Understanding Anime Notations: さつま!（Satsuma）+ English Annotations

When learning how to create Japanese animation, one of the most important things to learn is how to communicate through notations. The director who draws storyboards and the animators who create the key frames need to know how to communicate their intent across various departments and individuals.

This is where the free-to-download seminal text, Satsuma! The Basics of Compositing for Animators (撮れ！～アニメーターのための撮影基礎知識～) comes in.

Satsuma is one of most important modern documents created for anime production and it's very famous among anime creators. It is not on the other hand, famous outside the realm of anime creators. I hope that this blog and the attached annotations will help increase the usage of the document for beginner and seasoned animators alike who are more recently joining the world of Japanese Animation. Knowing the contents of this document are essential as a starting point for people who want to make useful and smooth contributions to Japanese anime productions.

The editor, Junko Miyakwawa (宮川 純子)is a seasoned compositor and anime creator who's worked on productions such as Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood , Lupin III, Princess Mononoke and many more. In 2009 she held an in-house workshop at the studio she was working at and noticed a big gap between the film-era staff and the newer staff that came up in the digital era.

Being inspired by noticing this gap, she started the Satsuma community textbook project in the early 2010s in order to help standardize the way people are creating notations in the anime industry and at a time when studios were beginning to diverge their methods more and more amidst rapid digitalization.

Satsuma covers so many topics and is extremely dense with information from timesheet anatomy, to camera work, effects, and best practices, but the layout and format are quite difficult to follow and read. Since the Japanese text is overlaying images in many cases, it's almost impossible to copy and paste text into machine translation in order to get through the text as someone who can't read Japanese well.

I have a personal version of Satsuma that I use in my daily work as an anime creator. which I've gone through and added english annotations to every part of the document. This is so I can easily scrub through and read the text without needing to resort to google lens or having to very slowly read the Japanese. I reference this text regularly so it was necessary for me to do my work well as a director.

One of my past mentors, Yuu Aoki, told me when I asked what I should study if I want to become a director someday. Without flinching he said "You need to memorize Sastuma from cover to cover". Since then it's been a document that I keep very close at hand.

I know of some other translations moving around the internet, though I really didn't like how the original Japanese text was getting wiped out. I'm studying Japanese still and I want to see both the english and the Japanese. Until now I've been just using this in my own work, but I really thought others might find my annotations useful so I've decided to share them here on my blog. I was hesitant to share the document to anyone because it has a clear copyright notice at the bottom, but I found out a way that I can share the annotations without distributing the document itself!

The following link goes to a .fdf file which is a data file that contains all of the comments that I have made for the document. You can add the annotations in via the comments feature of Adobe Acrobat, though I'm sure there are other apps that can read the .fdf file.

First you need to download the official Satsuma text from the website here.
https://satuma.grupo.jp/free838189

The version that these annotations work for is only the version named: 撮ま！準備号_130628.pdf. If use any other version it's very likely the annotations you add later will be broken.

Then download the English Satsuma Annotations I've created here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pCmy3BZaXmtaVvFMd4YtCrtHUCeAmNQW/view?usp=sharing

Then open adobe acrobat, click all tools, Add Comments

In the comments window click the three dots in the top right. Then click import data file.

From there you can add the data file and you should see the document fully covered in highlights that you can hover over and get the english explanation of what the document is explaining while the original format is preserved.

I found that hovering over the relevant areas to get the translations is super convenient and easy to use and I hope that people can find this useful! I also encourage everyone to edit their own comments and add their own notes as well. Don't just use my comments as is, try to also engage further with the text if you can.

Note: In order to follow Japanese copyright law and abide by the copyright statement in the original document, please download a legal copy directly from the Satsuma website. Also if you are interested in sharing the document please also recommend to people to download from the website as well.

It's important that we drive traffic to the Satsuma website, so Miyakawa-san and the Satsuma team can get metrics about the growing popularity of the text, and maybe they will be motivated to make an updated version. The last version was updated in 2013.