Interview with Tomohiko Ito and Shingo Adachi of Sword Art Online

First Published: September 9th, 2016 on fightingfornippon.com

As you might remember a few months back I was really excited to meet Tomohiko Ito at Madman Anime Festival this year, and despite some hiccups, I got to do just that! After the jump is a full 15 minute interview with Sword Art Online, and Erased director Tomohiko Ito, and the Character Designer for Sword Art Online and Working!, Shingo Adachi!

When starting up production on something like Sword Art Online or Silver Spoon, what’s the process you have to go through?

Ito — First of all, the producer brings us the project and says “Let’s do this”. And from there they choose who’s going to be the director and how’s going to be the cast and it’s kind of like flows from there.

When the director is chosen, as it goes further along, how do you choose key animators and episode directors?

Ito — When the director is chosen, you’ve got the producer and the production, they all have a discussion and they’ll all talk about things like, “Oh yeah so we have money so we can bring people in”, or “We don’t have money, so we can’t bring that many people in”. So based on the limited — what we have on hand — the main staff will be always discussed and chosen from there.

From there, do you prefer working will people you’ve worked with in the past, how do you contact them, or do you have an in-house staff you work with?

Ito — I don’t know that many animators myself, so that’s more for the production side of the series, but I personally do prefer calling people I do know, and I’ll contact them, just because they know what I like, they know what I want.

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