|
Our feature is flying into its final stretch this month and we can’t wait to share many exciting updates about storyboards, design, production, music, and editing! Story Team After many weeks of creativity, collaboration, and countless iterations, our story team has officially wrapped! The journey began with our story artists pitching rough storyboard sequences, exploring the film’s pacing, emotion, and comedy. Following the Rough Pitch, they refined those ideas and began to clean up their storyboards: sharpening the acting, staging, and cinematography while incorporating feedback from each weekly review. Once the sequences were locked, our incredible revisionists jumped in to help polish every frame for final delivery, ensuring the animatic was in its strongest state. It truly took the dedication and talent of the entire team to bring this animatic to life. A huge congratulations and thank you to our unstoppable team of story artists – Ashley Hua, Serena Lee, Bianca Nassar, Katie Wang, Jenny Yi, Jenny Wu, and, of course, Head of Story, Al Teng – and revisionists – Schantelle Alonzo, Stella Kim, Sophie Ludes, Chloe Pineda, and Emily Chao – for their hard work, craftsmanship, and commitment throughout every stage of the process.  Art by Andy Xiaoxia Jiang Design While the Story team brought the film to life through the animatic, our Design team has been hard at work shaping the visual identity of the project. From developing the beautiful backgrounds featured throughout the animatic to creating expressive character poses that capture each character’s dynamic personality, every piece of art they’ve created has helped define the world of the film. The team is also hard at work creating key art work for our pitch deck, including posters and other marketing materials that communicate the heart and tone of the story. Their creativity, attention to detail, and ability to balance stunning details with thoughtful storytelling and worldbuilding is truly unmatched. A huge thank you to our incredible design team, led by Jade Mahal Lew, Isa Kim, and Juris Anton Tungpalan: Shruti Ada, Kelly Xin Chen, Ten Cho, Fernando Gutierrez-Garcia, Ylan Ha, Eri Iguchi, Sara Kubo, Andy Xiaoxia Jiang, An Mai, and Jady Zhao.
Production Behind every successful production is an extraordinary production team keeping everything running smoothly, and ours has been nothing short of exceptional. We’ll be honest in saying we all would have lost our minds by now if it wasn’t for production keeping us feeling calm, prepared, and motivated to take on any challenge or deadline. Our fearless team of Production Assistants – Darcy Bergstein, Ollie Otou-Branckaert, Sally Pan, Alicia Paz, Brynn Straley, and Amiya Tuhina – have been the backbone of our day-to-day operation. They do everything, from taking detailed notes, coordinating meetings, managing everyone’s ever-changing schedules, tracking countless moving pieces at all times, and stepping in to solve problems before most of us even know they exist. Their organization, adaptability, positive attitude, and tireless support have made an immeasurable difference throughout production. This month also marked an exciting milestone as our Executive Assistant Amber Liu stepped into her shiny new role as Production Coordinator for the Design and Music teams. She has embraced this promotion with professionalism, thoughtfulness, and incredible attention to detail, keeping multiple departments aligned while supporting everyone on the team every step of the way. In addition, Alexis Wong, our Story Production Coordinator, continues to do a phenomenal job shepherding the storyboard process, coordinating pitches, communicating across departments, and ensuring the story team has everything they need to stay focused on their beautiful work! Our production supervisors, Pla Pichetpongsa and Jennifer Vu have expertly guided the production through every major milestone, balancing the big picture with the countless small details that make this production possible. Their leadership, quick problem-solving, and enthusiasm has kept every department more confident than ever moving forward. Last, but certainly not least: leading it all is our Producer Saira Umar and Production Manager Andrew Velazco! Their ability to oversee the entire production, anticipate challenges, and keep every team aligned is nothing short of magic. Saira is a wealth of knowledge who is endlessly reliable and always happily willing to help, and Andrew is our cool, calm, and competent leader who leads every meeting with positivity, enthusiasm, and humor. These two create an environment where everyone can do their best work. We are incredibly grateful to the entire Production team for everything they have done to bring our film to life!  Background by Andy Xiaoxia Jiang Music Our Music Team, made up of composers Sean-Paul Gouw and Carina Lim, and lyricist Victoria Cho, have begun one of the most exciting stages of the production process, laying the emotional foundation for the entire film through their beautiful, beautiful music! Alongside Writer-Director Peri Segel and Writer-Producer Allen Wu, the team has started spotting cues across the animatic, identifying where music can deepen emotion and bring each moment to life. From there, the team has begun delivering early demos for review. At the same time, our talented lyricist, Victoria, has been working on a special song for our project, beautifully capturing the themes and heart of our film. We can’t wait to hear more!  Art by Juris Tungpalan
0 Comments
 Art by Jenny Wu The feature team is excited to announce that they’ve launched this epic space rom-com into its next phase! We’re thrilled to share some spectacular updates. Casting We’re thrilled to announce that our celestial story has found its stars! Alongside director Peri Segel and writer Allen Wu, we were excited to welcome our Casting Director, Topher Ngo, and Assistant Casting Director, Sekai Murashige, to the casting team, whose expertise helped guide us through every step of the search for our wonderful voice cast. To help ensure that we focused purely on performance, we conducted a blind audition process. That meant that we listened to voice auditions without knowing who the actors were, allowing us to evaluate each performance based solely on how well it captured the heart, humor, and spirit of the character. The response to our casting call was incredible. We received nearly 50 auditions across all roles, and we were blown away by the talent, creativity, and range of performances that came our way! Narrowing down our selections was no small feat because we simply had too many talented actors to choose from for all roles. After making our initial selections from the blind auditions, we invited actors back for callbacks, where we explored chemistry, character dynamics, and different interpretations of the roles. From there, we assembled the cast that would help bring our story to life. To finish off the casting process, we gathered the entire cast and crew for our first Table Read. Hearing the script performed aloud for the first time by our full cast was an unforgettable experience. We couldn’t be happier with our cast and can’t wait to share more!  