From Castlevania to Boruto: Spencer Wan Interview
I myself had all sorts of questions after watching Castlevania, and seeing that Spencer Wan was so active on Twitter I thought I might try asking him, what resulted in a long interview. The scene he is best known for is the abstract black-lines-only part of the opening, but he had remarkable participations in many other known projects despite his young age. Other than Castlevania, where he animated, ADâed and directed episodes even, he also worked on Boruto and Invader Zim among others. My notes are in bold. Conducted on behalf of AnimeTherapy and originally posted on their website.
 First tell me a bit about yourself and how you started with animation.
Spencer: You know, that might be the only question I wasnât prepared to answer. Iâm not great at talking about myself.
Okay, Iâm 25 years old and Iâm from a small town in the Deep South. I got into animation after seeing Norio Matsumotoâs work on Naruto. I used to watch it with my friends in high school and Iâd never seen anything like it before. Â Iâd intended to major in illustration when I got into college, but I ended up swapping to animation at the last second because I couldnât get his work out of my head. I thought maybe I could learn how to make animation like that at school.
Where did you start your professional career and how?
Spencer: So after I dropped out of school I spent a year sort of just wandering around and doing very little with my life. I was having a hard time finding any sort of work, let alone artistic work. I ended up working in a tire shop for a while, actually. Dana Terrace was the one who dragged me out of that. Sheâs the creator of the show Iâm working on now(The Owl House). Iâd helped her with one of her student films when we were in school, and she was doing way better than me as a professional artist. She gave me a sort of a pep talk and told me about this animation studio called Animation Domination High Def that was looking for animators.
Itâs worth mentioning that there arenât very many studios in the United States that hire traditional(hand-drawn) animators anymore. We were even told in school not to pursue traditional animation as a career because those jobs didnât exist. Anyway, I applied the next day, they had me do an animation test, and few weeks later I moved across the country to work for them.
The work I did there was very different from the work people expect from me now. It was mostly parody cartoons, and we had to animate 2-3 scenes a day so it was hard to make anything look very good. It was a difficult job, and it wasnât what I wanted to be doing with animation, but it taught me how to draw very fast.
An interesting backstory, really. So you stuck with traditional animation because you wanted to create something like what Matsumoto makes?
Spencer: Thatâs how I started anyway, but he was just my first exposure to this sort of animation. When I got older I came across the work of Yutaka Nakamura, Mitsuo Iso, Toshiyuki Inoue, etc. Theyâre all incredible in different ways, but I could feel that they were also drawing on something similar. Thereâs a sort of feeling I used to get looking at the work of a really talented Japanese animator, and I really wanted my work to illicit that same feeling.
It wouldâve been a lot easier to change tracks to storyboarding or design. I had enough technical skill to do it, and there were many more opportunities available, but I stuck with traditional animation because I was chasing that feeling. I knew I couldnât be satisfied as an artist until I understood it.
Alright, now to more specific stuff. How did you get involved in Castlevania?
Spencer: Well after working at ADHD, I ended up moving away from LA because I couldnât find anyone who wanted to hire me for animation. I went back to my hometown and spent a year freelancing for scraps. I actually tried to go to Japan for work at one point, but my visa was rejected because Iâm a college dropout. It was around this time that Sam(Samuel Deats), the future director of Castlevania, had been emailing me to try to get me to work for Powerhouse. Actually, I rejected him the first time and tried to get my visa through againâŠ
Obviously that didnât work out, so I told Sam Iâd changed my mind and I moved to Texas to work for Powerhouse. Heâd been telling me the whole time about this awesome secret project the studio might acquire soon. I completely wrote him off because as a freelancer you hear that sort of thing all the time and itâs never as good as it sounds. That project was Castlevania. It ended up getting greenlit after Iâd been working at the studio for a couple months. Sam plucked me off the animation team to work on it and I started storyboarding on the first episode. It was actually my first time storyboarding, so naturally I was given the scene where the crowd gets attacked by an army of creatures in an elaborate gothic city.
I see. Then can you give me a quick overview of the workflow the staff followed while working on Castlevania? From finished storyboards to finished scenes. Iâm interested in the workflow you followed since Castlevania is obviously not your run-of-the-mill project.
Spencer: *laughs* Well in season one it was a constantly changing process. Powerhouse had never handled a TV show before, and so we were sort of creating the process as the show went on. We didnât even manage to standardize our storyboarding process until episode 4. Our background team doubled as our incidental and prop design team, with one of the background artists serving as a part time storyboarder. Sam was the director, but he was also storyboarding and designing all the main characters. His brother Adam, whoâs meant to be supervising compositor, became our editor. It was all over the place, but it allowed for a lot of experimentation. Thatâs how I came to animate on the show instead of just storyboarding.
