Explore the responsibilities of an Animation Director

During my first year working on the LIAF project and now working on the one-minute shorts, I discovered many of my strengths as an animation director. First, I have strong storytelling skills. Second, I have a good sense of visual beauty and composition. Third, I developed leadership and teamwork skills. These are essential qualities for any director.

Looking back on these two projects, I can see how my role as a director influenced my interest in this profession:

In the LIAF project, I co-directed with Kemeng. During our collaboration, I really felt the responsibilities of this role. As a director, I need to communicate the content of the project to the team and assign them to work. At the beginning, I made a mistake and tried to do the puppeteering and shooting alone because I knew exactly what shots and movements I needed. However, the result was that I was too tired that day, the shooting was not as good as before, and the rest of the team had nothing to do. That’s when I realized how important it is to assign responsibilities and lead the team more effectively. The next day, I assigned specific roles to each team member, and the shooting process went much more smoothly.

In both projects, I participated in script revisions to improve the storytelling. For the one-minute short, I only changed about 20% of the original script, but these small changes made the story more logical and humorous. I found that I was good at turning a simple, ordinary story into a story with a sense of humor.

Teamwork and communication are areas where I feel confident. During the LIAF project, we never had any major disagreements, and everyone was happy to be part of the team. We reported to each other every day and made clear follow-up arrangements, which made our projects run smoothly. I am also not afraid to take responsibility when needed.

In both projects, I handled the visual aspects such as shot composition, lighting, and other technical details, and I was patient enough to test and experiment multiple times to get the right results. I especially enjoyed handling the lighting for Drunk. For the scene where the cat-man pounces on the human, I tested various lighting setups and camera angles until I shot a shot that conveyed a real sense of tension and pressure.

Overall, these projects really helped me solidify my vision as a director and made me see the importance of teamwork, communication, and the technical aspects of animation. And I really enjoy the work process of this role.