Stop Motion and 2D reels

My Reels for up to 2021. Sorry They are not public at the moment, please contact me for password if you want to see them. I will constantly be updating these.

Stop Motion Animation

Tina T. Hsu stop motion reel from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

2D Animation

Tina T. Hsu 2D reel from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

0:02 - 0:17 Storyboard, rough and cleanup animation

0:17 - 0:18 2D Animation, tie-down, cleanup and paint

0:18 - 0:21 Animation cleanup and paint

0:21 - 0:25 Storyboard, 2D animation(rough/cleanup/color)

0:25 - 0:28 Animation tie down, clean up and paint

0:28 - 0:34 2D animation, cleanup and paint

0:34 - 0:55 rough animation

0:55 - 0:59 animation/paint

0:59 - 1:11 Everything visual (storyboard to finish)

1:11 - 1:18 Everything visual besides ship (rough animation to finish)

1:18 - 1:45 Everything visual

The Waterman

In Summer 2019 and beginning of 2020 before and after I worked on The Shivering Truth Season 2, I worked on the 2D animation sequences of live action film "The Waterman". The problem with working on features is that they have the tendency of taking a long time from me working on it and it coming out. I thought I wrote about it already but apparently I have not.

Here is a compilation of some of my raw footage

Tina T. Hsu waterman reel from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

I was one of the lead animators on this project responsible for a big chunk of the rough/tiedown animation. The process was surprisingly design heavy as I had to come up with many solutions that dictated the final animation/art direction of the piece even though rotoscoping is used pretty heavily during the process, and I will go into it a little more in the next paragraph.

Since rotoscoping was used, many would think all I had to do was trace over live action footage and be done. That wasn't the case here. The character design was made for live action, which means it was not animation friendly. It took a while to figure out the right stylization for the designs to work as animation. On top of that, we could not shoot some of the footages in the setting it was supposed to be in.

As a result, there were many things I had to animate over from scratch. For example, all the reference footages of underwater scenes were shot on land. For the sequence where the heroine drowned, I had to animate her hair, clothing and lower body from imagination because she was fumbling on land in the reference and non of those elements looked like they were under water. In the sequence where waterman swam in the lake, the footage I was given was the actor pretending to swim on a table on his belly while losing balance once in a while. So I took a few key poses from the footage as reference and pretty much animated everything from scratch for that shot. The direction also wanted to minimize hard cuts whenever possible so coming up with ways to morph one scene into another was something I had to tackle. 

Once the rough/tied down animation is locked it was then passed onto another animator to do the final "cleanup" animation. The art direction wanted the animation to look like it was done on pencil and paper, and after some R&D we figured the best way to achieve that was still by drawing with pencil on paper. I wasn't involved in that part of the process since I had Shivering Truth S2 lined up already and had to leave the project for a chunk of time, so the other lead animator, Sam Neiman, was responsible with that part of the project.

More info on this project can be found on the DVD bonus featurette.

Dr Praeger's Purely Sensible Hero Vegetables

In Summer 2020, I animated on a Dr. Praeger's commercial at HouseSpecial. It was a short gig, and everyone besides me worked from home while I was still scrambling to get myself a home setup at the time. So I went in and worked at the very empty studio for about three weeks while communicating with my director/producer via internet. It was a little strange but also kind of nice.

The director was going for a retro 70s-80s cartoon look. It is an era of western cartoon that I did not grow up with since I lived in Asia and watched a different set of animation shows. The commercial is a mix of hand drawn and rigged animation done mostly in Toonboom Harmony. Since I don't work with rigs the bits of my work are all in the hand drawn portion and here's a breakdown.

0:01 - Painted additional sprouts for the dirt mound
0:07 - Pizza splitting (rough to finish)
0:08 - Pizza splitting shot 2 (rough to finish)
0:12 - C-Top turn (Rough to color and BG sans effect and rigged settle)
0:17 - Barry the Beet kick (Rough to color and BG sans effect and rigged settle)
0:23 - Smoke effect animation

Oil painting animation

In March, when the Covid situation just started to escalate in the US, I started working at Bent Image Lab on a oil paint rotoscope/animation spot. The spot was painted by me and another animator tracing/translating live action footage with oil paint on glass and photographing each painting with dragonframe. We initially pitched to animate on 4s, but eventually settled on 3s due to client request.

This is raw footage from shot 2 of the spot.

Oil painting animation from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

The technique was an interesting mix of 2D, painting and stop motion which strangely fits many of my skill sets, but was definitely a new challenge for me. While I enjoy painting with traditional media, I always found oil paint a little too much hassle for personal work. I have not touched oil painting since a portrait painting class in grad school, which was close to a decade ago.

I soon found out that oil painting 8-9 hours a day in a not very ergonomic setup was far more taxing physically and mentally than I anticipated (especially during a pandemic). We were using oil paint straight out of the tube as much as possible for color consistency. To make sure the paint does not just scrape off from slick glass surface, I refrained from diluting paint and used much softer brushes usually made for watercolor/acrylic paint. Another challenge we faced was getting paint supply as many art supply stores were either shut down or bought out by I assume bored people sheltering in place.

Depending on what was happening on screen, each frame took me from 30-90 minutes. Between each frame, we had to scrape off the full painting. Considering supply, my wage and not considering other expenses, it feels like destroying a $40-$100 paintings every frame. I was a bit terrified by the process, but it was also kind of cathartic. After the job was done, the client told us they wanted to preserve some of the paintings. But since that was not coordinated beforehand all the paintings were destroyed during animation.