Art by Isa Kim Pre-Design Continuing from previous months, Art Director Jade Mahal Lew, Character Lead Isa Kim, and Background Lead Juris Tungpalan have expertly coordinated the art team to create over 80 art pieces. The world and story of Star Crossed have offered the design team opportunities to explore exciting questions, like how familiar technology might look in this sci-fi setting, or how characters might look across the years.  Art by Chloe Pineda Storyboards With more and more assets locked from pre-design, our story artists have officially blasted off into the world of our animatic! It’s been so wonderful to see our script come alive off the page, allowing us to explore how every scene, sequence, and emotional moment will play on screen. The process began with breaking down the script into individual sequences and identifying key story beats and character moments. From there, our artists translated our pages into hundreds of rough thumbnails, helping us map out everything from character performance to camera angles. In animation, locking the script is really just the beginning, because the story artists play a crucial role in shaping the story. The artists take what’s on the page and build upon it with visual storytelling, character performances, and visual gags, often uncovering exciting new moments that make the story even stronger! We’re excited to be approaching our Rough Pitch! This is the first time we’ll be able to experience our full story visually from beginning to end, and will really help us to make important decisions about pacing, storytelling, and character development as we move forward through production.  Art by Jenny Wu Production Team
Our team is growing! We’re excited to welcome many new members to our production team who have not only proven to be fast and eager learners, but continue to go above and beyond for the team in more ways than we could ever dream. Thank you to production for your endless support, hard work, and always bringing the calm to every storm!  Art by Emily Chao Visual Development We are thrilled to announce that our art team has completed 30+ total assets for pre-design over the past few weeks, including characters, backgrounds, props, and even maps of our expansive worlds! Our talented art team is led by Art Director Jade Mahal Lew, Character Lead Isa Kim, and Background Lead Juris Tungpalan. Alongside Director Peri Segel and Writer Allen Wu, the art team is working hard to ensure that every piece of art is crafted with a strong sense of intentionality to deepen character, reinforce themes, and further enrich the world of our film. We’ve been so impressed by the creativity and enthusiasm that has come out of this team so far and can’t wait to share more of their beautiful art soon!  Art by Eri Iguchi Story Led by our fearless Head of Story, Al Teng, the story team has officially assembled! To better familiarize themselves with our story, world, and characters, the story artists have cooked up many creative pieces of art over the past few weeks through a series of short exercises. Some of these exercises have even inspired new elements in our film!
Art by Jenny Yi What’s Next
We’re so excited to continue on with design and storyboards in the coming weeks and are grateful for the endless support and dedication of our exceptionally hard-working production team. Our production team has not only kept us on track and organized throughout every step of the process, but they have also patiently and efficiently put out every fire that has popped up along the way. Special shoutout to our fearless production team – this project couldn’t happen without them. More updates on storyboards, casting, and records coming soon! Building on the momentum from previous production programs, Asians in Animation has blasted off with its most ambitious project yet — an epic sci-fi rom-com feature.
How it Started In October 2025, Director Peri Segel and writer Allen Wu presented the concept of an interstellar romance that follows two lovers who travel through the vastness of time and space in order to reach each other at the star of love, Orihime. The film is a sweeping, life-spanning story that follows its lead characters from their younger years into old age. In developing this long-distance romance, Peri drew from her marriage to her high school sweetheart: “My now-husband and I met in high school, and much of our early relationship was long-distance,” says Peri. “We went to different colleges, began our careers in different cities, and still grew together through it all. Despite the distance, I’ve never felt closer to another person – and I wanted to bring that emotional truth to this story.” Inspired by poignant romances like Past Lives and Your Name, Peri and Allen also drew from grand space stories like Interstellar to weave an ambitious exploration of love and growing up throughout the cosmos. Through the perspective of its lead characters, Feature 2026 aims to ask whether it’s brave, or naive, to chase after grand, long-shot dreams. Passionate and ambitious creatives themselves, Peri and Allen understand deeply what it means to chase after bold dreams that feel like a long-shot. Art The art team quickly dove into the visual development process, exploring and refining designs for the project’s lead characters across ages.
Art by Lucy Feng In mid-December, the team completed an expansive 62-page pitch deck containing 65 pieces of art, encompassing not only characters, locations, and props, but also beat boards and style frames.
Next Steps In December, Asians in Animation officially greenlit the project to proceed to the Feature Pre-Production Program stage, aiming to expand the developmental materials into a 20-minute proof-of-concept animatic. After a short holiday break, the team reassembled for the next leg of feature’s epic voyage. In total, this next stage of the program received over 160 applications for the story, design, production, music, casting and edit teams. Over the course of 2 months, we assembled and onboarded a full crew and cast of 60 heading into the pre-production phase. Stay tuned to hear more about what we’ve been up to! |
AuthorThe Program & Production Team Archives
August 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
|
|
FOLLOW US
|