….
[Similar Time]
The whiteboard in Crunchyroll Studio 4B hadn't been erased in eleven days.
It was a mess, timelines crossed out and redrawn over themselves, character model sheets pinned over budget projections, sticky notes layered three deep in some corners.
And right in the center, circled in red marker that had bled through to the wall behind it, two words:
[DEATH NOTE]
[SOLO LEVELING]
That handwriting belonged to - Kun Gao - the CEO of Crunchyroll after Regal's acquisition.
….
Ten months ago, Kun Gao had been sitting three floors below this office, running schedules, managing post-production pipelines all by himself without knowing whether his vision had any scope.
Then Regal acquired the majority stake in Crunchyroll, not a merger, or a partnership, an acquisition - the sort that rearranges an entire industry's seating chart overnight.
Old leadership cleared out, new structure moved in, and when it came time to pick someone to run the operation, Regal didn't import a CEO from some streaming conglomerate.
He chose to stay and trust Kun Gao.
At the same point, two major projects entered the picture - Regal's own creations.
A combined production budget of $78.4 million.
A total workforce that would eventually swell to 413 people across four countries, and a timeline that everyone said was impossible.
Now, ten months deep, Kun stood at the window of the thirty-second floor watching the city sharpen under a pale morning sky.
Behind him, the room was already filling up.
….
The [Death Note] production carried a budget of $31.6 million, supported by a core staff of 164, with season one spanning 24 episodes.
Honestly, even though it was Kim himself who pushed Regal, it was not an appropriate decision to invest in a single season show - choosing multi season shows with an already more pivotal fanbase should have been their decision.
But Regal was from the start clear that he didn't want a money printing studio, and wished to build a brand no other studio has.
And at the same time they couldn't completely ignore the major section. So they decided to go with shows:
[Death Note], and [Solo Leveling]
…and [Death Note] was meant to be the easier one to produce among them.
Regal had already made the live-action film - a dark, cerebral thriller that divided audiences clean down the middle.
It was not only critics who praised the writing, audiences also wanted more of it.
But a movie is a cage, two hours, maybe two and a half.
And the original vision for [Death Note] had never fit inside that cage.
The bound script, uncut document, ran three hundred and twelve pages.
It had everything, full psychological profiles, and deleted confrontations between Light and L.
An entire third-act subplot involving a secondary Kira that got gutted for runtime.
Internal monologues that ran for pages, a philosophical architecture that treated the [Death Note] less as a supernatural weapon and more as a moral event horizon.
For the film, all of that had been carved down to one hundred and twenty pages.
Nearly two-thirds of the story - gone.
But the concept art and storyboards were always present.
The character designs that had been personally overseen down to obsessive detail, the way Light's eyes were meant to gradually lose warmth across the story, the specific quality of shadow across L's face during certain scenes…
When Kun's team opened the project folder for the first time, it wasn't an empty slate but a revival already taking shape, with the framework and surface in place, leaving them with the task of bringing it to life.
….
The first three months were pure excavation.
A writers' room of nine people, four series writers, two script editors, one continuity supervisor, and two consultants who had worked on the original film - locked themselves in a windowless conference room for six weeks.
Their job: comb the full 312-page script page by page, flagging every scene, subplot, and character beat that hadn't survived the film's edit.
They pulled out 192 pages of unused material.
Light's relationship with his sister, reduced to a footnote in the film, had six fully written scenes across the original script.
Each one was designed to work as a mirror, showing Light not as a villain descending into darkness but as a brother making a series of choices that slowly dismantle his own humanity.
L's backstory.
Ryuk's philosophy.
The psychological chess match stretched across dozens of scenes instead of compressed into a handful.
Breaking that material into episodes took another four weeks.
The writers produced three complete structural drafts before settling on a 24-episode first season, each episode running 23 minutes of content plus opening and ending sequences. The pacing document alone, a spreadsheet mapping emotional intensity, plot progression, and character focus across all 24 episodes - ran to 47 pages.
Total script development cost: $1.2 million.
….
Anime production doesn't begin with animation - it begins in pre-production, where ambition is either structured into a plan or falls apart.
The first step was storyboarding - twelve artists, working in rotating pairs across three to four episodes each, converted finalized scripts into visual sequences, defining camera angles, shot composition, and pacing.
Each episode required 280–340 panels, with [Death Note] averaging 316 due to its slower, precision-heavy rhythm, totaling around 7,584 storyboard drawings across 24 episodes before animation even began.
…and a total of six designers spent eight weeks adapting film concept art into animation-ready forms, resolving challenges in proportion and expression that don't directly translate from live-action to illustration.
Finally the layout & background Art with eight artists developed environments for all key locations, paired with evolving lighting palettes that gradually shifted from warm tones to darker hues. Across 24 episodes, this resulted in roughly 1,440 background paintings, about 60 per episode.
This placed the total background art budget at $2.3 million, making it one of the largest pre-production expenses for [Death Note].
….
Animation production is where the money lives.
At peak, 94 staff handled the pipeline, 16 key animators, 31 in-betweeners, 12 clean-up artists, 8 colorists, 14 compositors, and 13 in support roles.
Each episode took five to six weeks from key animation to final composite, but production overlapped, with four to five episodes in different stages at any given time. That overlap kept the schedule alive, and left Kun sleeping four hours a night.
