Today we’d like to introduce you to Alan Yang.
Hi Alan, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I first discovered animation in the fifth grade with Pivot Stick Figure Animator, animating fights and simple stories. I also had a passion for website building and making little games with Warcraft 3 and Starcraft: Brood War’s map editors. Later on, I learned Adobe Flash as well, along with basic stop-motion animation with Legos. The combination of creativity and tech always appealed to me, and it was just a great way to play as a kid. I was also a huge fan of movies like the Incredibles, Mulan, and How to Train Your Dragon, as my second love has always been literature and storytelling by extension.
I didn’t think of animation as a possible career choice and mostly left it behind in high school, aiming for a degree in Computer Science. I grew up in the Massachusetts suburbs to immigrant parents who wished the best for me with a practical career. However, they let me apply to a couple art schools. As I was mostly focused on applying to more than a dozen traditional colleges, my art school applications were not the best — I didn’t get into my first choice. My rushed art school prep also hurt my traditional college applications, and I got rejected from most top schools otherwise, too.
In the end, I was able to convince my parents to let me go to my second-choice art school, which I am very grateful for. I met true friends who I’m still in touch with today, along with my wife. Art school itself, however, was not great for me. I had trouble fitting into the culture and the structure and ultimately dropped out. I also struggled a lot after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which exacerbated the negative parts of my personality, and the hypercompetitive culture of art school was antithetical to improving my mental health even once I recognized this. Dropping out was a blessing in disguise as I was able to focus on becoming a more complete person and develop a better attitude towards work. My family and I also saved a lot of tuition money as I only completed about two and a half years of schooling.
Later that year, I broke into the commercials industry in Los Angeles. I am really grateful for those who took a chance on me and had my back at this time. It was huge for my self-confidence as a college dropout to feel like my work was validated. Over the next few years in commercials, I had the opportunity to work on varied kinds of projects from cartoony to realistic, along with the gift of stable employment — which can often be a rarity in our field. Despite that, I always felt like I wanted to work directly on animated storytelling projects.
Pushing towards this goal, I applied twice for Disney Animation’s Talent Development program — and got rejected both times. This hurt a lot at the time, but again was a blessing in disguise, as the extended years in my company gave me opportunity for growth, such as by becoming a supervisor and gaining insight into the business and planning side of the industry. The rejections also pushed me to work much harder and recognize the flaws and gaps in my craft. Furthermore, when I did join Disney Animation in 2022 as a Look Development Artist, I was able to join at a full journeyman level without needing to go through a trainee process.
Currently, I am working on Disney’s 2023 feature film WISH, after finishing working on the 2022 feature Strange World last year.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It’s been a varied road to say the least. I am lucky to come from a lot of privilege. My parents worked hard to gain their graduate-level education in Taiwan and then worked harder still to make sure my brother and I were provided for growing up — these advantages were not anything I personally worked for. Even though I didn’t finish art school, I can’t deny it was helpful for me to be in that environment for a couple of years. I hope that in the future, cheap education platforms can continue to provide better access to art education for those who are not as fortunate and that someday legislation can be passed in the United States to curtail the runaway prices of higher education.
The biggest challenge for me has been my bipolar disorder. My experience in college illustrated for me how schooling really isn’t for everyone, and it definitely was not for me. I alternated between extreme depression which made it hard to get homework done, and extreme anxiety that caused panic attacks several times a week. The lack of sleep and crazy deadlines also constantly sent me into hypomania, which altered my personality enough where I definitely rubbed many people the wrong way, especially because even normally, I rarely have a great read on social situations. I have many regrets about that general time in my life.
It took hard work and enduring many side effects, but over the course of several years, I was able to find a medication regimen that works for me. My goal for the first couple of years of working was simply to survive and continue getting through week by week without having a breakdown, walking out on the job, etc. Medication has literally saved my life, and I hope that anyone who feels like they have a mental illness can see past the cultural stigma to get help from a licensed psychiatrist and a therapist. Only once I felt like my condition was managed did I start to work towards my career goals again.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I specialize in Look Development. At Disney, this refers to anything involved in creating the appearance of a surface on a 3D model. This primarily involves the application of digital paint, called Texture Painting, which is fed into digital materials that utilize “BxDF”s, or “shaders” — functions written by developers that a final integrator uses to feed results into a renderer, giving you what you see in a final CG movie (to oversimplify things). It is my job to paint digital textures, choose and layer right kind of shading models with the appropriate parameters, and manage the complexity of digital scenes and characters. At Disney, Look Development also involves Grooming, which is essentially being a digital barber, and Instancing, which refers to scattering things like rocks and grass across environments. It is a complex job that is a balancing act between technical and artistic strengths.
Within Look Development, I also sub-specialize in Environments. This plays to my strengths as a strong technical artist with a coding background, as environmental work tends to be larger in scale and deal more in procedural systems. Nature works algorithmically and we often mimic such processes in digital worldbuilding. Environments also place a strong emphasis on pattern recognition, something I am good at breaking down into components and rebuilding in whatever style is required. All that being said, I think artists with a very strong visual sense are the most admirable, and it’s constantly something I keep in mind and try to improve upon. You can have the most impressive technical setup, but it means nothing if it doesn’t look good as a final image.
I’m most proud when I can create a neat technical trick and share that knowledge with coworkers. I love the collaborative aspect of the job and the little rush you get when figuring out something cool.
What are your plans for the future?
In the last year, I’ve re-ignited a passion for doing personal projects, and am trying to keep that a consistent trend, even if the work takes a long time. I like doing personal work primarily with characters as it’s different than what I do at work, and my personal taste is more gritty and realistic than what is currently trending with animation. Or to be more precise, I like taking a more realistic approach to stylized characters with a lot of wear and tear, scuffs, and imperfections. Animation tends to keep things very clean for a polished, family-friendly look. It might take some time to build up a catalog of personal work that I am proud of, especially because I am hypercritical of my own work, but I hope people look forward to it.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/x.yang.z/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanyangcg/
Image Credits
All the client credits are bottom text on the relevant images: – Supercell – Disney Enterprises – Electronic Arts.
