Animator Weilin Zhang (Jujutsu Kaisen, Mob Psycho 100) has started a new interview series with fellow animators, and we are honored to bring them to Cara! The concept of this zine will be a serialized interview of many different animators I know, where I ask them about reasonably esoteric things on the craft of animation seldom spoken about in public discourse.I think there is a lacking amount of depth in the educational material available to animators on the internet, particularly in English-speaking communities, so this is in hopes of supplementing that pool of information. Introductions: Spencer Wan Spencer Wan is an animator known for his work on Castlevania (2017); The Owl House (2020); and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023). He is the founder and director of Studio Grackle, the studio responsible for the trailer of Hades (2018) by Supergiant Games. Weilin Zhang on Spencer Wan:Spencer Wan is one of the most "complete" animators that I know. I can elaborate on what I mean by admitting that it's kind of hard to encapsulate his body of work with a word more specific than ingenuity. In every department he's ever handled (there's a lot), he's always managed to pick up his own ideas and solutions. I felt that very early on when I came across his tumblr page in 2016. His style in terms of animation and illustration was something I had never seen before among the animators I had known during that time. Every aspect, from the color palette of his backgrounds, to the timing his of animation was new to me and still kind of exists in it's own compartment in my head... but that was just his work as a student and a freelancer. Since then, he's worn more hats on the productions he's been on and his new tricks now are starting to solve logistical problems to do with animation itself. Did you know his lightning animation on The Owl House looked the way it did to work with TV regulations to do with epilepsy? His body of work speaks on all aspects of animation, because he is kind of just proficient in every aspect of the craft. Introductions: WEILIN-ZINENice to meet you, My name is Jerry and I'm your interiew host for the glorious WEILIN-ZINE! Im conducting these interviews in the hopes of one day having a Great Forest of Knowledge for the next generation of animators to grow with. I love animation and I want there to be more animation in the future! More and if possible, better than ever before! So that the next-next generation can grow up with even better animation! And then they'll make even betterBETTER animation!!11!1! Please spread this interview far and wide so that generations of aspiring artists can enjoy these interviews!!!!Jerry Nguyen, host & interviewer, WEILIN-ZINE Interview with Spencer Wan6/23/2024~7/12/2024Jerry Nguyen: you know, I feel like growing up and talking to animators of different levels of experience one of the correlations that surprised me at first was that even an animator's tastes in the kinds of animation they like change. So much so I think I can almost guess what an animator likes more accurately by factoring their experience.I'd like to ask you if you still remember what "good" animation looked like to you when you were youngerI think animators that are just starting out, particularly younger animators, have a very specific and pointed preference in animation that they think IS goodSpencer Wan: Well I remember back then I was really attracted to simplicity. I used to get seriously put off by the use of heavy shadows and highlights, so I gravitated toward Norio Matsumotos animation because hed intentionally excluded shadows where other animators would assume it was expected.Like back then it took me a while to see value in some of the best animation out there. I remember I turned my nose up at both Cowboy Bebop and Evangelion because the styles were too detailed for what I was interested in.And when it came to the movement I really liked when things moved in a way I didnt expect.Like it couldve been the best looking hand drawn 3D rotation in the world and I would not have cared. I wanted to be surprised.This was all before I had the vocabulary or knew any of the animators names though. I just knew something about it was getting to meJN: you know I think the fact that he doesn't draw shadows really affects how he puts down black lines. Especially in fabric, I think there is always an extreme frustration where not putting down a line for a fold feels like too little, but putting down a black line is way too harsh, and so as an in between we'll use shadows to record those forms in the drawing. Norio Matsumoto I think excelled at visualizing the balance of his drawings when it was finished as a cel rather than the drawing he put down on the animation paper itselfSW: You know I dont think I ever really thought of it that way. I think for me it was like the drawings already sing without shadows and adding any more to it just felt like muddying it up.I remember when that internal shadow trend started for clothing and it never really landed with meJN: ohhhh, now that you say out loud I guess that was a trendactually, it's funny cause now you ended up bringing back a lot of those heavy black shadows for the Hades trailers and before that also in the Invader Zim Opening.I guess I might suspect that some of it is just a result of the artstyle of the projects themselves, but it looks like you've worked