<![CDATA[Asians in Animation - Updates]]>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 06:21:36 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) – April 2025]]>Thu, 01 May 2025 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.asiansinanimation.org/4p-updates/production-memo-pilot-pre-production-program-4p-april-2025
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Can you believe it? If you want proof that time really flies, here's a shocker – we've reached our very last monthly TEA update!

Much like the finale of every crew project, this month has been all about taking a deep breath, wrapping things up, celebrating with a well-deserved screening party, and handling those final cleanups. Let's dive into how we've spent our last month together!

Crew Screening
This was THE moment everyone had been looking forward to since day one! More than 70 excited crew & cast gathered virtually and in person for the celebration. Take a look at our lovely photos where we united for tears, laughter, and watching together what we've been pouring our hearts into for months!

Thank you Titmouse Burbank for hosting us!
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Announcing...
Okay, now we have a confession to make... we've been deliberately holding back while sharing our artwork during these past few months. Why? For our official announcement!

Introducing to you the title of our show and the characters of the world of… Tea Leaves Last!
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Introducing...
Meet the characters we’ve been crafting and living with—and how we express our love towards them every chance we get:

(Mild Spoilers Ahead...)
And the best part of lovable characters… crew fan art!
By Claire H. Chong
By Nichole Isip
Yeah… we occasionally (constantly) have fun with them as well!

Within the past 8 months, our crew of 107 members have worked a total of 15,141+ hours! This equals almost 2 years of straight working, if one person were working endlessly 24 hours a day!! Throughout this time, we’ve created 338 assets (characters, backgrounds, props and effects) across 1401 different versions, and 4334 storyboard panels that made it to the final cut!

We’ve gained other treasures: invaluable experience in animation pre-production that you simply can't get from textbooks or tutorials alone. The intensive, collaborative environment we created truly mimicked a real animation studio, complete with deadlines, feedback sessions, and the creative problem-solving that happens when talented minds come together! We did it - and we’re so proud of that!!

What's next?
While most of the crew will be moving on to new adventures, many of them will stay for roughly another month to finish the final touches of marketing materials, sound and music and help with remaining wrap-ups! 

What’s more, we’re beyond thrilled to share that we have an online release of the final work scheduled on May 21st! 

We’ll be taking what we’ve worked so hard behind the scenes to the public - we hope that’s as exciting for you as it is for us!! 

Final Thoughts
Our program belongs to Asians in Animation (AIA), a community-powered non-profit organization dedicated to the celebr-Asian and support of the ​Asian animation community. We develop programs and organize events that are all about giving up-and-coming Asian animation professionals real-world experience to help them build the skills they need to succeed in the industry. If you want to receive the latest updates, make sure to follow our instagram!

Lastly, we’d like to thank YOU for accompanying us through this unforgettable journey. The animation industry we love has had its ups and downs, but that's exactly why communities like what we’ve cultivated matter more than ever – we're in this together, supporting each other, and creating opportunities even when the path gets rocky. Shows and projects will end, but we wave goodbye with smiles, and carry the memories, lessons, and connection forward…

Until we meet again (hopefully soon)!

With love and gratitude,
AIA 4P Production Program Team
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By Po Kei Nicole Wong
]]><![CDATA[Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) – March 2025]]>Wed, 26 Mar 2025 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.asiansinanimation.org/4p-updates/production-memo-pilot-pre-production-program-4p-march-2025
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Happy March, everyone—It’s time to share our progress so far!

First, let’s start with the biggest highlights of the month: the Clean Pitch, onboarding our new color artists, and overall, the beginnings of the animatic build. Read more about our major milestones plus exciting sneak peaks of our process below!

Storyboards
Congrats to the Story team for their hard work for the Clean Pitch! The boards are looking amazing, things are shaping up! As we enter the Animatic phase, our Board Artists and Revisionists will be continuing to address notes while elevating the boards!
By Hye Lynn Park
By Hye Lynn Park
 By Xena Seo
 
By Dee Thater
By Dee Thater
By Elizabeth Hwang
Edit

Speaking of Animatic—our Edit team will be hard at work working with the Story team in cutting together boards and prepping the Animatic V1 build!

