Future

Despite having 90% of the market dominated by Japan and the US, the Chinese animation industry is in a unique position. The industry is growing significantly for the first time since the pre-cultural revolution days. The number of kids in mainland China exceed the US by about 80 million, and the technology gap between home and professional studios is narrowing. An example of a 1-person production with a successful fan base would be the 2002 Japanese anime Voices of a Distant Star. While this has been proven possible in Japan, China needs to figure out better ways to economically equip their youth, especially in a generation that might later be dominated by user-generated contents.

On the contrary, colleges in China are producing animation graduates and postgraduate students, but not in large numbers. China needs 150,000 talented animation experts for film and television and 100,000 for game animations, but there are just 300 animation majors graduating each year. SARFT have also announced it has opened up domestic cartoon industry to private investors as of late 2004. By 2005 the division has approved 15 animation production centers in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Dalian and other cities. Other trends like cosplay are picking up in animation festivals around mainland

Flash animation market

On September 15, 1999 FlashEmpire became the first flash community in China to come online. While it began with amateurish contents, it was one of the first time any form of user-generated contents was offered in the mainland. By the beginning of 2000, it averaged 10,000 hits daily with more than 5,000 individual work published. Today it has more than 1 million members
In 2001, Xiao Xiao, a series of flash animations about kung fu stick figures became an Internet phenomenon totaling more than 50 million hits, most of which in mainland China. It also became popular overseas with numerous international artists borrowing the Xiao Xiao character for their own flash work in sites like New Grounds.

On April 24, 2006 Flashlands.com was launched, hosting a variety of high quality flash animations from mainland China. The site is designed to be one of the first cross-cultural site allowing English speakers easy access to domestic productions. Though the success of the site has yet to be determined.
In October 2006, 3G.NET.CN paid 3 million RMB (about US$ 380,000) to produce A Chinese odyssey, the flash version of Stephen Chow's A Chinese Odyssey in flash format

Conventional animation market

From the demographics perspective, the Chinese consumer market has identified 11% of the audience are under the age of 13 with 59% between 14 to 17 and 30% over 18 years of age. Potentially 500 million people could be identified as cartoon consumers[6]. China also have 370 million children, one of the world’s largest animation audience[7].
From the financial perspective, Quatech Market Research surveyed ages between 14 to 30 in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and found that over 1.3 billion RMB (about US $163 million) was spent on cartoons every year, but more than 80% of the revenue flows straight out of the country. Further studies show that 60% still prefer Japanese anime, 29% prefer Americans, and just 11 percent favor those made by Chinese mainland, Taiwan or Hong Kong animators.
In 1999 Shanghai Animation Film Studio spent 21 million RMB (about US $2.6 million) producing the animation Lotus Lantern. The film earned a box office income of more than RMB 20 million (about US $2.5 million), but failed to capitalize on any related products. The same company shot a cartoon series Music Up in 2001, and although 66% of its profits came from selling related merchandise, it lagged far behind foreign animations

One of the most popular manhua in Hong Kong was Old Master Q. The characters were converted into cartoon forms as early as 1981, followed by numerous animation adaptations including a widescreen DVD release in 2003. While the publications remained legendary for decades, the animations have always been considered more of a fan tribute. And this is another sign that newer generations are further disconnected with older styled characters. Newer animations like My Life as McDull has also been introduced to expand on the modern trend.
In 2005 the first 3D CG-animated movie from Shenzhen China, Thru the Moebius Strip was debuted. Running for 80 minutes, it is the first 3D movie fully rendered in mainland China to premiere in the Cannes Film Festival[9]. It was a critical first step for the industry.

In November 2006 an animation summit forum was held to announce China's top 10 most popular domestic cartoons as Century Sonny, Tortoise Hanba's Stories, Black Cat Detective, SkyEye, Lao Mountain Taoist, Nezha Conquers the Dragon King, Wanderings of Sanmao, Zhang Ga the Soldier Boy, The Blue Mouse and the Big-Faced Cat and 3000 Whys of Blue Cat[10]. Century Sonny is a 3D CG-animated TV series with 104 episodes fully rendered.

Terminology

Chinese animations today can best be described in two categories. The first type are "Conventional Animations" produced by corporations of well-financed entities. These content falls along the lines of traditional 2D cartoons or modern 3D CG animated films distributed via cinemas, DVD or broadcasted on TV. This format can be summarized as a reviving industry coming together with advanced computer technology and low cost labor[3].
The second type are "Webtoons" produced by corporations or sometimes just individuals. These contents are generally flash animations ranging anywhere from amateurish to high quality, hosted publicly on various websites. While the global community has always gauged industry success by box office sales. This format cannot be denied when measured in hits among a population of 1.3 billion in just mainland China alone. Most importantly it provides greater freedom of expression on top of potential advertising.