your style around it so I'm wondering if that opinion aged somewhat until nowSW: Well I more meant like specifically the use of only shadow for the interior of cloth. Like I remember thinking everyone was trying to copy that one Yutaka Nakamura scene from Space DandyThe black shadows I used on those projects were mostly just because the Zim one was supposed to look edgy and Hades already had those shadows in the styleAlthough I think it is kind of what my hand naturally wants to do nowId rather do like black shadows than have actual shadows hahaLike if you left it up to me Id only use shadow to show rim light or have one of those ones where it cuts diagonally across the character to make it moodierI love that shitJN: I love that shit too, honestly a lot of the web gen animators who joined around the 2010s feel similarly hahaI think with the Nakamura trend, people had never seen someone animate high fidelity fabric shading that emulated realism like that before. I reckon most people thought it was borderline impossible until he started to do itI think there's something interesting about your threshold for what counts as muddy, the fact that shadows seems to so clearly step over that line. You would think that shadows might be a bare minimum requirement of detail considering how it's basically everywhere in real lifeSW: I guess so, but Im really never aiming to make something look like real life in my workIve only ever wanted to make it look like animation.I dont know, theres a balance in my head that just gets ruined when you start throwing shadow everywhere.And you know, its a lot faster to draw without it, so win winJN: when you conceive of the thing your gonna draw, does it just start as a drawing rather than something like a real subject that you might have to perform the abstraction of in your head?SW: Yeah thats exactly it. I picture a drawing.I mean if Im drawing a real subject then Im going to picture reality, but if Im drawing an animated character then I picture an animated characterI just dont do much realism these days. No one pays me for thatIt used to be I couldnt make the drawings in my head so Id just let my hand run wild, but eventually my skill caught up to what was in my mind. Spencer Wan - SpiderPunk JN: well, lord knows you'd shake the earth if someone did. I still think about that spiderpunk testSW: That one was so hard for me to conceiveWe only had like a few early concepts for the character and they gave me some punk rock poster reference and said make it as crazy as you possibly canI couldnt come up with anything crazier than the style changing every single drawingBut it was like I had to conceive a new thing every time before moving on to the next drawing. I didnt want it to look like it was just changing color. It had to like feel like it was changing styles even if you couldnt see every single oneAnd I wanted to mimic the haphazard collage nature of early punk rock posters so I also had to collage everything togetherMy file crashed so many timesJN: I feel like I saw like 10 new illustration techniques that you've never done before in just that one animation.SW: Yeah I also was bad at them!I was like god damn Im not creative enough for this. I wanted structure back so badlyIf that test had been any longer I wouldve totally run out of ideasJN: so that was all stuff you figured out on the assignmentI legitimately thought you just have used techniques like that before on pieces I just haven't seen yetSW: Yeah I just looked at the posters and tried to recreate the techniques for some of themJN: crazySW: Like okay I can tell this was printed with a printer that was like straight up out of toner, but I have to do it on a computer soStreaky splatter texture subtract layer? I dunnoAnd then I ran out of poster techniques so I just grabbed anything that came to mindLike a spiderman Halloween maskJust slap that in there onceIts relevantI think they actually also did that in the movie on their own, but on MilesJN: This is such a strange reoccuring thing where you frequently lament that you don't possess this creative energyis there someone/something that you might look to as a foil to you in this regard??I can personally attest that I've tried to do some of the rendering styles in even just one frame of that test and I couldn't figure it outlike even the fact that you could identify that this one effect was a printer with no toner I feel like requires a degree of experience with printingSW: Well I used to play around with that stuff a lot more when I was youngerAnd thanks, but I never felt like I was really getting anywhere with any of those styles. It was like that feeling of trying to recreate a style but never quite getting there, only it happened to me a few dozen timesJN: I mean where would you liked to have gotten to?SW: Anything closer to the look they created just by experimentingIt never felt like I got that authenticityJN: hmmm, and for Spiderpunk structure was the thing was distracting you from that stuff?SW: Well I'm used to structure. Usually in production the quality of your work is measured by how well you met the director's vision and how well you stay on model. I'm used to doing that, but here they were telling me to just go off on my own and smack it as hard as I could with every creative tool available to meActually I struggled a lot with that on that production because any time I got Joaquim's