Jenny Yi on the style and influences behind Paint It!

Emma Star is a young graffiti artist, who has run out of places to paint in the monochromatic city she calls home. Her search for the perfect canvas leads her deeper into the city’s streets, where she encounters the city’s villainous ruler, THE SCREEN. In the short animated film, Paint It!, Star attempts to complete her masterpiece before THE SCREEN finishes her off.

Paint It! is a thesis film created by a collaborative team of artists who’ve since graduated from Seneca College’s animation program. The film was directed by Jenny Yi, along with animation leads Linnet Guan and Robin Insigne, as well as production manager Hannah Collins. We caught up with these representatives from the production team to learn about their process. Read on to learn about the film’s pipeline, from storyboarding and rigging to sound.

You worked together on Paint It! as your thesis film at Seneca College. Could you share a bit about their animation program, and the role that your thesis film plays in the program? 

Hannah: Seneca’s program has been updated since we’ve been in school – We were the last class that graduated before the program changed. We can talk about what it was like when we were there. We had a pitching process before starting our thesis films, where all of us presented our ideas. So we all got to vote for the films that we wanted to make, and we submitted our picks for what production we wanted to work on (if the idea we pitched wasn’t selected).

Jenny: For the projects that were picked, the person who pitched the project, was by default the director. That said, they were allowed to hand off the directing role to someone else if they wanted. Paint It! was my idea that I pitched, and when it was selected, no one else wanted to direct, so I was happy to.

What made each of you want to work on Paint It?

Linnet: Out of the projects that were voted to be made, Paint It! was the one I was most interested in. I liked that it was an action-based concept – I thought that would be really fun to animate. I also knew Jenny quite well and so I wanted to help her bring her pitch to life.

Robin: I’m really into anime. I like the fast movement of it; as well as the action, like explosions. When I was looking through the projects I could work on, I was drawn to Paint It! because it was the most action heavy.

Hannah: I knew Jenny a little bit, so working with her was definitely a draw. And I specifically wanted to be a production manager on Paint It! because I really liked her project’s concept. I thought the film was funny, and that it was well-written.

I have to admit too that I loved that there was no dialogue which means there were no lip syncs to animate. Also I knew that would be challenging. Lastly, I’m also a huge fan of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Paint It! had similar elements that I really liked.

Tell me about the concept behind Paint It! What is the film about?

Jenny: Paint It! is about a young graffiti artist named Emma Star, who refuses to be part of the system. She seeks places to paint her vision around the city she lives in. She finds the perfect spot, the perfect canvas, deep in the city streets. This leads her to the villain of the story, the digital SCREEN. She tries to complete her vision before THE SCREEN stops her.

Ultimately, she succeeds in completing her vision and she blows up THE SCREEN with colorful spray paint. The film is about spreading your passion and not letting anything stop you. 

What inspired the concept behind Paint It?

Jenny: I started working on this pitch during a storyboarding internship last summer. I was inspired by the artist-versus-AI controversy that was becoming really central with the rise of generative AI. Some people were claiming that AI was a groundbreaking new tool, but others, particularly creatives, were concerned that AI threatened to replace roles in artistic fields. 

The passion and creativity of human artists can’t be replaced, and that was the core message I wanted to share in the film. I wanted to highlight the value and contributions of artists, and spread positive energy. And, I wanted to share this message through a lighthearted action-comedy. The goal was to make an entertaining film that audiences could interpret on a deeper level if they wanted to.

What were the parameters that were set around your thesis film?

Jenny: There were actually no parameters around how big we could go with our thesis films. We were given recommendations for things like length, but we weren’t beholden to those recommendations. There were lots of people in our year, which meant the teams behind each film were pretty big, and pretty ambitious.

Past thesis films were 3-5 minutes long, but all of the films in our year exceeded 5 minutes. We were allowed to have dialogue, hand-drawn elements, and really anything we were up to tackling. Nothing was off limits!

In many animation programs, students work individually on their thesis films. How did you find working in a team format versus individually?

Jenny: I think there are a lot of benefits to doing a thesis film as a team. Mainly, we could dream big and exceed our own expectations. Working as a team also helped to develop the original film concept because there was input from other people. We had over 50 people in our production, which meant there were many more people around to contribute creative ideas and opinions.

Hannah: Working as a team meant we were able to build camaraderie and friendships which was really helpful. There isn’t only one way to do a production, and we were able to learn this together as we figured out a pipeline that worked for us.

Throughout production, we had lots of get-togethers and working sessions, where we established trust in each other. I think this was really beneficial because connecting on a more personal level gave us a chance to really get to know and understand each other. Ultimately this made it easier to collaborate.

What was the most technically challenging part of animating the film, and how did you overcome this challenge? 

Robin: Early in the production, Linnet and I did animation tests so we could get familiar with the rigs. The rigs were student-made, and we had to troubleshoot and fix problems to make them function more efficiently. With one of those animation tests, I was trying to figure out how to use z-depth, which is having props either in front or behind, to make it look like a character is holding onto something. I had a hard time figuring that out. It took a lot of trial and error, and in that process, I learned a lot about using Toon Boom Harmony. 

Linnet: The most technically complicated shots were the responsibility of me and Robin, and I agree that rigging was the most challenging part. In the first two years of our program, we did mostly hand-drawn animation. It was in third year that we pivoted hard into animating with rigs instead, which was a much newer skill we had to learn quickly. Animating with rigs is much more technical, and so there’s a learning curve that comes with it.

Could you share a bit about how you approached the storyboarding process? 