Design

For Design, Production has been assessing our Design needs as we head into our last few weeks of the in the Pre-Design phase, and prepping for the official Design phase! We’ve based our Design Breakdown off our Clean Pitch animatic and have launched all artists on remaining assets, which leads to a very exciting announcement: we have officially onboarded our final batch of artists, the Color Team! A warm welcome to our new members, bringing our TEAm over 100 people total!

We’ve also been busy this month with color and render tests. Playing with color style and exploring the look of the show has been a blast– here are some sneak peaks!
BG by Clair Huang
BG Paint by Seah Kim
BG by Benjamin Arnold
BG Paint by Lin Jin
BG by Benjamin Arnold
BG Paint by Seah Kim
Music & Sound

While we’ve been working hard with the visual aspect of TEA, we’ve also received our first pass on the main melody and lyrics for the opening number! And have started sourcing SFX for the episode. We can’t wait to put everything together.

Records

And on the topic of sound, Pickups/ADR/Efforts have started! ADR and Pickups is the process of “dubbing” in lines after the animation is done (boards in this case).

With so many new and exciting updates, we can’t wait for the next one! We’re getting into the home stretch!

See you then!
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]]><![CDATA[Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) – February 2025]]>Fri, 28 Feb 2025 19:12:29 GMThttps://www.asiansinanimation.org/4p-updates/production-memo-pilot-pre-production-program-4p-february-2025
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Welcome, welcome! It’s that time again, where we spill the tea and share our excitement!

The big moment this month was our Rough Boards Pitch, which took place during the second week. As our storyboards hit this milestone, all other departments were able to build off this accordingly. Get ready for your monthly update below!

Storyboards

On February 6th, members across all departments gathered to watch the entire episode as rough boards! And here’s the scoop: it has 14 sections and a total duration of around 40 minutes! The timing is still a work in progress, but our teams will keep tweaking it to ensure we’re telling the full story in the most effective way!

For many of our crew members, this was their first time seeing the story visually come together—seeing how the art and records they’ve worked on behind the scenes now sync up with the story to create a complete experience. It was an incredibly exciting day—no surprise there!

Next, the Story department took a brief breather and then jumped right into cleaning up and refining their boards. We have another milestone straight ahead: Clean Boards Pitch at the end of this month. By then, we’ll get an even clearer picture of how our story is shaping up, but we’ll save the rest of the details for next month’s update!

Design: Pre-Design

Here’s an example of how time flies: it feels like we’ve just waved goodbye to Visual Development, and now the Pre-Design is counting down! To better plan for the remainder of this period, our Production team quickly jumped into action, completing an early design breakdown based on the Rough Boards Pitch. With the breakdown and a report on our current progress, the team now has a clearer view of where we stand in relation to our goals, and has adjusted our game plan accordingly to bridge that gap.

We’re seeing more and more pieces enter the clean-up and coloring stages (54 approvals so far!). For this month’s featured designs, we’ve decided to do a special foodie edition! Bon appétit on the delicious bites from TEA world!

Tray of Bao & Pastries
By Genna Davis
Falooda
By Ginny Sutichavengkul
Dried Sour Plums & Sunflower Seeds
By Ginny Sutichavengkul
Dosa, Paratha, Pakora & Digestives
By Henry Nguyen and Claire Chong
We’ve also started building our Color Script to explore a visual guide of the mood and tone of each scene! Here’s a peek at some of our progress: (Some scenes blocked out to avoid spoilers!)
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Writing

After the rough pitch, we took another look at the script to do light dialogue re-writes to help the story and characters work even better now that we have visuals. We also did our final pass on writing some bonus material that we hope to get to after the pilot.

Editorial

More launches after our Rough Pitch! The Editorial, Music and Records team held various Launches + Spotting Sessions, during which our team went through the rough stringout together and identified spots needing SFX, lines needing pickups, and music. They’ve also started building an SFX library based on the SFX breakdown in preparation of later animatic builds.

We also did our second round of Scratch, or temporary dialogue based on some light re-writes or acting shifts needed for boards.

Music

After our music spotting session, we have a clearer picture and comps of what our score will sound like. We’re still at work developing our opening titles song for now!