boards I had a hard time moving away from themIt was like okay, I don't wanna mess this up, so I'd do a very literal interpretation where I'd be careful to keep everything he put into it in placeAnd then we'd get to review and they'd be like can you do this again but mess it upJN: When you went and messed it up did it go through?SW: Basically yeahJN: sounds like you really have to like strain yourself to do this other thing they were asking you to do hahaSW: Well it's just difficult when you get a storyboard that's detailed. It's like it's telling you you MUST do it like this.JN: Animatics do tend to be pretty compelling to work withI guess you've never really worked off of a comic panel storyboard aside from when you worked with Chengxi Huang rightEven he would do animatics and his panels had a specific blocking to them though, not sure if that dampened the effect storyboards have for youSW: Youre forgetting we both worked on that Carol and Tuesday thing a while backIts not the timing that gets in my way. Its the drawingsWith Chengxi its fine because I can more or less just use his poses and Im pretty sure hed want it that way anywayAnd I think on a TV production Joaquim wouldve been happy with that tooBut we were on a feature together and I was supposed to be trying to invent things every time I made a testOr at least it felt that way. Apparently it feels that way for a lot of people in featureJN: yea I did forget we were on that together actually, my badIf it was the drawings that tied you down then would crappier drawings have liberated you or just further confused you. You know how like there are those panels of essentially stick figures sometimes in some storyboardsSW: Actually yeah. As long as I can tell whats going on I usually prefer crappy drawings. Or at least thats what lets me exercise the most creativityJN: I think this is kind of a really funny topic that kind of worthwhile to get into, the idea that you, me, and probably a lot of animators might prefer shittier drawings in some scenarios.There's been a few other pieces of your answer that I think warrant revisiting, and if it's alright I want to backtrack through this conversation back up to the opening question to kind of tie it back up in order to continue discussing that very first answer"Crappy" is obviously reductive from my part, but I think more specifically I really prefer drawings that are sprawling and suggestive rather than simple and discreet, if I had to say.Im not sure if this is how you would describe what you're imagining when I say "crappy" though. what would you say?SW: I would just say anything that isnt trying to demand I draw the scene an exact wayPast that it doesnt really matter much to me. It can be suggestive or gestural or just a quick scribble because someone ran out of timeAs long as its giving me permission to ignore how its drawn, then thats enoughA storyboard is supposed to be an idea anyway, not a layout guideI get it though, I mean in America thats whats expected nowJN: It'll probably be gradual but if American storyboard artists had better pipeline with the animators (which I think is where it's trending) we might see animatics gravitate in that directionSW: That would be great, except were rapidly barreling in the other directionJN: still?SW: Thats what I see anywayJN: how do you figure with Flying Bark?SW: I mean Flying Bark is a great studio and has a ton of talent.And it hasnt stopped American storyboard artists from jamming their boards full of unnecessary poses even knowing that theyll be able to to a good job with itPart of that is on the higher ups for expecting that sort of thing, but part of it is on the artists for creating that expectation in the first placeAnd like, thats not going to make a lick of difference if you have the animators at flying bark working for you. Theyre going to do good work regardlessBut I bet its annoying for them to have to use every single pose in those storyboardsJN: I'd bet on that too. I think they should just convert half of the American board team into just animators haha, feel like most of them wish they could animateI always suspected that might have been why they feel the need to put out such over-realized animaticsat least part of why*SW: Im certain most of them could animate. Ive tried to encourage that but I almost never see people take the plungeI think they WANT to animateI think theyre afraid of job securityYoud have to be pretty insane to pick animation over storyboarding in America if you were thinking about moneyI mean, when I first started, there were hardly even any jobs for animators hereIts wild to see those start to creep back inJN: feels pretty great. Personally speaking everytime I've had to work on an animatic like that I have always thought "why don't you just get the board artist to just animate this".I'd claim that animatics like that hold back the potential of the entire pipeline if you have talent like Flying Bark.the animatics really force the hand of the animators to produce extremely snappy, darting motion because that's pretty much all you can afford to do while still stringing together the poses in each sceneparticularly when there are that* many panelsSW: You know if theres a sheet timer involved the animators that get that are forced to use all of those poses too. They dont get a choiceI think its probably different for Flying Bark since they work entirely