Here is a note on working with live action and rotoscope. It is a very useful tool in many situations, but it also relies on live action footage that is not always compatible with animation/the medium we were using. For a fast turnaround job that goes way beyond line work like this one, there was no wiggle room for me to fix and control many aspects of the finished work. Shots with subtle movements and facial closeups were especially challenging and time consuming as accuracy becomes an issue and subtle movements tend to get lost in the medium. Shots with dynamic movement tend to work much better for this medium.

Looking back, there were many could be better moments on this project, but given the fact that we somehow pulled it together during a pandemic I think we did our best. I can do without oil painting for another decade for sure.

some BTS videos and photos

Cleaning after each frame from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

We Bare Bear Season 3 promo - Bear Berries

In Summer 2018 right after I wrapped animating on The Shivering Truth, I went back to Bent Image Lab and animated on the second We Bare Bear spot. The hardest part of this spot was animating Ice bear interacting with live action character with moving camera. The live action plate also limited some of the animation choices I could have made. Since the live action was on 1s, the animation also had to be on 1s. The shot definitely ate up more than half of the very short schedule of this job. I hope it is still enjoyable though!


We Bare Bears - Bear Berries from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.

Honda: Dream Commute

From February to end of March 2018, I worked on the Honda: Dream Commute campaign for North Cal Honda also at Bent Image Lab.

The project was very mixed media in that it was a 2D + 3D animation/Live action people + puppet in one melting pot kind of spot. I was involved with character design, storyboard(everything except first establishing shot) and all the 2D bird animation. Since I have only boarded for 2D projects up to this point, it was the first time I saw my boards turn into 3D animation. It was also the first time I saw my storyboards on a (not very) big board for live action shoots. I also had to animate semi blindly while waiting for the live action plate to arrive, which took quite a bit of retrofitting when the plates finally did arrive.


Honda - Dream Commute from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.

Here is the animatic I and Jesse Mcmanus did. I boarded (or at least roughed out) everything in the spot besides the opening shot. Jesse was responsible for the opening shot, building designs and also cleaning up some of my rough boards. We boarded the majority of it in two days, and then revised for a few more days according to client notes.

Honda Dream Commute Animatic from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

Here is the link to full credits/BTS on Bent's website
http://bentimagelab.com/honda-dream-commute/

Some of the design work I did for this spot.
The Blue Bird I got to animate. I took the chosen concept sketch by Jesse and retooled it for final model for animation.

Some unused dog puppet concept sketches

Some cloud concept sketches that turned into 3D characters

Here are some BTS photos from my Ipad.

Estée Lauder - Ballerina

I worked as a cleanup&paint artist on an Estée Lauder's holiday ad campaign recently at HouseSpecial. I had been in talk with them for a really long time, and finally timing worked out this time. I did the animation tie-down/paint for 030(full body spin, the shot the thumbnail is from), and painted 040(full body spin/dance) and the second half of 080(last animated shot, goes from dance to wipe transition). It was a really short schedule and I did all the work mentioned above within an eight day span.


Estée Lauder - Ballerina from HouseSpecial on Vimeo.

We Bare Bears x Nintendo Switch Game Promos

For the last three months I have been drawing bears...a lot of them. I worked between May and August 2017 at Bent Image Lab as an animation director/lead on two spots for We Bare Bears X Nintendo Switch games, Arms and Splatoon 2. This is the third project I worked on in 2017, but the first one to go live so I am really excited. Most of the commercials I worked on so far are for online campaigns, so it is new to have something that plays directly on Cartoon Network.

I did the rough animation for this spot and handed it over to JD for cleanup/color and comp.

We Bare Bears - Nintendo Arms from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.

I storyboarded/animated/cleaned up (so basically all the character line work) on this spot.

We Bare Bears - Nintendo Splatoon from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.

Here is the full BTS/Credit on the Bent's Website.

Cap & Kith Spots

I recently worked on a few 2D animated spots at Bent Image Lab for an AD campaign for collaboration of New York street wear brand Kith and Cap'n Crunch and I thought I would share them here. It was a quirky and super fun project to work on, and also the first time I went completely paperless for 2D animation.


Capn Kith - Kith Ahoy from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.
I animated all the characters and effect, cleaned and colored all the characters and got help with cleanup and texture painting on effect animation, I also did most of the compositing. The effect animation probably took more time than the characters.


Capn Kith - Kings Of Their Castles from Bent Image Lab on Vimeo.
For the 60 sec spot I only animated the staircase fist bump and the cereal falling in the shot right before (00:38-00:41). The staircase fist bump shot went by really quickly but I got to design it from scratch and poured a lot of heart and soul into it.

I also did an Interview with Bent Design Lab about my process on this project if you are curious enough to read about it. Enjoy!

Animation cleanup stills

I figure I never post my animation drawings although this is what I do 90% of my time. This sequence is her walking into her kitchen while stuffing her face with donuts. The lower body is going to be covered by the kitchen counter, thus chopped off in my drawings. What you see in the second image is about 1.5 second worth of animation.

These are cleanup drawings that will then be digitally processed, colored and put into video form. The red tint is the tie-down structural under drawings I do before doing the black line.

Here is another cleanup drawing from a bigger shot I am still working on.
She is on 16 field paper, thus the 5 peg holes that barely fits in the scanner.

And these are cleanup drawings from various shots of the other character.