More

Some more good news! We’re wrapping up our latest round of artist & trainees recruitment, welcoming 3 for the BG team, 2 for Characters, 1 PR/FX Designer, 3 BG Painters, and 4 for the Color Stylist team. This brings us to our current numbers…

  • Production Team: 11 Crew + 3 Trainees
  • Writing: 6 Writers + 6 Summit
  • Art: 33 Crew + 5 Trainees
  • Story: 16 Artists/Revisionists
  • Cast: 14 Cast 
  • Edit: 4 Crew
  • Additional: 6 in other roles

Bringing us to 105 members of the TEA-m!

We’ve been gradually onboarding our new artists with the help of the Program team, and we can’t wait to see what our expanded crew brings to the table as we gear up for the Design phase! Plus, our total working hours have officially passed 7000—huge thanks to everyone for every single hour contributed, side by side, as one awesome team!

We’ll see you all next month!
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]]><![CDATA[Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) – January 2025]]>Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:00:00 GMThttps://www.asiansinanimation.org/4p-updates/production-memo-pilot-pre-production-program-4p-january-2025
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Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) – January 2025 – Asians in Animation

A new year brings new leaves! AND, new updates on TEA. We’re starting 2025 with a bang and can’t wait to share with you all the exciting news!

Casting & Records

Proudly introducing our fanTEAstic cast on ‘TEA,' alongside sketches from our Art and Story teams. 
We're still using codenames publicly for now, but will introduce you to the characters soon!
CAST

“Outsider” - Maxine Serna 
“Noble” - Rebecca Danae
“Artisan”  - Kelsey Jaffer
“Pirate” - Zoe D. Lee
“Pet” - Jon Lu
“Tourist” - Saira Umar
Maid Servant - Stephanie Sim
Servant #2 - Madeline Dimuyaga
“Outsider Parents” - Cheryl CHong & Allen Chan
“Noble Parents” - Mimi Chen & Marlon Dance-Hooi
Crew Members - Elijah Kim, Jon Lu
Soldier - Marlon Dance-Hooi
“Warrior” - Preston Yeung
“Idol” - Alex Bui
In the Booth with Maxine Serna, Marlon Dance-Hooi, Kelsey Jaffer, Kim Quach, Saira Umar & Stephanie Sim
As we mentioned in our November update, we reviewed over 120 talented applicants to find the perfect voices to bring our characters to life! With our incredible voice actors taking the mic, we also started piecing together their performances to shape the audio foundation of our story through editing!

Which brings us to another huge milestone this month: our amazing team of Editors (Jon Dorais, Lucy Hoa Skrypzak, Sophie Martinez, Dorian Saisse & Trainee Anna Maria Folsom) went through thousands of takes of lines, and exported 400+ files to create our Radioplay (an audio version of the animatic with all the lines that the board artists can work to)!

Design: Pre-Design has started!

With Visual Development officially wrapped, our artists have jumped straight into Pre-Design. As usual, some summary stats first!
  • 8 new artists onboarded
  • 140+ new submissions
  • 8 rounds of reviews
  • 30+ new approvals

During Pre-Design, our artists built on the approved vis-devs, included turns, facial expressions and details of characters, front-back/4-angle layouts of backgrounds, turnarounds for props, and added color to the clean designs. 

Storyboards

Story Team had the biggest milestone of all! This month, we launched our 8 board artists and 3 trainees on their sequences. Our journey of storyboarding began at the second week of January. From then, we’ve had our thumbnail pitch, 4 rounds of thumb/rough reviews, and are amazed by the wonderful efforts our artists put in their sections from the very first round of submission!
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Thumbnail Boards by Vivian Le
Meanwhile, our 7 Revisionists started on their own exercises of drawing and posing the characters. From our VA announcement video above, you can already see their work in action! These sketches are bursting with life and charm, capturing the essence of each character and setting the stage for future storyboard revisions!

More

Our work doesn’t stop here! Here’s a look at what the rest of the team has been up to—

Music - We’ve locked in our character motifs, composed by Sarah Linyao Feng and you can get a sneak peek below! 👂Stay tuned—there’s plenty of beautiful music on the way!

Noble Motif | Artisan Motif

Production - Our team structure just got a boost! We’ve officially onboarded trainees, refined our workflow with clearer divisions, and introduced a pairing system to keep things running smoothly. While production work isn’t always at the front, we want to give a huge shoutout to the team working tirelessly behind the scenes to keep everything on track!

