My 2012 Character Animation Demo Reel

Young Soo Jang Animation Demoreel 2012 from David Jang on Vimeo.

During my time living in Seoul, South Korea I was lucky enough to work on Kung Fu Panda:Legends of Awesomeness from 2011 to 2012. I had just come back from France off a feature film and I was pretty burned out. But, I didn't want to miss an opportunity to work on this project, so I jumped on board. I am proud to say that during my time working on the series, Kung Fu Panda:Legends of Awesomeness was nominated for the 39th Annie Award for Best Animated TV Production in the children category, which was a first for the series, so I felt good about contributing my two cents in there. Here are some of my shots from season two. Enjoy~

If you would like to know more about how it was like for me working on the project and in Seoul, South Korea, check out my blog post here.

youngsoojang.blogspot.kr/2012/04/blog-post.html

And, thanks for watching.

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? ^^

An Interview with: Cinepix Animation Director - InHo Son

During my time working at Cinepix Studios(Seoul, South Korea) on the TV series of Kungfu Panda:Legends of Awesomeness, I got to work with animation director InHo Son and on my last day he agreed to an interview and we talked about many things like his path down this road and what he views is the most important aspect of animation and occupational injuries, etc. This is the transcript or rather a written version to the best of my memory and some notes that I took during the interview. I would first like to take the time to personally thank InHo for agreeing to this interview and answering in such a genuinely honest manner. Enjoy~

An interview with: Cinepix Animation Director - InHo Son (@ Cinepix Studios)

1. Can you give us an introduction of yourself and how you came to where you are right now as animation director?

- I majored in mechanical design. I was interested in drawing, but I thought I lacked talent. The reason I majored in that was because I was attracted by the design drawings. The lines and how they drag out the lines for measurements. Those shapes really appealed to me. I wanted to be someone that did that kinda work, so that’s why I went into mechanical design. I went to school and first you start by drawing everything in pencils and I took a class called “CAD”, which was a software you used to draw out the designs and I had never known about this world of computers before, so in a way that was the beginning of my path down this road. And my friend, after showing me CAD introduced me to another 2D program called Dr. Hollow. You could use colors and replicate simple shapes, but the colors were very basic. Like blue, red, white. It was more primitive than your free paint program on Windows. And I looked at this and thought, “Wow, this is new.” But then now long after he showed me another software and it was 3D Studio.

- Max?

- No, before that. My friend studied this by himself and made logo animations on his own. But, back in those days even rendering a hundred frames would take a whole night. Even longer if it had heavy textures on them. So, I thought my friend was really good. At academic festivals, people would come over and get his contact info so I thought highly of him. Then I was called into the army. I went around the same time my friend went. We were discharged around the same time. And, my friend had set his mind on doing CG. I was still a bit unsure, because I was also interested in interior design at the time.

- Because you came out of a mechanical design background.

- Right, so my friend said he was going to goto an institute where they teach professionally. So I followed him to a CG institute located in Gangnam, cause he was my friend. The institutes had nice interiors, new computers and monitors. And with moving wireframes on the monitors that were divided into four seperate views. The software they were using at the time was called Explore. And it was the origin software of Maya, they called it Alias Explore back then. I looked at it and I thought it was super cool! 

- LOL~

- It was during that time I was at the institute that I saw Luxo Jr., Red's Dream and Knick Knack and it inspired me a lot and I wanted to make something like that. So, I worked hard and our group made a short film at the end of the term about two basketball hoops coming to life at night and playing basketball amongst themselves and it won first place at the institutes yearly competition and I was pretty happy about our small, but meaningful achievement. After we graduated, me and couple of our classmates opened our own studio in a small office space in a crumbling building somewhere and we tried to get some projects going. At first, all that came in were jobs for making perspective conceptual renders for architectural buildings printed out into 2D photos and I was a bit flustered by it, but then we got an advertisement gig for a network hub device with camera movements and logo designs as well, so I worked on the storyboards and found I was more interested in this line(story-based) of work. We worked without compensation for about a year and after that paid gigs started to come in. But, by then we started to have some conflicts occur within the studio and some of us, including myself, left to set up another studio. And we got to work on some commercials like Cheetos and Kellogg and we worked day and night during that period, but some complications arose and we had to close down the studio and I fell into a bit of a slump. I was burned out and contemplating whether or not I should keep doing animation, when a friend of mine called me and asked what I was up to. I told him what was going on and he told me to come join him on an animation film project called Elysium, so after being convinced to come on over and being referred to the project manager, I was immediately brought on board to work on the promo video for this feature film. It was here that I actually got my first real taste of character animation with characters and story. After working there for about two years, I briefly moved to another studio called Zero One Pictures before settling into Cinepix Studios and I have been there ever since. 

