Animation Mentor is putting the student highlight back into the hands of the students themselves.  We let students create whatever they want – revealing themselves by sharing video, text, and anything else they feel is appropriate.  If you are currently an Animation Mentor student and you’d like to participate in this, send an email to newsletter (at) animationmentor.com and we’ll do our best to fit you in!

Anna Yeung - Class 6 - Short Film Production

Anna Yeung:
I always loved watching cartoons when I was growing up, especially the Disney ones. You don’t know how much I tortured my sisters watching The Little Mermaid so many times. When I was in high school I developed a talent for drawing portraits from pictures in magazines or of friends and family. I’m not sure where it came from because I didn’t take any formal classes.  Actually, I think it was because I made it a competition with my older sister to see who could draw better!  I mostly drew in pencil but then I gradually started using pastels when I got to college. Every once in a while somebody would ask me to draw them something, so my drawing skills didn’t totally go to waste. I liked drawing portraits but I wasn’t good at sketching or drawing the same thing over and over again so I didn’t think I could be an animator.

I always loved watching cartoons when I was growing up, especially the Disney ones. You don’t know how much I tortured my sisters watching The Little Mermaid so many times. When I was in high school I developed a talent for drawing portraits from pictures in magazines or of friends and family. I’m not sure where it came from because I didn’t take any formal classes.  Actually, I think it was because I made it a competition with my older sister to see who could draw better!  I mostly drew in pencil but then I gradually started using pastels when I got to college. Every once in a while somebody would ask me to draw them something, so my drawing skills didn’t totally go to waste. I liked drawing portraits but I wasn’t good at sketching or drawing the same thing over and over again so I didn’t think I could be an animator.

When I was in college, I decided I didn’t like graphic design anymore so I looked around for other things I could do. I thought about changing my major to animation because it seemed like it would be fun and around that time Monsters, Inc. was the coolest movie I’d seen in awhile. But I didn’t learn much about character animation in school. After college I wanted to make my own short but I never did get around to coming up with a story. I modeled a character and called her Big Head because her head is very big. Doesn’t look too much like me but there’s a slight resemblance. Sometimes my head feels big and heavy like hers too. That was also my first time rigging so the model got all messed up when I switched to a new version of Maya. I guess there’s no more Big Head until I find time to learn how to rig. At least now that I am going to Animation Mentor I can learn how to make a short and animate a character so maybe one day I can do something with Big Head.

Anna Yeung:
I want to be an animator. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small or big company as long as I’m animating and learning new things then it will be fun.

Anna Yeung:
It’s been really good. I learned a lot of stuff in class 1 about animation that I didn’t learn in college. I didn’t even know what an arc or what blocking was. It’s also good to have people who know about animation give you feedback because when I show something in blocking to my family, they just think it looks weird and choppy. They’re not really sure what they’re looking at.

Anna Yeung:
Planning is very important!!! I still need to work on that but planning and video reference is something you need to do before animating. Sometimes I’m impatient and just start animating without filming reference and it takes forever to get the shot to look right. It’s also really hard to make changes when you actually act it out later and find out you animated it totally wrong.

Anna Yeung:
Besides any scene from The Little Mermaid, my other favorite would be the scene from Monsters, Inc. when Mike and Sulley are hanging from the doors trying to find Boo’s door and there are so many doors moving along the machine.

Anna Yeung:
It’s great being a part of Animation Mentor. I’ve met some cool friends here and I hope I’ll get to work with them in the future.