r/anime • u/Unlucky-Fold-5684 • 1h ago
Misc. I was invited to host a manga and anime workshop at a school
Some of you might remember my previous post where my mom gave brief ratings to the anime we watched together. There, I mentioned that she works as a school teacher. Seeing how incredibly popular anime and manga are among her students right now, she got the idea to organize a themed event for them and asked me to host it. I agreed and ran the workshop in the persona of a poor, exhausted teacher with a lollipop in his mouth.
There was a lot of material, and I tried to give them a real foundation. We started with the origins, talking about Osamu Tezuka as the father of the industry, and discussed why this medium has become such a massive phenomenon. I broke down the genres and age demographics in detail, and then we dove into the technical side. We went through all the stages of manga creation, from storyboarding to inking, and broke down the anime pipeline: animation, coloring, and compositing.
I dedicated a separate segment to the harsh realities of working in magazines and the different types of sakuga. As a visual example of sakuga, I showed them an action clip from the Star Wars: Visions anthology (the "Black" episode). To keep it from being just dry theory, I brought some props: an original Japanese Weekly Shonen Jump, officially licensed manga published in our country, and old bootleg copies from before official translations existed, so they could flip through and compare everything themselves.
At the end, I gave the kids a creative assignment for the month: draw their own 1-2 page manga. As motivation, I promised to buy the winner any manga of their choice. The students absolutely loved the event, so we will probably hold more meetings like this in the future. Going forward, I plan to dedicate the workshops exclusively to creating original manga, so the kids can prepare full-fledged works and submit them to real magazine contests.
