Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1055975
WINTER 2018 13 D E PA R T M E N T styles of animation to give his company an advantage over the competition. Four years ago, wanting to see if he could imitate South Park, he created a short episode using the song "Hello!" and characters from The Book of Mormon. The short went viral, but more importantly, Chong learned new techniques from it. He began to think about what he might do next. "I was doodling one day, and I drew something in the Bob's Burgers style that looked a bit like Archer. I wondered, what if I can animate the intro to Bob's Burgers but with Archer references?" He did just that, and the challenge led him to take his side project further. Chong spent the next seven months searching through episodes of Archer and Bob's Burgers for audio that lined up, so he could animate a short where the conversations flowed and the characters crossed over. "I kept working on it in my spare time, all to just teach myself how to animate," he says. "This was purely for fun and because I'm so passionate about animation and art. It was never made to get a job." In July of 2017, on his birthday, Chong put his episode online. When he mentioned the voice characters from both TV shows and Loren Bouchard, the creator of Bob's Burgers, in his Twitter post, he didn't realize that they were all together at Comic-Con in San Diego, halfway around the world. The next thing he knew, his "I Had Something for This Burger" short was getting buzz. The rest, as they say, is history, and while there were obviously elements of luck involved, Chong recognizes that his success story relies more on the years of hard work he put into learning animation. But he does not say this with ego. He says this because he hopes his story—the whole story—will serve as inspiration. "Get drawing, get animating, do anything you want," he advises. "But start with small projects that might have elements of the bigger things you want to make so you can nail those first. Then, when it gets to the thing you want to make, you know that you're going to create at the level you want. You don't have to put [everything you create] online. Don't make things with the idea that it's absolutely going to go somewhere. My Bob's/Archer thing, I never did that for a job. I did that, and any of the other videos I've ever made as well, because I love the animation." As for working on Bob's Burgers, he says, "It's everything I wanted it to be. I could not be more grateful for the opportunity." —Kim Fay T H E C L I M B