The Garden of Words was created using a combination of hand drawn animation , rotoscoping and CGI, with the latter facilitating the realistic appearance of the film’s rain sequences. The director of the film, Shinkai made half of the film’s backgrounds by using his photographs as a base and then drawing over the top with Adobe Photoshop, while the other half were fictional settings created with traditional animation and computer graphics. For the rainy scenes at the park, the color palette was toned down, and pale green shading was used to match the gloomy, rainy weather, thereby increasing the detail and defining the characters. Matching the tones to the background and lighting helped highlight the characters’ faces. A novel coloring method was chosen from other coloring methods following careful testing. The method involved integrating the coloring for each character with the background, a “new innovation of sorts” that mimics the refraction of light on the skin as seen in nature. This was accomplished by coloring the outline of the character, including the lines drawn for the separation of lit and shadowed surfaces, and then incorporating the background color onto the surface.
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