Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512296
FAWN VEERASUNTHORN Celebrating Fresh Voices Persistence pays off. Fawn Veerasunthorn is proof. Having always wanted to work at Disney, she applied three times. "It became my hobby," she says. "When I see them put out a posting, I think, oh, it's that time of year." Veerasunthorn originally applied with production work she had done at other studios. She got feedback that the work was great, but it didn't reflect who she was as an artist. "That's when I started doing comics on the side," she says. "I found that I'm doing storyboards during the day, and at night I get to know who I am, be myself. I put those in my portfolio." Veerasunthorn always loved drawing and hoped it was something she could do for a living. Growing up in Thailand she was told that wasn't possible. Fortunately, her family was supportive of her going to school for art, but even then she was told, go try it for a year—you'll be back. Instead, her third interview using artwork demonstrating her personal talent landed her a job at Disney and a first credit as a Storyboard Artist on 2013's Frozen. "I've been here ever since," she says. She went on to work on Zootopia, Moana, and Frozen 2. Then came Raya and the Last Dragon, where she was Head of Story. "That was a big step, a learning curve," she says. "Not only working on my own sequences, [but] the big picture of the film. That's when I started understanding, the film has to mean something to the person making it." Veerasunthorn still considers her job a never-ending education. "I have favorite artists that I stalk at work," she says, naming colleagues like Chris Williams, Byron Howard, and John Ripa who became her mentor on Raya. "His work has been so iconic, and I'm like, how do you pick those moments and have people remember [them] forever," she says. "Because that's what happens with Disney movies, right? They live on beyond their own life." This is something Veerasunthorn learned more about during the part of the Disney movie-making process where a film is screened for the entire studio. "What I found was they would pick out … just one image per sequence so people could talk about it and refer back," she says. "Early on I'm like, they never use a really great image of mine. [And] I thought, it's not them, it's me. I need to work harder on finding the moment to represent that sequence." From that point on, she focused on identifying those images, and as she evolved into a position of leadership, "I told everybody, think about that, find that first, and then make that your true guiding light," she says. Veerasunthorn embodies the demographic change that has taken place at Disney. Young, female, and Thai, she was a director on the movie Wish. Age is relative, though, as she talks about the even younger generation and how what influenced her as a child is so different from what influenced them. Japanese manga, for example. "Also the breadth and variety of what everyone has been exposed to," she says. "I think that helps with bringing in the modern sense of storytelling." Still, she notes, with younger animators she sees a lot of anxiety. "Am I good enough? I'm working at Disney, and everyone is so much better," she says. She wants to tell them that everyone deals with that, and she gives them the advice she wishes she could have given her younger self: "Trust my instincts a lot more. Go with my gut. In the beginning of a career there's so much pressure of trying to fit in … Something I learned over time [is] to not shy away. When I have something bubbling up in me, just speak up, speak it out, it will be okay. We're all friends, we all respect each other. I wish that people would recognize how powerful the spark of hope within you is. That's what kept me going all these years." 36 KEYFRAME F E AT U R E