Characteristics

In the 1920s, the pioneering Wan brothers believed that animations should emphasize on a development style that was uniquely Chinese. This rigid philosophy stayed with the industry for decades. And animations were essentially an extension of other facets of Chinese arts and culture, drawing more contents from ancient folkores and manhua. An example of a traditional Chinese animation character would be Monkey King, a character transitioned from the classic literature Journey to the West to the 1964 animation Havoc in Heaven. Though the concept of Chinese animations have began loosening up in recent years without locking into any particular one style. One of the first revolutionary change was in the 1995 manhua animation adaptation Cyber Weapon Z. The style consist of characters that are practically indistinguishable from any typical anime, yet it is categorized as Chinese animation. It can be said that productions are not necessarily limited to any one technique. That water ink, puppetry, computer CG are all demonstrated in the art.

Chinese Animation

Chinese animation are animations from China with increasing collaboration from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Unlike Japanese anime which developed a distinct style early on and multiplied globally, Chinese animations have only started to re-emerge to a more modern sense in recent years.

The history of Chinese animation began in 1918 when an animation piece from the US titled Out of the Inkwell landed in Shanghai. Cartoon clips were first used in advertisements for domestic products. Though the animation industry would not begin until the arrival of the Wan brothers in 1926. From the first film with sound The Camel’s Dance to the first film of notable length Princess Iron Fan, China was relatively on pace with the rest of the world. Though China's golden age of animation would come to a complete halt when the communist party of China led by Mao Zedong introduced the cultural revolution[1]. Many animators were forced to quit. If not for harsh economic conditions, the mistreatment of the red guard would threaten their work. The surviving animations would lean closer to propaganda. By the 1980s, Japan would emerge as the official animation powerhouse in the far east, leaving China's industry decimated in reputation and productivity. Though two major changes would occur in the 90s, igniting some of the biggest changes since the exploration periods. The first is a political change. The implementation of a socialist market economy would push out traditional planned economy systems[2]. No longer would a single entity limit the industry's output and income. The second is a technological change with the arrival of the Internet. New opportunities would emerge from flash animations and the contents became more open. Today China is drastically reinventing itself in the animation industry with greater influences from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Please Don't Wait Until the Last Minute

Your graduation is probably hinging on this demo reel, and when the stakes are that high, the odds of Murphy's infamous Laws honing in on your limited time will skyrocket exponentially. If it can go wrong, it will; your files will corrupt, your roommate will accidentally drop something heavy on the CDs containing your working files, your personal computer will crash, the school's computer labs will close early, every Wal-Mart, Target, and Office Depot within a fifty-mile radius will run out of blank CD-Rs, or you'll lose a crucial CD or zip disk in a moment of panic and not find it until you're red-eyed and terrified at 4 a.m. the morning that your reel is due. Your instructors will give you more than enough time, and will expect you to take advantage of it.

Don't disappoint them; in the end, you'll only be letting yourself down. Believe it or not, that's really all there is to it; it's just a matter of applying your artistic skills in a slightly different way. Seems simple, doesn't it? It can be. So start thinking about your demo reel now, and if you're still working your way towards that final point, it can't hurt to start keying your projects towards the compilation of that presentation piece. Good luck, and happy animating.

Plan Your Content's Sequence and Timing.

There's a lot to arranging your demo reel; it’s a matter of varying content between types (for example: 2D interspersed with 3D), of building up to a finale, of sequencing to your music. You want to arrange your clips so that your stronger samples support your weaker samples, but you also want to try to tell a story, and can at times cleverly arrange unrelated clips so that they seem to connect.

The best method is to get all of your clips together, and then arrange them in a program like Adobe Premiere. Play with them a bit; shift them around like puzzle pieces with your edited music track attached, until you're sure that you're happy with the arrangement and it has the impact and tells the story that you want. You should start off with something good to hook the audience, but not your best; blend back and forth between your better pieces, and the good-but-not-stunning pieces, so that you're displaying all of your work without losing them in long stretches of mediocrity with the best pieces only at the beginning and the end. Arrange your clips to build up to your finale, which should be your best piece; the last clip will be the final image that stays in the viewers' minds, and a large part of forming their final impression. You want to go out with a "bang", and leave them amazed

This is where your music will really help you. Once you've got your clips basically arranged, it really helps if you can start tweaking that arrangement, adding or removing frames here and there to shift things just enough so that key moments in the animation combine with key moments in the music track. It's a lot like orchestrating a cinematic soundtrack; if you're using a music track that has a long, thrumming crescendo leading up to a loud cymbal crash, you could time it with something a simple as a character jumping off of a building; the crescendo builds up the fall, and the impact of landing hits with the cymbal crash. Using your soundtrack in that fashion can really make your demo reel "snap", and turn it from a simple arrangement of clips into a dynamic, powerful music video.

