Student Specifications for the Anime Training Program

1st edition: 10-June-2025
latest update: 17-February-2026

PROGRAM STRUCTURE

What

The Animation Training Program is a continuous, online mentorship with professional instructor corrections and guidance that takes a practical look at the major topics every animator needs to know in depth to become a professional inside the anime industry.

Why

Nowadays, there are many courses and tutorials on how to become an anime animator, that, however good, focus only on passive learning:

In many cases, the courses focus only on technical elements such as Japanese nomenclature or technical procedures and;
The course is impersonal, i.e,. there is no one to follow up or review the projects.

Our goal is to remodel this reality and create a program that encourages the students to actively engage in their learning process.

Training Format

The top-level an animator can reach in the Japanese pipeline is “Layout” (LO), which requires not just classic character animation skills but a broader understanding of everything on frame: character emotions, animated visual effects, volumes, and their light/shadows, understanding the storyboard and visual storytelling, basics of environment art, etc.

To help artists gradually approach that final level, we've created a cyclical program that covers the four main areas (subjects) of focus for animators: drawing, painting, animation, and storyboarding. The first cycle deals with the basic or most fundamental aspects of the four main areas. The second advances to more artistic and complex elements, and finally, the third cycle involves practicing the technical components necessary to master anime, such as workflow and pipeline.

Each cycle lasts one month (4 assignments). So, in the first month, you'll study drawing with a focus on the basic and fundamental elements. In the second month, you'll study painting, focusing on the fundamentals, and so on. When the second rotation begins, in the fifth month, the focus for the 4 major areas changes to artistic and complex aspects. In the third rotation, from the 9th month onwards, the focus shifts to more technical concepts. The benefit of this rotation-based methodology is that students can study continuously until they feel satisfied with that area. Let's say a student has done the program for 1 year and wants to focus more on the technical aspects. They could enroll in just that module and study that specific area again, gaining a deeper understanding of nuances that they might have missed the first time around due to a lack of experience.

When the student completes the training program and achieves a satisfactory performance, they receive a certificate of completion, which demonstrates that they can create animations in the anime style and also join a project working with this language.

Inverted lesson: Just like in a Japanese animation studio, the student receives an assignment with clear instructions and resources. Afterwards, the supervisor (in this case, the program instructors) review your work and sends you notes on how to correct it and push your skills further. Self-learning, with instructor corrections.

Language: English

Instructors

Mar Exposito / Mar Kantoku (Director)
She holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication from Barcelona. In 2014, she moved to Japan and passed the JLPT N2. She later graduated with distinction from the 2D Animation department at Tokyo Design Academy, earning both honors and the Presidential Award for her work.

Since 2020, Mar has been running her Tokyo-based studio, leading a remote team creating anime-style videos for musicians, brands, and filmmakers worldwide. Her expertise lies in high-emotion character animation, storyboarding, and team management, bringing heartfelt storytelling and strong visual direction to every project.

Pedro Marcelino / Pedro Sakuga kantoku (Animation Director)

He's a Brazilian animator who has been working with animation and visual storytelling for more than 15 years. His experience includes 5 feature films, short films, animation for games, TV series, etc. Pedro started his journey with animation in 2009, and before that, built up a good experience as an illustrator and comic artist. After working for 10 years in the animation industry for Western productions, he decided to take a chance and venture into the anime industry. Since then, he’s been working as a director, animation director, and animator for anime productions.

From 2021 to 2024 Pedro had an important role working as head of animation and leading the first anime studio in Brazil - 555 comic. On this project, he was the director of the web animated series CRC Luna and Ame Kicks, both available on TikTok. Another important highlight of his career was the book Nausicaa and Bakhtin, in which he analysed the work Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa by Hayao Miyazaki from the perspective of the philosophy of Bakhtin's circle.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE

Weekly Timeline Example

1) The student receives a weekly assignment document. It explains exactly what they need to create and deliver, and includes resources to help them complete it.

2) When the student is ready, they submit the assignment piece(s) to the shared Drive folder.

Submitting weekly is ideal, but they can go slower;

However, there is a “maximum enrollment period”: To keep access organized, students cannot stay on the same assignment for more than 12 months. In other words, you cannot stay indefinitely take more than 2 years to complete the program that is designed to take 1 year. For example, if an assignment is from "month 3" and now it is "month 15" without submission, the program ends for that student. They will lose the right of accessing to ATP-only content, including Discord channels and assignment files.

To rejoin and access content again, students can pay 20% more for each pending month, which renews access for another 12 months.

3) Within about a week of the student’s submission, their instructor sends them offline corrections. These can be written notes, draw-overs, video recordings, or whichever format is clearest so they understand what could be improved.

Depending on their billing option, they may also receive a full redraw of one of the assignments as a bonus.

Notes:

Each month (or subject) contains 4 assignments total
Students should allocate 3~6 hours on average to complete each assignment.
Even if they have paid for multiple months upfront, assignments are made accessible to students at a monthly pace.
Students can take longer than a month to complete them if needed.
If a student delivers more than one assignment at once, instructors still plan on one correction per active student per week, matching their capacity as industry professionals. They may review additional submissions faster, but this is not guaranteed. Weekly submissions give the smoothest experience.

Drawovers

If your plan includes drawovers:

The main instructor will monitor your corrections and suggest the best assignment (especially if you're struggling or if you are interested in a specific subject), or you can request one directly.
Drawovers take an average of 2 weeks after the assignment to be checked is decided.
At the end of the program (or your purchased months), if you haven't used a drawover, the instructor will ask if you'd like to apply it to a previous assignment.