Crew Update & 2025 Look Ahead

This month, our total crew & cast size reached 93, with 4000+ total working hours logged. It hasn’t been the smoothest ride, with wildfires and storms in LA and Southern California affecting many of our team members. But through it all, we’ve looked out for each other—sharing shelter updates, news, and support to get through the challenges together.

Despite the extra hurdle, we’ve been making sure to keep the fun. Crew hangouts are still happening regularly, with Tea Personality quizzes, travel tips, and hobbies like sewing and calligraphy keeping the vibe lively. The TEA crew fosters a collaborative environment where both creative energy and friendship thrive. We’re eager to see what comes next.

See you next month!
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]]><![CDATA[Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) – December 2024]]>Tue, 24 Dec 2024 20:37:41 GMThttps://www.asiansinanimation.org/4p-updates/production-memo-pilot-pre-production-program-4p-december-2024
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Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) – December 2024 – Asians in Animation

The end of the year is near, and we’re wrapping up some milestones here at 4P—full steam ahead with plenty of exciting updates to share!

Big headline first: as of December 12th, we locked the Record Draft of our script, coming in at a tight 33 pages!

Casting & Records

Another one of our biggest announcements this month: our voice actors have been cast! Stay tuned to next month's update to meet them!

We’re already feeling the fresh energy their incredible performances brought to the table, both during auditions, callbacks, and at our final table read where some of our newly onboarded voice actors acted as their own characters!

We’ve also got our cast in full swing, diving straight into records, knocking out 18 sessions in just two weeks, directed by Voice Director, Topher Ngo. Our mighty editors have been working to help pull selects and edit audio down to prep for our radioplay build next year!
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Our Final Table Read!

Visual Development Wrapped!

Our design team is putting the final touches on their first phase work, and we’re officially wrapping up Visual Development! To give you a behind-the-scenes look at the effort, here’s a breakdown of the hard work that went into this phase:

  • 15 rounds of reviews
  • 90 assets
  • 501 submissions/versions in this phase
And just like that, we’ve reached the end of Vis Dev and are ready to dive into Pre-Design! The canvas is primed, the ideas are flowing, and we can’t wait to jump into the exciting challenges ahead! Bring on the next chapter!
CH Design by Flo Young
CH Design by Kelly Chen
CH Design by Claire Chong
CH Design by Seline Abanto
CH Design by Riana Seminio
BG Design by Ben Arnold
BG Design by Robin Wong
BG Design by Clair Huang
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Storyboards

Now, let’s talk about the Story Team! This month, we welcomed a new group of storyboard artists and trainees, making our team a solid 12 strong. Under the lead of our talented Director Hye Lynn Park, the team kicked things off with some casual character sketches to warm up. Now, they're dividing and conquering 20 beatboards, each representing a key story moment from the script. 

We’ll also be bringing on revisionists in the new year!

See below how we’ve been gradually bringing our narrative to life!
Beat Board by Rebe Chen
Beat Board by Xena Seo
Beat Board by Hye Lynn Park
Beat Board by Riana Seminio
More

We’ve also been diving into Music, developing character motifs, brainstorming opening theme ideas, and discussing how to weave early music explorations into the current storyboarding process. 

Behind the scenes, our Production Team has been the glue holding it all together—keeping meetings on track, assets organized, and conversations flowing smoothly. They’re the engine powering our progress, and it’s no easy job making sure nothing slips through the cracks! 
Finally, the cherry on top: we’ve been having an expanding Observation Deck, offering more aspiring animation folks a front-row seat to learn the ins and outs of studio-standard pre-production. Here at AIA, we’re committed to nurturing the next wave of industry talent—one step, one opportunity at a time.

Crew Update & Holiday Cheer!

This month, we’ve welcomed new crew members across color styling, editing, assistant editing, and IT support. That brings our total crew & cast size to 78! Alongside the hard work (1500+ total hours this month!), we've been enjoying some casual hangouts where we share personal updates and geek out over the shows that inspire us, games we’ve been playing, and more!

As the year draws to a close, the team is taking a well-deserved break starting late December to recharge and enjoy the holiday season. We want to end 2024 by sending out a big thank you to everyone for their commitment and dedication, and we’re looking forward to regrouping in the new year with fresh energy and new goals!

