Notes from Speakers Series Event with David Chai

What can you do after college?
• Students can go on from college to do games, storyboards, visual development and more at major animation studios such as DreamWorks, Pixar, and Disney.
• After graduating, David Chai did independent work, got reels together, and shipped them to ad agencies, while teaching at a private college.
• Your work situation as an animator really depends on where you are in the country.
• Little things can pay off, people will see you and remember you (network around, its important).
• The animation community is small!

Process of Animation:
• Thumbnails/Script (put thumbnail drawings in with the lines)
• Storyboard/Animatic-layout resolved at this stage, so as not to waste money and time
• Style Consideration-getting people’s opinion is how to decide which animation to use.
• Character Design-poses, working with hands.
• Rough Animation
• Color and Line Processing-clean-up the drawing, using Adobe stuff (Photoshop, After-effects, Premier)
• Layout/Backgrounds-painted digitally in Photoshop, layer in After-Effects
• After Effects Compositing
• Camera Move Approaches-expand actual artwork
• Editing-bring in all frames in Premier and assemble them, or have uncompressed files in after-effects and edit them in premier.
• A short film (like “Fumi”) had 12 people on animation, scanners, story consultation, production/editing, etc
• Group production- to maintain consistency, he does key drawings, team does in-between, but for big projects, they have model sheets and teams are broken up into characters.
Festival circuit-sometimes you have to pay entry fees, but the payoff is that you can get request to screen around the country for years to come, depending on how the film is received
• David used to send his work to just about anywhere (but it costs a lot of money). Now he sends to ASEFA and Academy-qualifying festivals.
• Be careful of scam festivals and agencies, where you pay for your work to be displayed but it never happens.

How to get into animation/production?
• Look into free places to post your work online (youtube, blogger, myspace), use a blog and word of mouth for publicity and promotion!
Writing scripts for animation
• Writing fellowship at Nickelodeon (go to nick website to find out more)