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

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Between April 2021 to July 2022 I worked as a stop motion animator on Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.

Where do I even start? It is the longest project I have been to date. It was very demanding and I had the worst burnout I have experienced after finishing the project. But am I grateful I got to work on it? Absolutely. It is the project with the most reach/impact I have worked on in my career so far.

Here is a compilation of some shots/raw footages I animated for the project.

Tina T. Hsu Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Reel from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

For the first 8 months or so most of my work was on Wood Spirit, the blue fairy that gave Pinocchio life. I did the bulk of her shots in the 400 and 3500 sequences. Where she gave Pinocchio life and when she grants cricket's one wish and exits. I loved her design and am grateful I got to do the majority of her sequences, but animating her was not easy. Her wings especially. One of my fellow animator described her as two characters stuck together. Since her wings did not have the anatomy of bird wings, it took me a while to figure out how to animate them so they looked organic. Since all her movements were supposed to be gentle and graceful, there were a lot of tiny increments in the animation. However, Since the puppet and the wings are quite heavy the joint tensioning couldn't be too loose it no longer supported the weight. So I had to put a lot of force on her while trying to be accurate as slow movements are not very forgiving. The wings were also very long but the root is a small ballpoint, which makes positioning the wing tips very difficult. Tensioning and fighting with the leverage/length of her wings was something I struggled through out working with her. One thing that came rather naturally was her acting. I sort of knew what she needed to feel like or at least had a vision that was close enough to what the directors wanted

By 2022, I requested to animate some shots other than wood spirit for new challenges. I have always been interested in dance sequences as I had studied many different styles of dance growing up, and it is a fundamental part of my understanding of movement. Wanting a gear shift from the gentle and graceful shots wood spirit embodies, I asked for the poop dance sequence. I did not end up getting it, but was given Pinocchio's puppet show debut dance sequence. I was responsible for most of the stage side of the performance, while other animators did the audience side and Volpe's closeups. It was very challenging/complicated and rewarding at the same time. As it was the second half of the production, pressure for speed became a lot more apparent, which was not easy to juggle when dealing with complex multi character dance sequences. One other thing worth mentioning is that the choreography from this sequence was actually not outsourced to professional dancers/choreographers, but a combination of me and fellow animators coming up with fitting dance moves, and the directors also  pulled dance moves from old movies that we fitted into Pinocchio's performance.

I worked in person closely with the onsite director Mark and the rest of the crew, and had briefs over the internet with Guillermo Del Toro. As an animator I tend to look at the board and shot length and offer the most direct path I think solves the problem, and the director either lets me do it or have a different path in mind. One thing I really appreciated working with GDT was that he always had an answer when it comes to what he wanted. Whether the direction was "go for it" or "no I want that instead", I rarely disagreed with his vision. It is hard to explain, but I feel he had this very accurate sense of balance when it comes to not shying away from what he wanted while making things assessable to the audience.

The experience watching the film after its release was an odd one for me. The first view at the staff screening I was unable to watch it as a movie. I was reliving the production as I watched each shots go by than enjoying it as a movie. A couple weeks later I went to see it in the theater with the general audience, and that was when I was able to enjoy the movie more. Watching a good chunk of my life flash past the screen is definitely an experience that is hard to describe. The fact that there is footage of me animating on Netflix and at the MOMA in New York is also mind boggling.

It was over all a very intense yet rewarding experience to work on this project. I hope you enjoyed it if you have seen it and give it a chance if you haven't. Congratulations to all involved making it and I hope the film continues to excel during award seasons and continue to captivate audience.

I will update BTS as I sort through them.

BTS footage of me animating the close up of Wood sprite poking cricket (animated separately in large scale)

Tina T. Hsu Pinocchio 0400-0760 BTS by Jason Ptaszek from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.

BTS footage of me animating Pinocchio's Dance

Tina T. Hsu Pinocchio 1400-0260 BTS by Jason Ptaszek from Tina T. Hsu on Vimeo.
This was also featured on MOMA Instagram  

Crew Photo

Animation Team

Wood Spirit Stage

UV pass

Puppet Show Stage

Children head rack for back of audience head

Other random BTS Photos I took while on production
Maquettes (character sculpts) 

The Puppets features in the infamous poop dance sequence

Head Mechanism for facial animation

Stand-ins. Basically mock ups or broken puppets, or anything that can be used to help with planning/camera/lighting setup when full puppets are busy in shots.

Flat Puppets with limited movements. Think cardboard cutout used in live action for background crowd.

Puppet hospital

Sets

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.

The Shivering Truth: Season 2

From Summer of 2019 to the beginning of 2020 (feels like a long time ago), I spent about 6 month working on Season 2 of The Shivering Truth. Now that Season 2 has aired, I am going to start posting about it. Will start posting footage and BTS photos once I get the permission for those.

For Season 2, I started as a storyboard revisionist, and later moved onto animation so I have two credits this time. Season 2 is produced at HouseSpecial, with a mix of new faces and season 1 crew.
The animation crew was split up into even and odd episodes this time, so most of my work are in the even episodes until it all blended together towards the end, as productions do. I am not sure if it was planned, but it felt like the odd episodes were heavier on the visual spectacle while the even episodes were more sensitive and emotional. And perhaps due to that aspect of the show, the odd episodes always felt more heavy duty for me on the board revision end.

Here are some BTS photos

Episode 1: The Burn Earner Spits
Episode 1 was a beast in all stages of production. I mostly re-boarded the TV shop scenes/ike and Hank's sequences and did minor redraws and added frames for the rest of the episodes. Animation wise I was responsible for a few prayer flyer shots, and the new age shop (one of the cutest sets)
Episode 2: Carrion My Son
This is perhaps my favorite episode of season 2. The majority of revision happened in the doll shop, but there also added drawings in the opening segments. Animation wise I was responsible for Gigi(girl on the phone), Conrad in the church flexing, some Reiss and mom shots including Reiss taking care of mom doll in the bedroom.
Episode 3: Nesslessness
I feel like I did a lot of rebuild/redraw on every part of the episode. The opening sequence was very complicated for board and animation I believe, and re-building the scene was a bit of a brain gymnastic. I wasn't very involved with animation except for a few elements.
Episode 4: Beast of Both Worlds
Another episode I really liked. I believe most of the re-boarding were in the thug head quarter/fight scenes so lots of violence. Animation wise most of my work was on meditation lawn and him snorting and smoking up books, and the dream girl in her dream cloud.
Episode 5: The Diff
This was a very interesting/challenging one board wise because of how abstract and out of the box this episode was. I think most of my revisions were in the limo sequence, the EMT section and some the half figures, but a lot of work also went into adjusting the very architectural opening and the optometrist's office. Animation wise I did a few shots in the EMT sequence, the hotel and a bunch of tumbling figures, a few shots of the half figures and the pretty animal/nature shot.
Episode 6: Holeways
I don't remember the board revision on this one being super heavy. A lot of it was in the dental office, Dustin tearing up his room, animals and the final field I think. A good chunk of it was kicked back to the board artists towards the end since they didn't have future episodes to work on at the end. Animation wise I did Dustin in the cave, dentist talking through his mouth (was a bit of a challenge since the head mech was not working in half of her face) and the pigs cuddling.

I always enjoyed working on this show, even though I always wished there was more time and money to make it even nicer. But that's true to most if not all projects I guess, and I certainly hope it gets a season 3!