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.

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.

Mushroom Hunting WIP

A new story about a mushroom picking mission after a nuclear accident.
I am still working on this and will be adding or taking things out as I work :p

Moments and Location Sketches on Steroids

some moment boards , and some location sketches on steroids: I find a location and sketch it , and try to capture a moment or put some kind of story into the scene.

The Domestic Goddess (working title) WIP stuff

These are WIP from a project I just started a little while ago as a portfolio piece. I am slowly flushing out my ideas. I am still trying things out and will be updating this constantly.

Some Designs just so I know who these characters are.

This is the story reel of one of the scenes at the location designed above, sort of an early/opening sequence.

I have not had the time to separate all the layers and put in the camera moves so these are just the storyboard panels roughly cut together. I hope the distinction between continuing panels and cuts are not too confusing.


The Domestic Goddess (working title) story sample from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.


The Boards.