digitally, but Im speculatingBut yeah Id agree with you. If you made me use all of those poses it would seriously hold back my workLuckily Ive never been contractually obligated to. I would cut poses all the time and no one was ever the wiserJN: yea, I have also been very fortunate to bend rules and get away with itfirst time hearing about a sheet timerSW: So when America started outsourcing animation to South Korea, they needed a way to communicate the timing of the animatic and the lip sync to the animators thereSo some old animation people became sheet timers who write this episode long x sheets that include all that info including compositing directionIm summarizing a lot here, but thats basically how it wentAnd the sheet timers are ancient now. They dont really train new sheet timers. Every sheet timer Ive met has been in their 60s at leastBut as an animator on one of these productions, you just get your section of x sheet that pertains to your scene and all the timing and posing has already been decided for youYou basically just make it on model and add breakdownsSo now picture youre handed a scene where the storyboarder chose to draw over a dozen poses and they didnt understand animationYou can see how frustrating that would beMost of the union productions Ive been on call them scenes by the way, not cutsJN: just sounds like all of America's pipeline problems are concessions to having to make overseas outsourcing work yet againScene lengths are also getting tighter and tighter too,,It's honestly kind of crazy how much your work is shaped by how long a scene is. I've had to forego so many ideas, probably like at least half, just because that specific cut was 6-10 frames too shortas a specific example, it is impossible to animate the kind of floating, weighty quality that you find in old Disney or Satoru Utsunomiya, or Hashimoto these days unless you break the time length pretty egregiouslySW: Well traditionally the scene length is decided by the editors and not by the storyboardersThe editors are actually in a different union so they really dont like it if artists branch over into timingThe union I mean, not the editors specificallyBut yeah, in American animation they tend to cut much faster. Its just whats taughtPeople always said that my scene lengths were super longJN: I dont think I would have ever thought that would be a factor in thiswait then who comes first in the pipeliine, the storyboard artist or the editor??SW: The storyboard artist does. Then it gets passed to an animatic editor who times itBut these days we have a lot of board artists timing their own animatics before the editor ever get itJN: that pipeline seems to make a lot more sense when I remember that until recently storyboards were ostensibly comic stripsSW: I mean, they still are. No matter how you look at it its an animaticPeople are just conflating them because the storyboarders still identify as storyboarders and so when they post their work on the internet they say these are my boardsI think Ive done the same thing actuallyJN: right, I mean just to clarify I meant that having editors time out the scene made a lot more sense if they were given storyboards drawn on those thumbnail blocks where either there wasn't any time written down or the timing was still pretty broad and estimatedactually, I think they do that in Japan because they still use konte pagesSW: Id kill to have someone time my storyboardsSo much work I wouldnt need to doJN: wow are you sure?sounds like it could demand a lot of correspondence to get it rightSW: I feel like it would be more a matter of just directing the timing situationally, but yeah overall I dont think I need to have full control over thatJN: interressttinnggggSW: I see you forming opinions about me over thereBut you should KNOW this about me by nowI dont need full control when I directJN: I just mean it gives me something to consider about my own preferencesnot sure I have considered the opportunity to delegate handling that beforeSW: Well if you find a good animatic editor to work with let me know hahaJN: ...you know what? I will consider it it, I might have some candidates in mindSW: I mean Ill probably keep timing these smaller projects, but for a full 22 minute episode Id be very eager to hand that offId be eager to hand off the storyboards too, for the most partJN: give it to meeeeeeSW: DealJN: alright, well I think the other thing that I really wanted to talk about with you that you had mentioned earlier was about how you picture things in your head. Im going to be honest this might straight up torpedo this interview because this is probably way too subjective to really reliably converge on the same definitions but let's fuck around and find outParticularly I think it's interesting that you sometimes just start from a drawing if it's what your work asks of youbut over the last few days I sort of started to check with myself if I might also do that I think I do too. And if I had to guess the reason I can do that probably more than anything has to do with sheer amount of "drawings" I've looked at in my lifeIt's kind of* weird but like at some point the drawings you see sort of "are real" much like the buildings and people you see are "real" in the way that they occupy your surroundingsSW: You sure about that? You havent been able to see them since you were a kid?JN: you know I really don't knowI could remember cartoons