- And you were appointed animation supervisor right away?

 - Yes, what was going on was they were animating a tv series called Cubix at the time and they placed me as supervising animator for one of the supporting characters. And as time went by I moved up to supervising animator for the main character and then animation director when we started a new tv series called Aqua Kids(2004). 

2. Is there an animation film that you like in particular? Something perhaps that left a big impression on you? And, if so can you elaborate on that? You mentioned earlier that you first saw Luxo Jr. and was very inspired....

- Yes, Luxo Jr. and other Pixar shorts, especially Knick Knack. But, you can say that there are two types of inspiring animations for me. The ones that I just mentioned would be inspiring animations for someone who didn't really know much about animation and then there are animations that you admire from the perspective of someone that has learned and worked in the same field for some time. And that one would be Finding Nemo and more recently Tangled.  

- Could you elaborate more on why you find Finding Nemo and Tangled as well-made animations?

- Well, I am not an expert on story, but I find the story of Finding Nemo to be very good. Coincidentally, Finding Nemo came out right around the time I became a father and thinking about it as a parent I really empathized with the story. Also, I was amazed by how well they could express human-like features through fish characters. Even in terms of innovation, I think they did a great job with slowly inputting human characters to their films along with ocean scenery, textures and colors. Didn't they do well in box offices as well?

- Yes, I read they were number one and still to this day hold the number two title for animation films if I'm not mistaken.

- For Tangled, this could be an excuse, but there was a period when after having observed all the different animations from all the different studios and CG was no longer something scarce and new, it might have also been that I was losing interest in it as well, but there was a period when I stopped watching animation. Even Pixar films, I remember I used to watch the same films in the theaters in awe two or three times by sneaking back in after all the other people left. But, after working as a supervisor for some time, it started to become comparative to projects I was working on and it made me feel inferior and along with other thoughts and concerns I started to stray away from watching feature films. 

- So this had nothing to do with the films themselves, but it was more about what was going on with you internally?

- Yes, I also saw Shrek, but not Shrek 2. There was a period in my life like that. And not too long ago, I started watching feature animations again. Even the old ones, I started watching them all over again and then I came across Tangled with the vibrant colors and long hair animated and all. I watched this while we were making KungFu Panda and naturally I compared it with what we were doing and observed all the aspects of it in detail and.....above all, I thought the animation was done well.

3. What do you think is the most important aspect in an animation shot as an animator? It could be one of the twelve principles in animation or anything else you might think.

- I think that's a hard question and I don't necessarily think there is one particular best aspect in animation. Just like a car, all the parts in the car matter in order for it to run properly, so too does all the aspects in animation. But, if there is one thing that I feel is important in becoming a great animator, it's sensibility.

- Sensibility?

-Yes, there are some people that can memorize an action or movement just by seeing it once in there life. And when they animate something they remember back and bring out the feel of the action or movement better than others. That sense is very important in becoming a great animator in my opinion.

- That's very interesting. I never thought of it like that. But, for example someone like me would probably watch videos again and again frame by frame to understand and learn timing and feel for weight, etc. I guess I'm not that talented. lol~

-Well, yes that is another way of acquiring that skill set. And you don't have to remember exactly how something moves. I guess it's more intuitive than anything.

4. What are your thoughts on occupational safety and health, since animators are prone to many injuries such as back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, arthritis, reduction of eyesight, etc, etc due to long-term intensive working hours in front of the desk or computer?

- Yes, because our job requires us to sit in front of a computer when you look at it in long term, there are many risks. I think the most important way to avoid that is self-management. I believe in working hard when you work and resting hard when you rest. That's why I don't advocate working late to anyone or coming out on weekends to work as well.

- Well, I think that's easier said than done. From personal experience working here and looking around I think many people would like to get off work on time, but just can't.

- Well you can look at it as a battle between your ideals and reality. I also believe that you need to be in an alert mindset while you're working. I think it's important to prevent yourself from working late as time goes by.

5. And finally, any word of advice you can give to anyone that’s looking to work in animation or is going through a slump period in their careers?

- ......................

   
- or would you not recommend people to work in this industry?

- No, it's nothing like that. I was just thinking. I enjoy working with people that have a positive mindset and I think that's one of the hardest things to keep after you've been working for a long period of time. But for people that are trying to get into this industry I would suggest you try and nurture a positive attitude that lasts. That's my advice.

- Well, that's all we have. Thank you very much for your time!

- Thank you~

(This interview took place Nov 6th 2012)