Jenny: We used Storyboard Pro from Toon Boom. After nailing down the script, we separated it into different acts or sections of the story. We distributed those sections and everyone took their section from thumbnail to clean. Every week we shared progress, pieced the story together, and spoke with professors about what shot angles we needed to change, and what might make the story more cohesive.

That went on for most of pre-production during the first semester. We needed to match our drawings with sounds, effects, timing, and editing. We also needed to cut scenes from the storyboard because of the length.

Linnet: During the storyboarding process we trimmed the story down quite a lot. In fact, we ended up having the opposite problem briefly, where some of the scenes were too short and the film would be over in a flash.

It’s really hard to balance a story correctly, and storyboarding is a really important process for nailing that. Aside from ironing out the story, we put a lot of effort into making our storyboards very detailed. Our professors had told us to animate very closely off of the storyboard, so having a clear board was crucial for conveying the important details to our animators.

Hannah: We had to show our storyboard in a screening, along with music and sound. Jenny’s a big storyboard nerd, and so our boards were super clean. I think having such a clean board allowed us to work out the kinks in the film ahead of production, and it set us up for a very organized and seamless production pipeline. 

The art style of the animation in Paint It! is reall beautiful. How did you and the team decide on this style? Were there any references or inspirations behind it?

Linnet: Jenny originally brought Spider-Verse to us as a reference for inspiration. However, we obviously couldn’t replicate one-to-one the style of such a big feature film, so we also looked at serialized TV shows like Kid Cosmic too. We liked the snappy animation style, and it’s an action-comedy, which is the same genre as Paint It! 

These references gave us a good starting point for how we wanted our film to look visually. Ultimately there were two animation styles we wanted to capture: A snappy animation look for the comedic bits, and a Shonen style of animation at the end to wow the audience. 

Robin: Yes! I also looked to anime shows like Dragon Ball Z for inspiration. I was also heavily influenced by Studio Trigger, who made shows like Promare and Gurren Lagann. For the shots I worked on, I wanted to capture the fluidity and movement of sakuga animation.

Jenny: When it came to character animation I was inspired by Tron Uprising. I wanted to replicate that style. It's heavy on linework, and has sharp angles. I really like stylized shape-language heavy character designs. Even though one of our problems with the rigs was that they tend to be used for softer, more round shapes. Our character has sharp shapes and angles. 

What tools or features in Toon Boom Harmony were the most helpful to your team when animating your film?

Linnet: One of my favorite tools in Harmony was the option to create a setting where you only select a movement peg instead of the artwork itself. If a drawing node is clicked instead of a peg, problems can happen as you animate, as various transformations start clashing with each other. It was a simple fix for a very common issue.

It's not a fancy tool or anything, but it was super helpful and helped streamline the animation process a lot. I always made sure to recommend it to our other animators when I could.

Robin: I really liked the node view. I actually learned this from our Rigging Lead, Eden Jung. She discovered the quake node, which basically makes everything shake. With this we were able to control how much the camera shook. There are a bunch of fancy nodes in the node view I discovered throughout production, and quake node was one of them.

The sound design for the film is really spectacular. The music, sound FX, and character’s expressions help to drive the plot. Is there anything you can share about the music in Paint It?

Jenny: I reached out to my friend, Mingxuan Gao about making a soundtrack for our film. He had just graduated from Ontario Institute of Audio recording Technology (OIART) and was very passionate about it. Not only does he write music, but he produces songs. He saw my pitch and liked it, so he joined the team. 

We showed him examples of the type of music we wanted for Paint It!, which was a mix of J-pop and rock. He shared with us an unpublished track of his that he thought was in this style. I listened to it along with the storyboard, and realized that the song and board matched perfectly! Even without editing. 

I was so excited about this, and so I asked him if we could use that track. Since it was unpublished, he was happy to let us use it for the film. The whole story kind of centers around that song. We have different remixes of that song during quiet moments and even during the credits. I leaned on the vocals, and the lyrics tied into the story too. When we were struggling with sound effects, Mingxuan reached out to another friend named Jacob Duke, and he did most of the effects for us.

Hannah: We realized early in production that none of us knew how to do sound, which is how we ended up working with Jacob. Every week we had a meeting with Jacob and Mingxuan to go over some of the sound effects we wanted. We did some voice acting too, even though the film doesn’t have any dialogue. Overall we think the film’s sound design gave it the professionalism we wanted to showcase – we’re super happy with how it turned out. 

What kind of reception has Paint It! received, and how has it felt to finally share your project with the public? 

Hannah: So far, we’ve only released Paint It! on Youtube. Aside from that, we've submitted it to a few film festivals, but have yet to hear back. It's been great to see everyone’s reaction to it. We are all really proud of the work we’ve done. 

Jenny: We also got to screen the film at school, twice. It was fun to show it to other animation students because they understand better than anyone the work that goes into it. I think we set the bar really high for younger students. They are excited and terrified at the same time.

For those who don’t know the animation craft, they thought it was entertaining to watch. For those who know animation, they found it amazing that we achieved what we did in such a short time. 

Linnet: We really appreciated the first and second year students. Many of them supported us and helped us purely as volunteers, despite how busy they were with their own schoolwork. They were excited to help us bring this project to fruition, and we couldn’t have completed it on time without their assistance. 

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• Interested in learning more about Paint It!? You can watch the film and see the full credits listed on YouTube.
• Interested in using Toon Boom Harmony on your thesis film? Students can qualify for up to 84% off Toon Boom Animation’s software.