u/ProphetOfTruth117

Over the last weekend, I attended Anime Central in Rosemont, IL, USA. Amongst all the excitment (and chaos) surrounding the Idolm@ster events happening, there was actually a good amount of Ikizulive content shown off during panels at the convention that wasn’t advertised much. I wanted to share the information I heard about at the event with the community since I was one of the very few Love Live fans that attended these events.

Context

One of the special guests that attended Anime Central was Hisayuki Tabata, character designer for Ikizulive and chief animation director for the Dou Da Doing MV. The announcement post for his appearance does mention Ikizulive, but many brushed this off as something that wouldn’t be brought up much due to the post also mentioning much more popular works he worked in alongside Ikizulive being fairly niche among western anime fans. Regardless, I had nothing else better to do, so I decided to show up and get excited for Ikizulive’s five seconds to shine. I got a lot more than that instead.

Panel 1 - The Art & Career of Hisayuki Tabata
This panel started out with an introduction of Tabata. He then spent about ten minutes doing a live sketch session of himself drawing Polka. While he was sketching, he brought up some interesting pieces of information:

• He exclusively draws through digital means (he drew on an iPad in the panel)
• He likes to start drawing characters from their torso first (the interpreter for the panel said “the buttocks“)
• He draws Polka similarly to Lelouch from Code Geass
• Mentioned how the holes on the paper animators draw on is different between Japan and the US, and how they do different motions to flip the paper.

After this, he showed the Dou Da Doing MV and told people to pay attention. After it finished, he asked the audience if they could tell the difference between the parts that were CGI, and the parts that were 2D animation. He then went into detail over how impressed he was with the work the 3D CGI team did with the music video. He went over how the complexity of the outfits would make animating the characters in the traditional way would be extremely difficult, and that 3D CGI can make the process much easier. He then transitioned into showing correction sketches for the music video. He shared some interesting details about why certain things are the way they are in the music video:

• He advocated for the Miracle KotoBomb (at 4:21) to be included in the music video
• He went very in depth about how he pays extra attention to the hands of the characters to show their emotions more and told people to pay attention to how fluidly the moved
• He describes Yukuri as fragile and sickly which is why she has one hand holding the other at 0:37
• He put extra effort into Mai typing at 0:16 to make sure it looks like she is actually typing.
• He mentioned paying extra attention to how Noriko holds her smartphone throughout the music video. He brought up how she holds her phone by gripping it with both hands instead of her hands overlapping like how a girl usually would.
• He showed that he had a lot of notes on a correction sketch of Shion at 0:49 to detail how her facial expressions should be. He said this was to showcase her introverted nature properly.
• Animating the angle of Aurora moving at 0:42 was quite difficult.
• They obtained permission from Japan to show off this preproduction art and that it is extremely rare to even see this in Japan.

After showing quite a few correction sketches, he showed the Dou Da Doing MV again. He told the audience to look closely for the details he mentioned while showing the correction sketches. He said it’s a shame you cannot go frame by frame in a YouTube video, but you actually can by pressing the < and > keys while the video is paused on desktop.

It was very clear watching this panel that Tabata very clearly takes a lot of pride in his work. I feel quite happy knowing someone who pays attention to such minute details has a pivotal role in this project’s production. I think anything animation related with Ikizulive is in good hands with him running it.

Panel 2 - Bandai Namco Filmworks Industry Panel

This panel started with a quick introduction of what Bandai Namco Filmworks is, and what parts it is composed of. Then guests Hisayuki Tabata and Toshikazu Naka came to the stage to introduce themselves and be there to explain details about the projects they were personally involved in throughout the panel.

The first project they showed was Ikizulive. They played a portion of the Dou Da Doing MV and then went to a slide with basic information about the franchise. Most notably, this slide contained a never before seen localized logo for Ikizulive (the image in the post was my image that I posted on the Ikizulive Discord server and this subreddit’s Discord server before it ended up here). During this segment, Tabata said that he worked on making the silhouettes of the characters as simple as possible to make the characters recognizable. He said that he always wanted to design his own characters, so working on this project is an honor for him. He said that he designed the characters in a way to make you fall in love with all of them instantly.

After this, panel showed off a handful of recently released or upcoming Bandai Namco Filmworks projects. From what I could remember, this included MAO, That Time I Was Reincarnated as a Slime, and the new Gundam movie.