Don't Be Afraid to Cut Your Work.

This can apply in two ways

first, don't be afraid to leave work that doesn't measure up off of the demo reel, completely. You don't have to include everything, and if you have weak material that may drag the rest of your reel down, just cut it entirely. If you're just using it as space-filler to meet the minimum length requirements, odds are it'll be pretty obvious and your audience will lose interest quickly.

Second, don't be afraid to cut even your best work. In the course of your school career, you'll probably produce content that could be two or three times the length of your final reel; find the moments in the work that you choose to present that display your skills in the best light, and clip them. You can even cut more than one piece from an animation, and space the parts out depending on where they fit best with your music. There's no need to agonize over just how you're going to fit that dramatic, minute-long scene of a slow camera pan over the same landscape. Cut just enough for viewers to get a good impression of the quality of the work, and move on.

Arranging Your Content

Choose Appropriate Content.

This, to me, is the most important thing to remember. Your friends and classmates may be impressed by the realistic textures applied to certain censored body parts, or by how well you penciled a hand-drawn sequence of the famous "lift and separate", or the amazing amount of detail involved in the bloody entrails splayed about in a two-minute grisly, pixelated bloodbath; employers, however, will not be. Nor will they look favorably on your animated tribute to your eternal devotion to whatever mind-alterations happened to get you through semester exams without bursting a vein; odds are they've seen it before, far too many times, and it will not leave a positive impression no matter how well it's animated. There's nothing wrong with having fun with your demo reel, and your animations; the majority of animation is about fun, but when preparing your demo reel, please try to keep it clean and family-friendly.

Professionalism doesn't just include the quality of your work; it includes the maturity to impose the appropriate restraints on the samples that you send to represent yourself. Remember that employers will see your demo reel long before they ever see you, and the content of that reel can cause them to form various impressions of you, both good and bad. Even video game companies that specialize in topless beach volleyball games will look for that professionalism in a reel; they'll be more interested, first, in how well you can maintain a work ethic in a professional environment. You can show them your fascinating technique for rendering bikini tan lines later--at the appropriate time.

Use a Soundtrack, and Use it Well.

You may be wary of setting your demo reel to music, but choosing the right soundtrack can make or break a reel; synching your animation clips to a music track can add a needed "punch" that can leave a real impact on viewers. Try to choose something that can be easily edited down to within your reel's time constraints; often tracks without words are better for this, and finding that right "cutoff point" within your allowed time range will probably end up deciding the final length of your reel. Try to use music with a clearly-defined beat, quick-paced and infectious without being jarring; a clear climax of the track can also help you use the music to string entirely unrelated clips of animation into a sequenced story with a beginning, middle, and end.

However, one thing to always remember when choosing music for your demo reel is the issue of copyright infringement. This is a very heated topic lately, as we all know, so I'll pass on the advice that of one of my old animation instructors gave to me:

Know Your Time Constraints.

Often your demo reel will be given to you as an assignment in a class devoted to completing the project in time for graduation; many schools impose time constraints within a certain range. I remember that my demo reel had to be at least a minute and a half long, but no more than two minutes; this is an average range, though some schools will go as high as three minutes. Later, you may be piecing together a new demo reel to meet submission guidelines for a specific employer or call-out, but no matter the reason, you should always check the minimum and maximum lengths of time allowed. This will help you plan your content, and how you will space it.

Preparing a Professional Demo Reel

The First Steps in Planning

For an animator, the demo reel is like that final exam in your senior year, complete with all of the extra work, stresses, and last-minute panics. And like the final exam, it can mean success or failure--not only in your education, but in your career. You've probably worked on a variety of projects during animation school, some fun, some not. But do you need to include every last one of those projects in your demo reel?

The answer, surprisingly, is no. While you may think that potential employers will be fascinated by an hour-long epic of every last product of your college career, trust me when I say that they won't be. On average, they'll sit through about of three minutes at the most, and they'll already have decided if they're interested or not in half that time. The rest is a waste of your time, and theirs; the most important thing about your demo reel is maximizing the impact of your reel while effectively utilizing the time provided. Let's go over a few things to keep in mind while preparing your first demo reel.

