Dezaki, illuminated

A useful tweet with some 2004 documentary screenshots explaining an analogue lighting technique:

Comment faisait Dezaki pour insérer ces fameux faisceaux de lumière qu'on retrouve dans toutes ces oeuvres ? ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/fdUzRR9WzI

— Julien Bouvard (@julienbouvard) December 15, 2020

[Something like: How did Dezaki manage to add these famous light beams which one finds in all his works? I don’t really have French, so don’t take that as an authoritative translation!]

I shall edit this into the post on analogue and digital techniques, but I felt it deserved a brief note of its own too. In my ignorance, I can’t tell from this whether the light was

1. added using this technique during initial photography
2. added by photographing the animation cels together and then photographing the light onto the film in a separate apparatus akin to that pictured above, with reduced exposure to make it a transparent layer ‘on top’ of the animation

Perhaps one of those seems absurd to an expert; perhaps neither holds true, and they used a third approach. As always, I welcome further details, leads, and suggestions.

We shouldn’t assume that photographers used only this type of light manipulation. I suspect the analogue photography period had many lighting tricks. Nor should we assume that this was limited only to the team gathered around Dezaki, though his use of it does stand out!