At one point, a subtitled trailer for the new Hasunosora Bloom Garden Party movie was shown. The information slide did not feature a localized logo (despite an English Hasunosora logo existing on a gachapon machine for a while now), but the commentator for the panel did say they “hope [they] can bring this to the US”. I’d guess this would mean a release on Crunchyroll at some point, but fingers crossed it could be something more.

Hisayuki Tabata and Naka Toshikazu Autograph Session

During the convention, both of Bandai’s production staff guests had a signing session. Unfortunately, they did not allow personal items to be signed, but an “art postcard to be provided by Bandai Namco Filmworks” would be signed by them. I was guessing this would be a postcard showcasing multiple Bandai Namco Filmworks properties, but decided to go because I wanted to thank Tabata for his hard work on Ikizulive. I was quite surprised and extremely delighted to walk in and see that they were signing Ikizulive postcards. These postcards feature the newly revealed localized Ikizulive logo and the Anime Cental logo on it. I guess you could say this is the first piece of localized Ikizulive merchandise.

Both Tabata and Toshikazu were pleasant to talk to. Not a lot of people attended the signing, so things were pretty laid back and no one was rushed. The assistant for the signing even allowed attendees to get a picture with them. I mentioned I have been a Love Live fan for nearly ten years now and they asked if I had ever made it to one of their concerts yet. I said I was hoping to make it to the 15th anniversary concert and they sounded quite pleased. A friend of mine was cosplaying Yukuri at the time and Tabata pulled out his phone and asked if he was able to take a picture of her. He asked for multiple poses and took a handful of photos. I walked out of the signing quite happy to have a newly acquired piece of Love Live merch. It’s my first autograph from a member of production staff, and I currently have it hanging on the wall alongside my seiyuu signed merch.

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway Screening + Guest Panel

Before this panel started, Bandai Namco Filmworks staff were handing out the leftover Ikizulive postcards from the signing session from the day before. After hearing about this from a friend, I ran over to the panel to grab a blank one for myself, but they ran out. A friend and I decided we would come back towards the end of the panel and take any cards left behind by panel attendees. We asked a couple attendees who didn‘t seem to be interested in Love Live if we could have their card, and even checked the trash cans near the panel room to save any postcards from being thrown away. We were successful in grabbing a few from attendees and the nearby trash bins and were able to get a blank one for ourselves and gave the extras we had to some close friends of ours who couldn’t make it to the convention.

Unfortunately, we were not able to get that many, so I do not have any more to give out to anyone on the subreddit. I tried my best to get as many as I could to give them away to other members of the community. If you know someone who went to Anime Central and went to this Gundam Hathaway movie screening, ask them if they still have the postcard. It may actually be one of the rarest pieces of official Ikizulive merch now.

I caught some of Tabata’s comments at the end of the panel and one I thought was interesting was his explanation on the differences between American and Japanese audiences. He noted how American audiences get more visibly excited while Japanese audiences are more subdued. He said it really moved him seeing people so excited by something he was personally involved in making. I hope my excitement for Ikizulive got to him.

Conclusion

Overall, these events were extremely interesting to attend and I wish it was more well advertised that Ikizulive would be so heavily featured. I feel like more Love Live fans would’ve shown up if they did. I joked to some friends that there was a hidden Love Live side quest among all of the Idolm@ster events happening there.

They never explicitly said no photos were allowed, and a friend of mine was able to take a handful of pictures and short video clips of the two panels. I have included links to them below so you can view the preproduction artwork and listen to some of Tabata’s comments.

Thank you for reading! It’s an honor to be able to present this news to the community. I wanted to make sure these events would not be forgotten. Especially since I believe these panels featured information all fans would be interested in hearing. Thank you to Hoshino from Idol Story for helping me break the story on Twitter, and thank you to my friend, Umi Kirby, for getting these images and video clips. I’d also like to say thank you to Tabata and Toshikazu for hosting such interesting panels and giving Ikizulive a spotlight in the west.

Panel 1 Imgur Album

Panel 2 Imgur Album

Panel 1 Clip Playlist

Panel 2 Clip Playlist

Just for fun, some memes I made about the situation since the Idolm@ster events at the convention were a bit hectic at times.