Additional Private Meetings

A meeting date needs to be decided with the main instructors 5 weekdays before the meeting.
Mar or a program admin will prepare and send your Wise invoice within 48 weekday hours.
Pay 24 hours prior to the meeting for it to proceed.

Breaks and Holidays

Student AND instructor holiday period:
-2026 April 27th to May 3rd (1 week)
-2026 August 10th-16th (1 week)
-2026 December 21st to Jan 3rd (2 weeks)

So, 4 weeks of break total.

Holidays pause all activities (corrections, meetings, deliverables), but the total program length (e.g., purchased months) remains fixed.

Paused time is effectively "frozen," so students and instructors complete the same amount of content within the original timeline, just shifted around the breaks.

Pricing

The program is set at 29,000 JPY monthly per student.

Additionally, students can request extra Private Meetings (“Additional Private Meeting”) with the instructors at 8,000 JPY per 45 minutes.

ENROLLMENT

Application Process

Step 1) The applicant fills in all required information in the form.

Step 2) One instructor reviews the portfolios and application content, decides if the applicant has passed the screening, and notifies the other. That other instructor reviews applicants to give final approval.

This step includes a recommendation on whether a student is selecting the right cycle based on their goals.

Step 3) When the applicant has been screened, ATP’s production assistant emails them to say whether they were accepted.

If accepted, Maru Exposito will prepare a WISE Payment link so the applicant can pay for the relevant ATP cycle(s). Their slot will be held for 7 days. Applicants lose priority if the payment does not arrive by that date.

Step 4) After the payment's arrival is confirmed by the Studio, the student receives the Discord server invitation (if they’re not on the ME Community on Discord already). The ATP-students-only area contains peer and instructor chats. That access opens only after completing enrollment and when your chosen start month begins.

Note: Students can start at the beginning of any month, booking a start date as early as 6 months in advance. You could, for example, begin in April and move slowly, or reserve a start in May or June.

Grading System

All students will be graded after completing three full cycles (12 months) and, if they are successful in meeting the minimum requirements, will receive a PDF to certify their program achievements. If students enroll in only one subject or cycle, they will receive a specific certificate for that cycle and subject.

Evaluation process

The focus of our program is to train artists so that they can work in the Japanese animation industry and/or create their own projects in the language of Japanese animation. As such, the assessment method will be rigorous and detailed to fulfill this objective. Everyone who works as a professional animator knows that artists need to be highly developed and technically proficient, but they also need to be responsible, open to criticism, and highly organised. To encourage this, in addition to specific technical guidance, soft skills will also be evaluated.

Therefore, the final grade will have two parts:

Part 1 - Soft skills
Intrapersonal skills such as the ability to communicate well, organization, openness to feedback, interpretative skills, capacity to work in a group, etc.

Part 2 - Hard skills
Specific skills for animators, such as drawing skills, colour-painting skills, the ability to tell stories with images (storyboards), and the ability to bring drawings to life (animation).

PROGRAM CONTENT

3 cycle's meaning
Basics/fundamentals
Intermediate/advanced
Technical

Cycles order
Drawing
Painting
Storyboard
Animation

Cycle 01

Drawing - Cycle 01
1. Structure of the human body vs anatomy of the human body
2. Head structure in perspective/Eyes - anime style
3. Realistic hands/Realistic feet
4. Hair - anime style

Painting - Cycle 01
1. Color theory and digital painting variables
2. Color palette
3. Realistic painting
4. Expressive painting

Animation - Cycle 01
1. Animation principles part 01 - Settings
2. Animation principles part 02 - Design
3. Animation principles part 03 - Movement
4. Extra principles

Storyboard - Cycle 01
1. Sequential art
2. Visual storytelling
3. Turning a video into a storyboard
4. Turning a storyboard into a video

Cycle 02

Drawing - Cycle 02
1. Draping of clothes (dresses, loose shirts, skirts, hoodies, etc)
2. Shadow - anime style
3. Forced perspective with foreshortening
4. Realistic Background - anime style

Painting - Cycle 02
1. Painting of organic/natural objects - part 01
2. Painting of organic/natural objects - part 02
3. Painting of non-organic objects - part 01
4. Painting of non-organic objects - part 02

Animation - Cycle 02
1. Hair animation
2. Wide clothing animation
3. Effects animation
4. Camera animation

Storyboard - Cycle 02
1. Thumbnails
2. Beat board
3. Visual narrative typology
4. Finishing styles and levels

Cycle 03

Drawing - Cycle 03
1. Character sheet
2. Expression/posing sheet
3. Prop sheet
4. Background board

Painting - Cycle 03
1. Style frame painting
2. Board painting
3. Character Design painting
4. Color script painting

Animation - Cycle 03
1. Layout
2. Genga
3. Douga
4. Shiage

Storyboard - Cycle 03
1. Ekonte - part 01
2. Ekonte - part 02
3. Animatic from Ekonte - part 01
4. Animatic from Ekonte - part 02

Program Changes and Cancellations

1- This schedule may change if students struggle or are interested in a slightly different direction, or for similar reasons. If changes are significant, we will attempt to notify students in advance.

2- Meetings with instructors and assignment corrections will be adapted around holiday breaks when applicable.

3- If Maru Exposito cancels the program due to unforeseen circumstances, the student’s payment will be refunded for the underperformed part of the program.

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