Our story continues… See you in 2025!
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]]><![CDATA[Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) - November 2024 – Asians in Animation]]>Thu, 28 Nov 2024 06:00:02 GMThttps://www.asiansinanimation.org/4p-updates/production-memo-pilot-pre-production-program-4p-november-2024-asians-in-animation
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Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) – November 2024 – Asians in Animation

This month has been a whirlwind of creativity, collaboration, and, well, a lot of tea (you’ll see what we mean). We’re brewing up something special—let’s break it down!

About the Show, “TEA”

Logline: “When a society built on tea trade and consumption is threatened by a mysterious company, a young outsider must gather the exclusive Houses of Tea as allies to revitalize ceremonial tea magic.”

How it Started

Fresh off of the success of Asians in Animation’s inaugural talent incubator, the AIA Immersive Lab, the Asians in Animation Pilot Pre Production Program (4P) was greenlit at the beginning of September. 

The goal? To expose talent to industry processes by taking a 100% original AIA-made series IP from concept to a ready-for-production animatic. 

Running October 2024 to May 2025, participants will get hands-on experience in an animation industry simulation, ultimately working together to create a professional-level pilot animatic with a full production crew.

To pilot this new pilot program, Asians in Animation Creative Chair and incoming Chief Creative Officer, Saira Umar, stepped into the Showrunner/Executive Producer role and Asians in Animation Creative Director and incoming Head of Production, Alice Jiang as the Producer.
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After two whirlwind weeks of preparing our production documents and templates, building the production calendar, opening applications and building an animation writers room, we were ready to launch the program!
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Writers’ Room

September 28th was the first day of our Writer’s Room! At our first Story Summit, Saira Umar (Showrunner) and Stephanie Sim (Story Editor) fielded ideas from 13 summit members, who pitched 13 different concepts, from which we selected and developed our top 3, resulting in TEA (our public facing title.)

The initial pitch? A “tea-themed magical girl show,” described as Sailor Moon meets Bridgerton.
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“Tea-themed magical girls in a regency/period setting! Just before her debut tea party that marks her entrance into society, MC shatters her family's priceless heirloom teapot! If she wants to impress her fellow debutantes, she needs a new tea set, and quick. She visits an antique store and accidentally acquires a MAGIC teapot. At her tea party, MC and her friends become Tea Time Magical Girls!” 

We’ve definitely strayed very far from this idea, but the same spark of Tea Magic remains! We were excited to lean further into historical inspiration and more mature themes as the pilot evolved.  
After several rounds of outlining and refining, we hit a major milestone on November 18th: our first full draft table read!
 
The script is currently in revisions, and should be done mid-December!
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Building the Crew
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Recruiting for 4P was no small feat, with over 200 applicants ranging from fresh talent to seasoned pros, including:

  • Story (50+)
  • Design (80+)
  • Production (~40)
  • Music/SFX, Editorial, Casting Lead, and the Program team​

Our team of reviewers and artistic leads carefully sifted through portfolios, websites, resumes, and some seriously impressive application responses. So far, we’ve interviewed over 80 candidates and welcomed 42 crew members aboard. The Story & Art departments are still rounding out their teams, but the crew’s shaping up to be TEA-riffic!
Visual Development

Now for the eye candy. We’re halfway through our Vis Dev period and are cheerfully seeing the world of TEA come to life! Our 15 artists have gone above and beyond, bringing an impressive 257 (and counting!) pieces of art within the past month!

Art by Seungmin Oh and Vy-Anh Nguyen
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“Noble” was our most competitive role with over 50 auditions!
Casting
We received 120 auditions across 15 roles (with most people  auditioning for at least 2-3 roles), for a total of 260+ file submissions!
A small team went through and “blinded” every single submission, so that the casting team, led by Casting & Voice Director, Topher Ngo, could review all submissions without any bias or recognition of names for the first round.
Once we have our initial picks, we plan to then unblind the applications and review them holistically, as well as callback and interview top candidates in the coming weeks.
Our cast will be selected around the start of December!
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Other departments are crushing it too! We’ve whipped up beat boards and started crafting music motifs for the show and its characters. Oh, and speaking of effort—our team has already clocked an astounding 2200+ hours in the last two months across 36 reporting crew members!
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With so much momentum and creativity fueling 4P, we’re beyond excited to see what’s next. Stay tuned—there’s plenty more magic behind the scenes!
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