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!
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!
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! 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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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! Our Final Table Read!
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! 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! 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! 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. 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! 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. “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!
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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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! 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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January 2025
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