He is a Chinese animator who won the American Student Oscar! Let's take a look at this work first!
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Who is this animator?
Cheng Teng
Beijing animator, currently lives in Los Angeles, USA
In 2007, he entered the School of Digital and Media Arts of Communication University of China
In 2010, he created an animated short film Red Scarf Man
In 2011, he created a happy graduation design anniversary, and won the Best Director Award of the Aniwow International College Animation Festival, the Best Director Award of the Beijing Film Academy Academy Award, and the Special Award of the Open Recruitment Department of the Tokyo Animation Awards
In 2012, he entered the University of Southern California's School of Film and Television Arts as a graduate student in the Department of Animation
In 2014, he completed the animated short film Higher Sky and won the Silver Medal in the student Academy Award animation unit
Past, present, and future related to animation
Compared with the predecessors who have been fighting in the industry for many years, my animation path is quite bland. Almost always in the state of the student. I didn't enter the rivers and lakes much, but at most I stepped on the water by the lake.
My junior high school and high school are all in art schools, junior high school is Xu Beihong Middle School, high school is the Attached Middle School of Arts and Crafts, which is considered to be an art student of Gen Zheng Miao Hong. When I applied for the art major in my third year of high school, I read a lot of advanced names such as industrial design, visual communication, and digital media, and found that I didn't understand what these majors had to do with my insight at that time. At this time, I heard about the animation major, and realized that this was the only major I could understand the name, so I happily decided.
In fact, at the beginning, my first choice was the Beijing Film Academy, and the professional examination was also very smooth at that time. As a result, the day before the deadline for filling in the volunteer form, I learned that a female classmate of my favorite named Liang Fan was going to the Communication University of China. In order to chase after my sister, I resolutely changed my first choice to a middle pass. This is my first step in my relationship with animation.... Later, I also began to associate with Liang Fan in college, and after graduation, I came to Los Angeles to study abroad, cooperated with almost all of my animation works, and now I am married.
Cheng Teng and Liang Fan media college graduate photos
I was admitted to the Communication University of China in 2007. At first, I was actually quite inferior, because I found that the students around me knew a lot about animation, and the students in the same dormitory began to discuss the topic of the pen tablet model on the first day of school, and I didn't even hear of photoshop because I didn't touch the computer at home. At this time, I met a classmate named Li Xia, who was a very important friend and noble person in my life. Li Xia is a super pervert who has been drawing his own film and television storyboard since junior high school. And there is a particularly strong creative ambition and realization. A lot of my technical skills about animation, the narrative ideas were explored under his leadership.
Both of our families are in Beijing, so they often hang out during the holidays and think about how to change the world. In my sophomore year, the Animation Department of the Communication University happened to be running a business called Aniwow! During the International College Animation Festival, we took advantage of the summer vacation to use flash to grope and make a 40-second opening animation for the event. Although it is now a work that is too rough to look at directly, it was still admired by teachers and classmates at that time. So we were encouraged to work on a full short film with a more beautiful picture and a serious story. At that time, because none of the students had formal filmmaking experience, and not too many people were optimistic about this project, the whole production process was full of hardships. At that time, we both moved out of the school dormitory because we had to go to class during the day so that we could work all night. It took a year under various difficult conditions to complete this 5 minute and 30 second short film and named it "The Red Scarf Man".
Although the hardships of this year have turned our health into a pool of paste, fortunately, after being posted online in 2010, Red Scarf Man received unexpected attention. The film has also won many awards in the domestic category. More importantly, this film not only familiarized me with the overall process of animation production, but also honed my heart as a creator.
After "The Red Scarf Man", we ushered in the graduation project of the undergraduate, and Li Xia and I chose to achieve different works because of the themes and concepts we wanted to try. I worked with Liang Fan on the graduation project. Because we had just been dating at that time, in the bumps and bumps, we were deeply touched by the difference between the ideologies of men and women, and I wanted to make an animation related to this. So in 2012, he made a short film of more than 8 minutes, "Happy Anniversary".
↑ "Happy Anniversary", remember to open the wifi
Tokyo Animation Festival received the award
In the production of The Happy Anniversary, I gradually discovered that the works I wanted to pursue were works that could not be limited by regional culture and age differences, and that they were simply films that anyone could accept and appreciate. I realized that to achieve this I needed not only to hone my strength further, but also to reach out to completely different artists and audiences. I wanted to find a place I hadn't been to before, preferably with a completely different ideology and values from China. Then I found out that this place was Los Angeles, which was separated from Beijing by the whole earth.
So in 2012, I went to Los Angeles with Liang Fan to graduate school in animation, and I went to the University of Southern California, the School of Cinematic Art (School of Film and Television Arts of the University of Southern California). Liang Fan went to the University of California, Los Angeles.
USC is a very good school, and the film school is often ranked first in the United States. (The first film and television category in the United States to change every year, but generally IT is the USC and New York University that sit in shifts) The biggest inspiration I received here is to explore and find my own themes and directions, and to think about what I can do better than others. In fact, in my previous undergraduate work, I have always tried not to include too many unique Chinese cultural symbols in my works, because I always feel that once I do things with Chinese themes, then my audience will be limited to Orientals, which is contrary to my desire to do works with breadth. However, my education in the United States made me realize that as a Chinese, my 20 years of knowledge and understanding of Chinese culture is my unique field. If We can package China's unique culture into a form that audiences around the world can understand, it will be the most successful.
With this in mind, in 2013 I designed my first martial arts kung fu animated short film after I came to USC, Higher Sky. I put the Chinese-American style and Chinese philosophical ideas that I did not dare to touch before into this film. Then spend a lot of time deconstructing and reorganizing them. A year later, Higher Sky was completed in May 2014.
