Met a Japanese artist online through college portal thought I share...

So what do you do for a living?

-I’m an anime colorist for a popular anime studio

That’s pretty neat, so what do you actually do?

-I copy and paste color palettes that the art director sends me.

Copy and paste, sorry not familiar more detail...

-Sure, when artists finish an episode, the colors haven’t been added. After a day or two I am sent every frame of the anime episode. The program I use to the right of the screen shows me the colors the art director wants to use. Every part of the frame is numbered. Like skin, clothes, sky... whatever is in that scene. So if brown is numbered 1 and the characters hair is 1, I copy and paste that color to his/her hair.

Wow, thats a lot of work...

- it’s not so bad I’m extremely efficient, it becomes second nature,

How many frames do you work with in a day?

-A thousand or more...

Holy... molly... Is the pay good?

-Yes, especially if you’re really fast.

Can you tell me the studio you work for?

-unfortunately I can’t...

Well I have lots of questions let’s catch up some other time, thank you.

This sounds like a task that's ripe for automation. But then this is also from the country that still has fax machines everywhere, so go figure...

there is a program that auto color for animation studio. No need to do each frame anymore.