Real Life Locations

Tomoyuki Aoki said:
We went location hunting with the staff members in a Spanish town called Cuenca, and took a number of research photos there. While I used the real town as my basis, many of the building interiors were fabricated. The Windmill doesn’t exist in the real town, either. And while the exterior of the Clocktower Fortress is modeled after the Parador (a Spanish state-run hotel), the interior spaces such as the dining hall and the girls’ rooms were constructed to have the “appropriate feel.” Achieving that feel is my job.

I took many different approaches in order to create “the culture of Seize,” which combines various cultures – including Japan’s – within the backdrop of Cuenca, Spain.

For example, tile-decorated spaces like The Windmill’s bathing room came from my memory of Mexican architecture. It’s one of the many architectural memories that I have of various cultures that I’m always studying in my own way. My architectural memories come from images that I don’t remember clearly; often from old photographs that I saw long ago. Also, while I was researching European architecture, I found that the decorative culture of Portugal fit in nicely with Seize’s culture as well.

The frequent use of tile decoration on this show had several effects. For one, it functioned as a common element between all of the locations that appear, such as the Clocktower Fortress, the glass studio in episode 4, and The Windmill. Unlike the scenery in a standard school anime, scenes of a foreign world don’t look very familiar, so having that special “something” that sticks in the audience’s memory lends the show a sense of reality. That’s the conclusion I came to in my search for a way to achieve, within the confines of a TV series, an architectural atmosphere that differs from that of Japan, England or America.

The location hunting we did in Cuenca yielded immeasurable results in depicting scenes both in the town and out in the wilderness. It gave us enough information and layout material for more than half a season’s worth of episodes. Such was the fruit of actually experiencing a location hunting excursion.

Furthermore, that common memory among the main staff facilitated smoother communication for us at the production studio. The art boards drawn by Mr. Kai, the art director, were full of charming colors. And based on those, Ms. Usui and the capable crew at Studio Easter produced fantastic backgrounds full of atmospheric light and shadows. I felt truly happy about that.

When I saw the completed first episode, there was a sense of reality to it, as though Kanata and the others really were living in the town of Seize. And I thought it fully achieved that “appropriate feel,” as though The Windmill and Clocktower Fortress really existed in the town of Cuenca. I think it turned out to be a brilliant, harmonic blend of the visual “sound” produced by all of the staff members.