure more often than on the Renewal’s version. Still on the subject of lightning issue of composition cell animation, there is one thing that I suspect is partially the cause of some over dark scenes. Talking about episode 01, lets take a look at two extra shots from episode 01 that also appears on episode 19Īs we can see, both look darker, on the second one there is an excessive contrast and the trucks don’t look as green as they are supposed to. (Also is fun to note the cell shadow casting as the whole composition becomes thicker) Those two scenes can be better noticed with diff.pics: There is a notable example of that on episode 01, the moment the extra layer for the exhaust fumes of the missile are added on the composition, the Airplane becomes slightly lighter and more yellowish.
#EVANGELION EPISODE 4 EXPLANATION FULL#
Such overlay issues are inherently to full analogical animation with no digital balance, as it’s difficult to compensate the exposure by just increasing the amount of light of the capture machine, sometimes even if correcting the exposure is indeed possible by controlling the light source, the colors may be off since the cells not only aren’t perfectly transparent, but they may filter some color wavelength to pass slighter easier than others. This is also present on the original broadcast. The first scene has at least two extra cell layers for the explosion and the bullet tracers from Unit 02, but the next scene omits these two extra layers, thus it becomes clearly slightly lighter. Speaking of which, the more cell layers are used for composing a scene, the darker it’ll look by the way, this can be seen on two follow up scenes of Asuka shooting zeruel further bellow. Then the episode 19 BD was made from this same new film master from the 2003 renewal. I wonder how these corrections were originally made, but I suspect a new master film was created after such corrections and this new master wasn’t properly exposed like other episodes that look miles better. I believe this has something to do with several animation issues that have been fixed from the original broadcast version, as can be seen here: It’s also important to note that all color and exposure issues from the BD appear identical on the original DVD remaster from 2003. As a matter of fact, episode 19 looks the worse from all the episodes on the BD (with the exception of 16, of course). But even so, the original broadcast version also has some minor exposure issues, notably Eva Unit 01 regenerating her arm like the first picture above, the shot looks considerable darker than the previous one, I suspect mainly due to the “blur” effect that was added for the sceneĬompared to other episodes that reuses these same cells or have similar shots the issues become very clear as being cronical to episode 19.