that I had seen, but when I drew it was always beginning from imagining what the real thing wasand then working it downit wasn't until my teenage years where I started to emulate artists that I could begin to start with a "cartoonized" imagefrankly when I started to emulate Nakaya Onsen it was probably the most palpable moment where I could do thatI always had trouble with configuring the ribcage and pelvis, but when I started to emulate the way Nakaya Onsen drew, I literally started to be able to draw anything I wanted to some extentSW: You bathed in the knowledge of the Nakaya OnsenJN: more real than you can imagineit was like discovering a cheat codeSW: It was a little different for me. I was always able to picture cartoons since I was very youngEmulating other artists for me was more about training my handsI remember I used to like overlay them on my vision and watch them doing things in whatever room I was inJN: seriously??you'd have to be able to like transpose their proportions according to perspective and everythingSW: I can assure you it wasnt an active effortJN: could you like modulate what the cartoon looked like?for example if you imagine like a spectrum of cartoon to realistic, could you have slid down that spectrum all the way to realistic?SW: Mmm probably not back thenAnd at some point I stopped doing it because people thought it was weird Id just be staring offI just figured its something everyone didOr could doJN: lmfao, how old until you found outSW: I mean I think I just found out nowI havent thought about that in a long timeIts not like I ever talked about itJN: well, in that case. Since it seems like I might infer that realism was something you* trained your mind to be able to visualizeI kind of want to ask if this was also true with respect to motionI mean did the cartoons you imagined move in a specific way..?SW: It was so long ago now. I think they just moved like cartoons Id see on TV back then JN: Sorry about the long silence here, on the other hand the time gave me ample time to mull on your answersI think where our last conversation ended off I was very interested in how drawing and more interestingly consuming animation might have expanded the sensitivity of your visual imaginationyou know how like people who are very into music are extremely sensitive to the texture of certain sounds, or even how people who have a wider vocabulary to describe different hues allegedly appear to be much more sensitive to subtle hue changes?I think stuff like this is well understood in the visual sphere for static images, like how people are able to describe a painting or a photo in terms of hue, lighting, brushwork, composition etcbut I dont think in terms of animation Ive ever really come across the same level of vividness. I know at least for me watching animation has given me the capabilities to picture differences in my head that I dont really have the words to describe. I think Norio Matsumoto is a landmark example for me personally, specifically the way he animates acrobatic mid-length scenesand I think it has a little bit to do with the way he modulates his frame ratesSo I just first wanted to confirm with you if youve also experienced this thing where looking at so much animation has expanded your sensitivity with regards to movementI know Ive asked you before and heard you lament about the fact that at your current stage youre much more affected by lower framerate animation to the point where itd steer you into wanting to* make your animations smoother than you otherwise would have because the choppiness in your own work would bother you otherwise.SW: Ahh yes. My Richard Williams syndromeNorio Matsumoto totally still does it for me though. Im much more sensitive to it in my own workOr in the work of animators Im directingIm a lot less bothered if its not related to my work at allI can MAKE myself be bothered, but why would I?If Im watching someone elses work Id rather try and turn the criticism off and try to enjoy itJN: Before you start animating a scene do you imagine it in your head first?SW: I do, yeah.I usually do some thumbnails of whats in my head and then move on to storyboardsJN: does it work kind of like what we talked about earlier where you kind of imagine directly the kind of movement you need rather than starting from a realistic version and then caricaturizing it?SW: Yup! Theres really no realism involved in the way I workJN: How'd that look like?? Were you able to like imagine the individual frames or did you imagine like a video playingSW: I mean were getting back to the thing where I could just see characters whenever I wantedJust, these days I do it all in my headJN: yea, I guess I'm just trying to figure out what the boundaries of it are if there are anyI came across Shingo Yamashita's old web diary one time and he mentioned how he thinks in Japan, there's 2 ways of animating. 1 is you plan the scene as a series of still frames that the scene transitions through. 