Story boarding

The storyboarding process, in the form it is known today, was developed at the Walt Disney studio during the early 1930s, after several years of similar processes being in use at Walt Disney and other animation studios.

Storyboards are graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of previsualizing a motion graphic or interactive media sequence, including website interactivity.

Usage

Film : A film storyboard is essentially a large comic of the film or some section of the film produced beforehand to help film directors, cinematographers and television commercial advertising clients visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur. Often storyboards include arrows or instructions that indicate movement

Animatics : In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage may be followed by simplified mock-ups called "animatics" to give a better idea of how the scene will look and feel with motion and timing. At its simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence. More commonly, a rough dialogue and/or rough sound track is added to the sequence of still images (usually taken from a storyboard) to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together.

Business : Storyboards were adapted from the film industry to business, purportedly by Howard Hughes of Hughes Aircraft. Today they are used by industry for planning ad campaigns, commercials, a proposal or other projects intended to convince or compel to action.
A "quality storyboard" is a tool to help facilitate the introduction of a quality improvement process into an organisation.
Design comics are a type of storyboard used to include a customer or other characters into a narrative. Design comics are most often used in designing web sites or illustrating product usage scenarios during design.

Interactive media : More recently the term "storyboard" has been used in the fields of web development, software development and instructional design to present and describe interactive events as well as audio and motion, particularly on user interfaces, electronic pages and presentation screens. An interactive media storyboard may be used in the graphical user interface for the user experience design of a website or interactive project as well as a visual tool for planning the content. In contrast, a site map or flow chart may be better to plan the information architecture, navigation, links, organization and total user experience, especially when the sequence of events is less predictable or the audiovisual change between events is of little design importance.

Gaming : Like all storyboarding uses on interactive media, it can be used for games to present the game's storyline

Advantages : One advantage of using storyboards is that it allows (in film and business) the user to experiment with changes in the storyline to evoke stronger reaction or interest. Flashbacks, for instance, are often the result of sorting storyboards out of chronological order to help build suspense and interest.
The process of visual thinking and planning allows a group of people to brainstorm together, placing their ideas on storyboards and then arranging the storyboards on the wall. This fosters more ideas and generates consensus inside the group

Phenakistoscope

The phenakistoscope (also spelled phenakistiscope) was an early animation device, the predecessor to the zoetrope. It was invented in 1831 simultaneously by the Belgian Joseph Plateau and the Austrian Simon von Stampfer.

One variant of the phenakistoscope was a spinning disc mounted vertically on a handle. Around the center of the disc a series of pictures was drawn corresponding to frames of the animation; around its circumference was a series of radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc's reflection in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images with the appearance of a motion picture (see also persistence of vision). Another variant had two discs, one with slits and one with pictures; this was slightly more unwieldy but needed no mirror. Unlike the zoetrope and its successors, the phenakistoscope could only practically be used by one person at a time.

The word "phenakistoscope" comes from Greek roots meaning "to cheat", as it deceives the eye by making the pictures look like an animation.
The Special Honorary Joseph Plateau Award, a replica of Plateau's original phenakisticope, is presented every year to a special guest of the Flanders International Film Festival whose achievements have earned a special and distinct place in the history of international film making.

History of animation

A flip book is a book with a series of pictures that vary gradually from one page to the next, so that when the pages are turned rapidly, the pictures appear to animate by simulating motion or some other change. Flip books are often illustrated books for children, but may also be geared towards adults and employ a series of photographs rather than drawings. Flip books are not always separate books, but may appear as an added feature in ordinary books or magazines, often in the page corners. Software packages and websites are also available that convert digital video files into custom-made flip books.

The first flip book appeared in September, 1868, when it was patented by John Barnes Linnet under the name kineograph ("moving picture"). They were the first form of animation to employ a linear sequence of images rather than circular (as in the older phenakistoscope). The German film pioneer, Max Skladanowsky, first exhibited his serial photographic images in flip book form in 1894, as he and his brother Emil did not develop their own film projector until the following year. In 1894, Herman Casler invented a mechanized form of flip book called the Mutoscope, which mounted the pages on a central rotating cylinder rather than binding them in a book. The mutoscope remained a popular attraction through the mid-20th century, appearing as coin-operated machines in penny arcades and amusement parks. In 1897, the English filmmaker Henry William Short marketed his "Filoscope", which was a flip book placed in a metal holder to facilitate flipping.