Thy Vo on the nine-day production behind Little Persimmon

Little Persimmon (Vietnamese title: bé hồng) follows a young Vietnamese girl who is processing loss for the first time following the death of her grandfather, whose memory she celebrates by attempting to retrieve his favourite fruit. The short film was produced in only nine days, facilitated by Asians in Animation. 

Asians in Animation is a non-profit which seeks to elevate and provide opportunities for storytellers of asian descent through talent development and community building. Little Persimmon is just one of their recent endeavours.

The short film borrows reference from Thy Vo (head of animation) and her ancestral home in Vietnam, using her own photos as visual reference and family history as a starting point in the story’s development. Vo’s career in animation includes work on productions for Sesame Street, PBS Kids, and Cartoon Network.

We had the chance to sit down with Thy Vo to discuss the nine-day sprint that produced Little Persimmon, her experience with Asians in Animation, as well as her own perspectives on the challenges that Asian creatives face in the American animation industry.

What got you into animation and what your career looked like up to now?

Thy: I've always been really into art and drawing since I was a kid. I was one of those classic stories of starting to draw the second I could pick up a pencil. Art and animation specifically. 

I got into it because my parents and I originally had a language barrier. So being able to watch Tom and Jerry, or even just Mr. Bean pantomime stuff, we were able to connect through that. So it got me interested in the entertainment industry. 

And then, as I got older, I got more into cartoons and YouTube series. And then I realized I can make a career out of it. So I went to Savannah College of Art and Design to pursue an animation degree. I met a lot of great people there. So I worked on a ton of films, and it was through one of those films that landed me my first job in a post-production motion design company. 

I worked there for about 2 years before I switched to Primal Screen, where I did more stuff that I was personally interested in, more kid-oriented preschool series work. I. We also did PBS Kids work, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network. So that was great.

I worked there for almost three years before the studio shut down from just the current state of the industry. Losing that job and going on unemployment made me available for volunteer opportunities which would not have been available before. 

And that's how I found Asians in Animation. They were looking to make this film in nine days, which was crazy to me. But I was like, “I'm in need of meeting other people, supporting my community, making art.

While you were the head of animation on Little Persimmon, the concept came from you as well. 

Thy: It’s so close to my heart. How we initially started the film production was that all the leads met about three weeks before the start date of the nine-day period. And we were thinking, looking over their timeline, and we were like, “This is not enough time to do what we're trying to do.” We did three weeks of pre-production, where we [worked on the concept] of the story. We all pitched stories to each other about what resonated with us, what we thought represented our community, and was also just something more fun to make. 

My initial concept was actually about a dog and a grandfather. It was based on my grandfather, who had a ton of outdoor dogs. We lived on a farm in Vietnam, and he only ever named and gave a collar to one dog in his life right before he passed away. And this dog loved him so much. This dog, after he passed away, would sleep at his grave and skip meals for like two weeks. So I wanted to explore that relationship. I'm a huge dog person, so that relationship was really close to me. It makes me happy and sad at the same time, which is a really great feeling.

But then, as we started writing the story more and more with the leads, we felt like maybe that was a little too niche. And so we switched the dog to a young girl. And it'd be the young girl figuring out her grief for her grandfather.

That was also brought up within Southeast Asian culture. When there is a death, we don't typically mourn for very long. More than anything we celebrate that life. We have big parties every year. There's karaoke, there's food, there's music. There's people getting drunk. And there were so many sensory things going on that we wanted to show in the film. And when we initially storyboarded it, we had all that in there. We had drunk uncles passed out on the floor, cousins running around, babies asleep in a specific room. We had aunties cooking. You know, it was a big party. 

But as we saw, we're like, “This is getting too big.” And we narrowed it down to what it is now. Which is focusing on the girl, the tree and the grandfather. So that's the concept. Once we figured out that was where we were moving with it, Yusra [Shahid], our lead designer, made a painting background guide. She did a lot of prep work making these templates and guides and rules for the designers to just jump into backgrounds. 

Once we got it from storyboards, Flo [Young], our character designer, started making model sheets of our proposed girl and grandfather characters. She did like six different variations before we settled on one.

Ivan Gozali was our lead story, so he was really getting the script done in those three weeks, flushing it out, making sure it made sense, so that when the storyboards had questions he had all the answers ready. Noël Sarate Wiggins was our post-production editor, and he was really great at trying to just prepare his setup so that once stuff came, he was ready. Because we knew it was going to come really fast. 

Tracy Liu was our production lead, and she was the one making Excel sheets of our timeline, making things really clear for us. We had all these artists with these ideas that kept growing and growing, and she kind of kept us contained but still ambitious. So that was really amazing to have her and the two other coordinators alongside her.

What was your role in pre-production?

Thy: My prep was doing an animation guide. So I did a step-by-step walkthrough of our animation process. We had a lot of people with different backgrounds. A lot of them were fresh grads that hadn't had studio experience yet. And if they did, they weren't typically doing traditional. They're doing puppeted. So I made a guide to get them used to a traditional pipeline.

And we wanted to bring something magical into it. So we thought of making persimmon spirits. We initially were thinking about making them more frog-like, because frogs are a big part of the Vietnamese ecosystem. And then we collected references of my own photos from Vietnam. The setting is based on my mom's childhood home. So when I showed my mom the film, she recognized it immediately. It's not a one-for-one but the colors, the shapes, the little details. They were there.

