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.