Working on Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness

This is a short summary of my experience working for a year in Seoul, South Korea on the Annie Award nominated TV series Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness? What have I learned? Well, I think the more appropriate question would be "Where to begin?".

Well first, I'll brief you on who I am and what I've worked on so far, so you can read this in perspective.

My name is David Jang and I graduated from the Academy of Art University in Animation & Visual Effects in 2007. I've also learned from Animation Mentor(2008) and GOBELINS, l'école de l'image(2010) in advanced character animation. You might say I am an Otaku when it comes to animation.

My professional working background has a humble beginning that dates back to 2004 when I did 2D animation for a TV show intro back in San Francisco. Since then, I have worked in Cinematic Game Teasers(in California) and Feature Film(in France). 

This was my first time working on a TV series(in Korea). I didn't know what to expect, but looking back I am glad I made the choice. It wasn't an easy road for sure. Working in Korea is very different from working elsewhere. It has it's own sets of obstacles, trials and tribulations to endure. 

Part of the reason why I made this blog was to share and hopefully give insight to and with people related in my field and that means sharing the good and the bad. However, I will always try to be careful about what I say and try to stay in perspective and keep a level head about it.

You will work till you die. This is not something new in the working cultures of South Korea. There is a reason why South Korea is one of the fastest economically developing countries amongst the OECD. People here work like nobodies business. After going through a financial crisis in 1997~98 and receiving bailout from the IMF organization, South Koreans have been working like judgement day was right around the corner and how much they worked would decide whether they would go to heaven or hell. Working in an animation studio was no different. On average I finished 2 minutes worth of animation every three months from layout to polished stage. That means we do around 40 secs worth of animation on a monthly basis. Numbers don't lie. Average working hours were from 10 a.m. ~10 p.m. And some Saturdays or Sundays a month, I would come out to work in order to meet deadlines. Now here's the thing I learned about TV series, is that you have a studio team deadline(not a deadline your supervisor makes for you) almost every month. Which means, crunch time was a habitual state of mind while I was working here. The stress is enormous. Physically and mentally. The hardest thing for me, since I am an outgoing person who values exercise and hobbies and extra-curricular activities(basically meaning having a life), was that I couldn't do any of this. It was realistically impossible. Now, some people could argue that it's just me and other people can survive just fine and that can also be true. Not all of the workers were stressing like I did. Some of them seemed to be living just fine and adapting well to this system. So, it's up to you to decide how to take this. I'm just giving you my perspective on it. 

The culture is different. Koreans tend to be very serious when it comes to work. There is almost no talking during working hours inside the studio and sometimes you can just feel the tensions and stress in the air. For me this is a bit weird. I mean I can understand this type of working culture if I were a doctor or a lawyer, but since I am an animator and I worked in animation studios, generally my point of view when it comes to working environments is the less stress, the better and the more fun and casual it is, the less pressure animators feel as artists and that is very important when your job asks of you to make creative results on a daily basis. A quick example of that would be when I was working in France, the first thing most people did when we got to work in the morning after a quick espresso was exchange greetings with everybody, no I'm not kidding, I mean literally everybody(!) in the studio and talk a bit. It was a bit foreign to me at first, but the small talk, cracking jokes and just starting the day in a peaceful and casual manner helped tremendously to relieve stress and pressure when deadlines were approaching. The atmosphere was casual and fun with many opportunities to get to know one another even in different departments, by contrast in Korea there are people that have never talked to each other even in the same cubicle. The most important thing I got from this was that the culture of the studio has direct connections to the quality of the workers atmosphere.

Koreans are awesome. You might be going "Huh?", since I just wrote that Koreans tend to be very serious at work. Well, one of the hardest things I've found is to say goodbye to a group of Koreans you've been with or worked with for a relatively long period of time. (I bet there are a lot of people agreeing with me just now, but individual experiences may vary.) The most distinguishing positive characteristic of a Korean, in my opinion, is "Jung". Jung is a Korean word used to express the strong connections Koreans have and give to one another. In english there is no word for it. The closest you could say would be something like, loyalty or brotherhood. But, Koreans have "jung" whatever the sex or race. If you work with them for a long time, they will give you "jung". And it makes it soooo hard for you to say goodbye. This is obviously a cultural thing. And it always results in bitter-sweet goodbyes. By contrast, my French friends had no problems saying goodbye to me and vise versa. lol~ (I'm not saying one is better than the other, it's just culture) 