I made this master reference for the animation team that just had all this information of what a day looks like, how to manage your Discord, the art schedule, how to use our tracker, how to use SyncSketch because we did our reviews through SyncSketch. And then I made the animation guide of each pass I would like to see up until colour. Some of the team had never used Toon Boom Harmony before, so this was really helpful for them to come back to.

Nine days is obviously a very tight timeframe to create a short film. How did you budget the time on this project?

Thy: Before the nine days even started, we had to figure out how we were going to do this timeline, because animation couldn't start without storyboards. Backgrounds could start without storyboards. So we did what was called a staggered timeline, and we had them start on whatever they could. Three days was a lot for the storyboard artists to make the boards and in those three days they gave us a thumbnail pass, and then an animatic pass. So it was timed out by Noel and everything.

In those three days, in my role, I was also trying to see, like, “Hey, is this getting too big? Can we downsize at all? Or can we make something more efficient? Can we change this transition to go faster?” We tried to get thumbnails in on the first day, so that we could start getting the artists in the mindset of, “You're going to have to be drawing trees. Go study some trees. You're going to have to be drawing these types of characters.” So we had them practice those kinds of characters. 

Fortunately for the animators, in those three weeks we had decided on a character sheet. So my three days for them was to do animation tests with that character, so that we could find model issues that they kept running into, and either adjust the design before true animation or get them on board with staying on model.

Once the animatic was locked, we moved on to shot creation. We had shot coordinators, so they would build out the shot names for us and the task list so that we could assign animators and artists their work. We transitioned from boards to animation. And at that point the story team was having a lot of fun while everyone else was kind of panicking. The designers were making backgrounds like crazy.

And also, since this was a fully remote production, we tried to promote a studio environment by being live on Discord. We would have live work sessions where people were drawing together. Sometimes they were chatting if they had enough focus to spare. So that really helped, I think, create some bonding time with us.

We were animating about four or five hours before the debut time. We had set a premiere time where we had all the mentors and members of Asians in Animation. on the call to watch the film. I think the final render came out maybe thirty minutes before that call. And then edit had about thirty minutes to get the last shot in there and rendered, and check for mistakes as well. 

What was it like working with such new animators?

Thy: I was constantly checking in on them. For the most part they were doing great until the very end. So I was checking in on them. And I was like, “Hey, I'm really worried. I don't want you to do overtime and get yourself sick working on this. Do you want to cut this in half and pass this on to another animator?” And some of them said yes some of them said no.

I was just trying to make sure. I totally understand working overtime for a shot you really like, and you just really want to do well and finish it. But at the same time I was like, “I don't want you to get used to this as a work standard. Don't do this much unpaid work in your career. It's so dangerous, and you'll get sick so fast.” 

It's awesome that you were able to set a precedent for industry standards for these animators you mentioned. 

Thy: Asians in Animation is trying to promote representing our community, but also trying to emulate a studio environment for new grads. This year and last year it's been really hard for new grads to get jobs, or get their foot in the door. So they're really lacking that experience, and it's really easy for them to get taken advantage of at this point right now. 

So we wanted to create an ideal studio experience where you're not expected to burn yourself out or take more on than you were ready for. I also have to credit that so much to my experience at Primal Screen. They were the first studio in my experience, especially amongst my other peers, that carved out time to make sure you weren't burning out. 

So they were constantly checking in on me. They were constantly encouraging me, and uplifting me on good work that I was doing. And I was allowed to call in and just be like, “I'm having a really hard time today being productive. I think I'm gonna take a half day.” They were so understanding about me doing that. 

Obviously it was a mixture of trust, knowing that I would be actually getting my work done. But oh, man, that has saved me, and I want to continue that. I want to foster that wherever I can.

Asians in Animation made these journals to have all the artists jot down their experiences, and how they felt about the program, so that next year Asians in Animation could do better about organizing it. There were tons of personal “thank you” notes across the board. So it was a really positive experience for everybody. 

People afterwards talked about it saying: “This revived me in my career. This gave me hope. This made me so happy. This reinspired me.” It was such a good experience overall. I was really happy with the outcome. Both the film and also just everyone's time from it. I think it was a great time.

What are your thoughts on the lack of Asian perspectives in North American animation? We might get a lot of animation out of Japan, for instance, but we're not seeing much of the Asian experience outside of certain parts of East Asia.

Thy: Right? Some people are quick to tell me like, “Oh, there's Asian representation.” And I'm like, “There's East Asian representation. And there's usually one of three different story types that we see all the time.” 

But a lot of other stuff, the really unique stuff, isn't getting as much spotlight. The really niche family dynamics, or experiences that mean so much to us. But no one else knows about it. So being able to tell those stories is really important.

When we were deciding on the story [of Little Persimmon] we were saying, “Oh, is this too niche? Is this something that people aren't going to understand or recognize?” And my argument to this was always, “Well, yeah, people might not be familiar with it yet. Until we make it.”

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• Want to see more from the project leads behind Little Persimmon? Follow Tracy Liu (head producer), Ivan Gozali (head of story), Yusra Shahid (head of production design), Flo Young (head of character design), Noël Wiggins (head editor), Thy Vo (head of animation and compositor), Katie Dizon (program producer), Theresa Kao and Kyle Powell (program coordinators).
• For more info about Asians in Animation and how you can get involved, visit the organization's website.
• Are you ready to get started on your own independent film? Artists can download a free 21-day trial of Toon Boom Harmony.