Each episode also required around 3,800 - 4,200 key drawings, unusually high for a dialogue-heavy series, because performance detail mattered. A single four-minute scene between Light and L could demand over 600 key drawings, capturing subtle shifts, eyes, fingers, posture, that carried the tension beyond dialogue.
With in-betweens, total drawings reached roughly 8,500 per episode, placing [Death Note] above industry norms for high-end productions.
At month four, animatics for three episodes were complete.
In month five, voice casting began with 32 actors auditioning for Light over two weeks.
And in month six, the first finished scene, Light opening the Death Note as Ryuk's laughter crept in, was screened internally.
No one spoke afterward.
….
The budget gap tells the story before anything else does.
[Solo Leveling] cost $15.2 million more than [Death Note], not because of length, but because it was built as an action spectacle, demanding heavier animation, compositing, and rendering.
It was also Regal's starting point: a web novel written at twenty-three that grew into a phenomenon. Its comic adaptation, led by Gregor, exploded with 200 main chapters and striking visuals.
Now, in Studio 4B, Gregor worked as incharge under Kun to bring that world into motion.
….
Gregor grasped early what took the animation team weeks to fully accept: they weren't simply adapting a story, they were competing with the audience's imagination. Every reader had already envisioned each moment, and the production now had to surpass those internal versions, despite operating within real constraints.
That realization shaped their approach. Instead of trying to outdo imagination directly, they focused on what the comic couldn't show, the space between panels.
The fraction of a second before and after impact and unseen motion the reader instinctively fills in.
That became the guiding philosophy of Solo Leveling.
….
Unlike [Death Note], [Solo Leveling] required a visual identity built from scratch. A 22-member concept team spent nine weeks adapting the comic's high-contrast, static style into something fluid for animation.
They produced 34 character sheets with power-state variations, Jin-woo alone had six evolving designs, and built 19 dungeon concepts plus 8 real-world locations, resulting in about 2,340 background paintings across 26 episodes.
Creature design pushed further, with over 140 unique monsters and a modular system for Jinwoo's shadow army, allowing scale without losing distinct silhouettes. Igris alone went through eleven iterations before approval.
The animation team reflected that scale:
178 core staff, expanding to over 200 with freelancers, nearly double [Death Note]. This included dedicated VFX and CG units, handling abilities, particle effects, destruction, and large-scale scenes, supported by a library of reusable effects to manage workload.
Per episode, drawing counts ranged from 9,200 in dialogue-heavy segments to over 14,000 in action, with Episode 11 peaking at 16,400 drawings and costing around $1.78 million.
The Igris fight alone used 4,300 drawings, with a two-second sword-draw sequence taking weeks of work, an example of the production's precision at its highest level.
….
Kun enforced a strict rule in audio production:
–the two series could not share any personnel. Separate composers, sound designers, engineers, and studios - because each show operated on a completely different emotional language.
[Death Note] leaned on restraint. Its score, built around a small ensemble and electronics, used silence as a tool, long stretches without music, letting ambient sound and performance carry tension.
When music appeared, it was minimal: isolated motifs, subtle textures. The sound team created over 340 foley assets, including 27 variations of pen-on-paper to reflect Light's shifting state of mind.
[Solo Leveling] took the opposite approach.
A 62-piece orchestra, blended with electronic and traditional Korean elements, delivered scale and intensity, while still shaping quieter moments with precision.
Its sound design introduced a distinct audio identity for the shadow army, a layered, resonant signature that audiences could recognize and anticipate. The library exceeded 1,100 unique assets, driven by the demands of combat, creatures, and varied environments.
….
Running two productions at once settled over Crunchyroll Studio like a constant, unmoving pressure.
At peak, Kun oversaw 413 people spread across four studios in three countries, core work in the main facility, animation support in Seoul, background art from Tokyo, and CG from Vancouver.
In the past ten months [Death Note]'s first season was in final post-production, the last round of color grading and audio mastering was running this week.
Twenty-two of twenty-four episodes were fully locked. Episodes 23 and 24 were in final compositing, running six days behind the ideal schedule but still within the delivery window.
Quality control screenings were set for next week, a panel of twelve internal reviewers watching all 24 episodes across three days, flagging anything from color inconsistencies to audio sync issues to animation frames that didn't meet standard.
[Solo Leveling] was deeper in the pipeline, with eighteen of twenty-six episodes in post-production, six in active animation, and two late-season entries still in storyboard revisions due to their heavy action demands, while Gregor spent three to four hours every Thursday reviewing key frames, comic panels on one screen, animation frames on the other.
The CG team in Vancouver was on their third consecutive weekend of overtime, integrating the final dungeon environment for the season's climactic raid sequence. The Seoul outsource team had just delivered a batch of 1,400 in-between frames, four days ahead of schedule - the first time anything had come in early since month three.
Behind him, the room was filling up.
Forty-seven people filtering in for the morning stand-up, the core production team, the people who had been in this room since the beginning.
Kun grabbed the red marker from the whiteboard ledge and drew a line under both titles.
"Alright." he said to the room. "Morning check-in, then leads from both teams in the review room by nine. Twenty-two locked episodes on one show, eighteen on the other. We are in the last mile and I don't want to find out we have been running the wrong direction. Let's go."
Someone near the back, one of the junior animators who had been there since month one, watched this room go from forty-three people to four hundred and thirteen and back down to the core, muttering to the person beside her: "He says 'last mile' every week."
"Yeah." her colleague whispered back. "But look at the board. I think this time he might actually be right."
….
.
[To be continued…]
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