In terms of my working skills, 

Dialog - I learned many tips and tricks about animating dialog. This is truly one of the biggest aspects I advanced in while working on Kung Fu Panda. Part of this was because they have such fantastic rigs here that it's almost impossible to do a bad dialog. But, the stuff that I learned or was rather ingrained in me was how to time the audio and your animations keys in-sync and when and how to give accentuation and punctuality to your characters moving lips and jaw. And by doing sooooo much animation with dialog in it, it was virtually impossible to not advance. I remember before working here how scared I was of doing lipsyncs and how daunting it was when I got my first dialog scene with Shifu in it. But, the simple truth is all you have to do is a lot of it and you'll get the hang of it quite fast. Of course, I am no where near perfect(in fact, I'll bet I'll look back ten years from now and be really embarrassed. lol) and I've only begun to surface the possibilities in animating lipsync, but at least now I am not afraid of it and I can go into a shot in a calm manner with pre-planned intentions and goals and I think that's something worth mentioning.

Complex Action Sequences - Before I worked on Kung Fu Panda, the most complex shot I've ever animated was a 3 second shot with flying vultures and some characters riding on top of them. But this was already an animation in secondary animating phase that had a very simple path of action from point A to point B and all I had to do was animate some wings flapping and characters with moving holds. But in Kung Fu Panda for example, I had to animate a fight sequence with Po strapped in an electric table suspended 100 ft in the air with Tigress attacking an evil character by scissor kicking and doing break dancing moves on top of Po's belly while the table was reacting to the weight and force distribution of the fighting going on as the camera was swiveling around the table in a climactic attitude. It was really cool and really fun to animate, but with the deadlines and workloads I had, it was a miracle I didn't rip my head off and throw it out the window. For about a year I worked on shots from crowd animations spanning from 3~15 with main characters in them to Furious Five fight sequences that would make Wong Fei-hung look like a pussy. (No offense to Wong Fei-hung, I am a huge fan) It was a hard time to endure, but I could definitely feel my animating chops going up.

Attention to Detail - I think the upside of working in such an extreme environment is that your body and your mind goes into survival mode and enhances your senses even more than you could imagine. My head ached a lot and my eyesight had decreased dramatically, but my attention to detail has exceeded a lot more than I anticipated. Like, attention to cloth animation, prop animation, hairs and eyes and facial detail, etc. This experience has really opened my eyes to many different types of movements depending on the weight and texture of it. 

Working Speed - Needless to say, in order to meet deadlines I had to work fast. I don't necessarily think this is a good thing, since working fast meant I had to look past other important stages of animating like pre-planning your shots and thumb-nailing them for clearer stronger poses(and yes, I realize this might sound like an excuse and that you should always plan-out your shots, but trust me. Work in Korea for a year and you'll know what I mean), but I definitely upped my speed in getting shots done in a swifter, more efficient manner. 

Layout & Camera Movements - Because we worked off of animatics made from Nickelodeon back in the states, and we as animators started from blank scenes in Maya, we had to place all the sets and props and cameras and characters on there and start from scratch, since there weren't any layout & pre-vis artists. This meant we had to do all the layouts ourselves too. So, now I have a much bigger appreciation and respect for layout artists. It literally makes or breaks a scene how well or horribly you place your cameras and make them move. I had to find out the hard way. lol~ But, I learned how camera compositions and movement have a direct connection to showing scene atmosphere and story beats. Also, I was surprised that even though this was CG, all the camera movements were still very much based on movements made in real-life. For example, when I did a shot with Tigress fighting a small evil villain who scurried around attacking and defending from Tigress, the camera movement needed to be jumpy causing almost a horror movie like atmosphere with a lot of shakes and tilts and pan ins and outs. Without much knowledge or experience on camera movement, I exaggerated the movements a lot abusing the capabilities of CG cameras. Later, animation director InHo called me and told me to delete all the unnecessary rotations and keep it simple. "Just use translates (replicating dollying actions) and focal zoom ins and outs, but keep it minimal. Try to think as if you are holding a camera and moving it around. The audience has to know and understand what's going on at the same time feel like there is chaos." I was stunned at the level of detail that layout stages require. 

In the end, one word summons up my experience on working on Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness. I don't have to say it, right? ^^