2 is you imagine a film being played and you sort of pause the film in your head every 1/12th of a second or so and draw that still frameand I guess I'm curious if you have something like this going on where you might feel you fall closer to either side of this dichotomySW: Maybe closer to the second one. Its just not a film for me. I didnt watch too much film or grow up studying film, so my understanding of drawing doesnt come from thereIm just grasping at a scene I can be inJN: Sure, sorry I just mean video not necessarily live actionSW: Right, no I get itBut for me I picture the entire spaceI guess itd be less like a film and more like a 3D software?Im sure its not super uncommon to be able to just live in the space in your headJN: yea probably notSW: When I do my thumbnails youll usually see me redraw the same idea from a few different angles and then I just cut the things that dont work for meThose basically become my beats and then I use film rules to figure out how to connect themJN: so you have like a 3D sim of the whole scene in your head as you thumbnailSW: For lack of a better analogy, yeahI can look at it top down or from below, or I guess from any angle I want toThe one thing I cant do is change the camera lensI have to figure out focal length through experimentingJN: okay that's fucking interestingSW: Cause its not a camera for me, its the focal length of my eyeballJN: hmmm I mean it's kind of bizarre you can sort of frame step things because that's also something that your eyeballs can't doat least Im not confident that your brain processes things in frame ratesbut things* like smears and blurs do eyes to us...SW: Well Im not exactly frame stepping or whateverIts more like super smash brosJN: uhhhhhSW: Like you can pauseAnd move the camera aroundI did that all the time as a kidJN: I seeeeSW: And my pose to pose in animation also comes from experience. I used to only use straight aheadJN: I guess then if your imagination works like that one of the things i can imagine you having to adjust to is getting a sense for how long 1/12th or 1/24th or 1/8th of a second feels like in your imaginationSW: Well, actually I figure all that out laterLike I can make it faster or slower, but whats the pointYou knew right? I draw all my animation before timing it outJN: I didn't know that actuallySW: Oh. Maybe we never talked about thatI draw the entire thing on 1sAnd then I pick my timing laterMy brain naturally times things on 3s for 24fps, so I usually start by making the whole thing 6sAnd then I make it 8s for slower, 4s for fasterAnd if it felt right at 3s it just stays a 6The 3s thing is just because of how I developed. I used to animate almost exclusively on 3sJN: fascinatingcause if the poses look right it doesn't really matter how the timings differ it'll only change the pace at which the movements occur huhSW: ExactlyJN: if you play a video at 0.5x it still looks reaalisticSW: One day I was just like why am I starting and stopping drawing when its just gonna end up on 3s anywayI could just continue drawing without breaking my flow and worry about the rest laterIf your spacing is good your timing really becomes secondaryJN: I used to time it out as i drew so that as I flipped I could get a better sense of the timing of the whole animation so I could be better informed on how to decide the spacing for the next frame I was gonna drawI since abandoned it and animate like what you are describing nowSW: I think you just naturally end up here eventuallyThe old school style is to use the x sheet to time your drawings so it makes senseJN: rightthe other thing I was curious about is when you go to animate a scene how do you figure out whether to use animation camera illusions like background slide vs an actual camera over the canvasSW: Oh, that?Its usually just whether the characters feet are onscreenWith some exception but it ends up that way 90% of the timeA background slide is always a better option for production so I favor that whenever I canJN: so that doesnt occur to you in imagination it's just something you work out after you're done with that partSW: Well its something I work out while Im looking at the storyboard trying to figure out my layoutId rather not worry about really precise camera movements that someone else has to replicate later in AE, not to mention strobingAlthough I have plenty of tricks for getting around thatJN: ..you do??SW: And then if youre working with an Asian studio you probably need to think about paper and peg switching and its such a choreWell yeahLike for example I would do things like create a 4 frame camera movement for a 4 frame holdCant strobe if you just freeze the character in place long enough for the camera to zip past themI had someone try to rewrite my x sheet for that once, citing strobingAnd I was like did you actually look at this or what? JN: wait if im understanding it right you'd just animate the camera at 4 fps?SW: Well that was for a quick movementBut like, for a longer one you can use the same principleSay you need to make the camera pan quickly over the scene but its uhhh like 12 framesYou can plan your motion around that so it either holds longer in the middle or is on 1s just in the middleThe strobing only happens with the spacing is far enough for the eye to pick it up, right?So if the thing is barely moving when the camera is moving fast, no strobingAnd then when the camera slows down it can move againJN: that's smart as fuckyea that makes a lot of senseSW: Its just something I picked up on while I was fucking up hahaMost of what I do is because of some frustrationAnd trying to get around it without making more drawingsTruly I am the laziest animatorJN: uhhhhhSW: [emoji]Put that in your interview Links: Spencer Wan: Cara X TumblrWeilin Zhang: XDiscover more:Animation on Cara Cara Edit: Animation (2022)