This film has been fortunate to receive attention and praise from many parties, and it has also been recognized by the student Oscars, and I am happy that Western audiences can accept what I have passed on.
In early 2014, during the production of Higher Sky, I received a call from Joe Anguilar, who was a Producer at DreamWorks and Head of Creative Department at Oriental Dreamworks. Joe said that he had been following my work for a year, and that he had gone to Hangzhou as a special guest to attend the Golden Monkey Award ceremony, and thought he could see me, but I didn't show up. (In hindsight, it was actually because my girlfriend and I had been eating and playing wildly in Hangzhou for 5 days before the awards ceremony, plus the heat of the day, which led to the illness on the day of the awards ceremony.) Now that I'm in Los Angeles, I can recommend an internship at DreamWorks in the United States. So I did a 6-month internship at DreamWorks as a storyboard artist, working with Vicky Jenson, director of Shrek 1, on a storyboard for a DreamWorks movie. It was a rare experience, working in such an extremely regulated large enterprise, which gave me a lot of experience in large groups of workflows.
With these experiences in mind, I started my graduate project at the end of 2014, knowing that this might be the last work of my student years, I decided to abandon the style I was already familiar with and put together everything I wanted to try on this graduation design.
It's an American black comedy. In a 3D and live-action animation style, the director is two people, me and one of my classmates, Brian Rhodes, a muscular macho man who is 7 years older than me but mentally younger than me. The film is about a mother and daughter of mosquitoes, the mother is the most skilled blood hunter in the mosquito group, and the daughter is a rebellious young man who has just come of age. The whole story is a series of accidents triggered by a mother mosquito teaching her daughter that mosquitoes hunt human blood for the first time. Except for the two protagonists, mosquitoes are 3D, the others are shot live. Most of my previous works were small teams or individual works. There are many team members, and the maximum number of people on the shooting scene is close to 200. So this project was a big challenge for me, a student who didn't have much executive experience, and of course, it did give me a lot of ability to improve.
Regarding the current situation; I graduated from the University of Southern California in May this year, and although the film has been handed in as a graduation project, Brian and I still have a lot of dissatisfaction with the details, so we are still using the free time at work to refine the film. After that, there may be many things such as screenings and competitions, and it should be some time before the film is posted online. I'm currently working with Avi Arad (producer of the Fantastic Spider-Man series, Iron Man films, and creative director of Marvel's film and television division) to work on a new 3D animated film he produces. This is an original superhero film directed by Peter Ramsey (who directed the Guardians League, worked as a story director and storyboard artist to produce Fight Club and Men in Black 1).
In addition, at the invitation of Joe Anguilar, I may return to Shanghai early next year to participate in the oriental dreamworks animation project.
About USC (USC)
Then let me briefly introduce USC~
There are three years of graduate students in the Animation Department of USC, and there are 15 people in the same class plus one exchange student from Taiwan every year (the exchange student is only one year old). Each student has his own work room in the school, there is a rendering machine room editing room and a recording studio downstairs, and basically at the end of each semester, everyone stays up late in school.
The courses of USC graduate students are generally very close, except for three years to do 3 more complete films. The amount of homework per week is also quite large, for example, in the first semester, there are two courses to cut the classwork is to make a 1-minute short film.
I think there are opinions about this arrangement, in fact, I personally do not particularly like it, because for graduate students with a certain foundation, so much creative volume will make me have no time to study innovation, and I can only repeat what I am good at. In contrast, I prefer to sink my heart and slowly sculpt a work. I feel like this is also a greater improvement for myself.
However, this is to say that the school is a very good place, the school here pays great attention to teaching according to the aptitude, and the teacher generally only talks about some basics, general, and then spends a long time teaching with students one-on-one after class. The professor here pays special attention to the students' own ideas when making suggestions, and will never mention opinions that contradict the students' original ideas, basically only adding branches and leaves to your original ideas. Even students can make their own demands on the teaching course schedule, and then the teacher will make some immediate modifications according to your requirements.
In addition, I am very touched by this side, that is, the school here pays special attention to teaching and assisting students to establish networks with people in the industry. Nanga is one of the most closely connected schools in the industry that I know, and it is also close to Hollywood, so it can be said that it is close to the water building. The school schedule constantly arranges opportunities for students to meet with industry insiders, such as the weekly seminar class, which is a class that all students in the department take for three years, and the weekly main speaker is a professional invited from the industry outside the school, from freelance artists to Disney directors to animation film directors. (In fact, every time a new animated movie is about to be released, the film's creator will appear at seminal, tell various behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and do publicity by the way.) In addition, the school will have one or two master classes every semester, that is, to invite a professional in the industry to come to the school for a whole semester of classes. I took two master classes in three years at USC, one was dreamworks head of layout, Gil Zimmerman, and the other was the famous Korean animation director Peter Chung, both of which benefited me a lot, and also established off-campus contacts with these two teachers, especially after Peter gave me a lot of help outside the school and invited me to participate in his TV animation in Nickelodeon. During my work at DreamWorks, he also introduced me to Jennifer Yuh Nelson, a Korean-American female director of Kung Fu Panda 2, and was really flattered at the time.
In addition, USC also holds various industry events every one or two weeks, screenings, studio days and so on. There is even a compulsory course dedicated to teaching students how to design their own business cards, resumes, personal websites, how to talk to people at parties, and sell themselves...
In short, under this initiative of the school, basically in a few years, students will have their own huge network, and in the classroom environment, the network between classmates can integrate with each other and develop a larger network. This is really helpful for students to enter the society after graduation. In fact, animation is originally a job that requires immersion, and most animators have some ingenuity behind closed doors. Often the energy is taken into account social activities, so the help of the school in this regard is very much needed. I think USC has done a really good job of this.
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