Iâm getting kind of off topic though- the way it would usually work is that weâd receive an approved script and weâd have a few weeks to storyboard it. We didnât have any revisionists working with us, so if there was a problem, weâd address it ourselves and then Adam would cut together an animatic and add sound. Itâs worth mentioning that we didnât have any voice acting to work with in season 1, so we sort of had to guess at how the actors would read their lines.
After the animatic was approved we would ship it along with the designs and key backgrounds to MUA Film, our outsourcing studio in Korea. And then in some specific instances we would leave a note telling them to exclude a sequence, because Sam or I had planned to animate it ourselves. After storyboarding was done I jumped right onto animation. We were working with a pencil and paper animation studio, so even though I work digitally, I would have to write x-sheets(equivalent to time sheets in anime)Â for my work as if Iâd drawn it on paper. At some point in the process we decided we wanted to do a much more specific compositing job on the show, and so we had the studio ship us back their cleaned and colored animation, and our in house compositing team would polish it with a mountain of after effects work. A lot of why the show looks so cinematic is because of them.
So I take it this is how it went with the average scene. But your scene in the OP, that got a lot of attention, is clearly exceptional. Can you tell me more about how you came up with this style and scene? Personally I have to admit, itâs one of the best and most striking animation pieces I have seen in a while.
Spencer: Thanks! We really slaved over that opening. It actually wasnât meant to exist- there was no time or budget set aside for it. Sam had done the storyboards for it in his free time and pitched them to the producers. They said we could do it if we could somehow find time for it. I think Sam originally intended to handle the entire thing himself, but when the time came to animate it, I was the only one available. So Sam pulled me into his office and showed me the storyboards, specifically the part at the end. He said something to the effect of, âI know I want this to look like fire. You can do it in whatever style you come up with, as long as itâs done quickly.â Never in my career had someone put so much trust in me.
A lot of people like to compare the sequence to the music video for Take On Me, but when I was trying to come up with the style, the first thing that came to mind was one of Yutaka Nakamuraâs animations. Itâs from an anime I watched in high school called Soul Eater where the character goes to draw his sword, and the entire scene turns into this abstract looking sort of river of pencil lines on a red background(this scene). I thought maybe I could do something similar to that. It took me about an hour to realize I couldnât do it the same way, and my imitation of it was coming out far too abstract to tell what was going on. I ended up doing another pass on it, but instead of trying to copy Nakamuraâs abstract linework, I tightened up the drawings focused on the shadows. I thought I could try to mimic the look of how light shifts around on an ember, and thatâs where I got the shadows that constantly roll across the characters. The finished result still bears a lot of his influence, but I think I managed to put my own spin on it.
I remember that Soul Eater scene! Now that you mention it, I can definitely see similarities. But the Take on Me? Not really. How much time did you spend on that scene, if I may ask?
Spencer:Â It was something like two weeks? I donât remember that well anymore. I worked entirely through the last four nights, so it felt longer than that. I remember losing an hour to daylight savings time, and that put me in a really foul mood.
Iâve never mentioned this before, but itâs unfinished. I ran out of time in the end, and so the part with Trevor and Sypha is just my rough first pass. I was devastated when we shipped it that way. At the time I considered it to be my biggest failure as an artist. Ironically itâs the piece of work Iâm known best for now.
Syphaâs scene in the 2nd season is also yours right? Glad to see the same style made it into the show.
Spencer: Adam had wanted to have it in the show for a while, and I really didnât want to do it. I was so upset about the opening before it aired that I swore I would never draw in that style again. But then the opportunity presented itself and I thought, âWell I guess it would only be for a second or soâ. I felt the second time I did it it was a lot less inspired though.
Canât complain myself, it was pretty cool.
Spencer: Well I had more experience the second time *laughs*. I didnât have to feel around for what the style was.
So moving on. The problem with your Alucard fight scene, that you had problems translating your digital motion guides into paper, you said that also happened for the Cyclops sequences. How widespread was this problem then? Did it only affect your work or the work of other animators as well?
Spencer: It would only affect animations that had large camera movements, that we sent overseas for clean up. It was a problem born from the fact that we donât really do paper animation in America anymore.
When the camera moves around a lot, the field has to get bigger. You have to use something called panning paper in order for the drawings to maintain a proper size for clean up. But there was no one that I could learn that from. I had to teach everything to myself, and so my first instinct was to make the drawings smaller to fit them on the page. The clean up artists overseas fixed this by scaling the drawings up, but then they had to recreate my spacing from scratch and they didnât have enough time to do it the same way. The result was that drawings would pop anywhere from a few pixels to a few millimeters out of position all the time. Adam ended up respacing everything, but it wasnât a perfect match to the original, so drawings tend to pop around. Most people donât notice it though.
Actually Iâve had a similar issue with other productions where if my spacing gets too tight, thereâs a chance a drawing could pop out of place too. Iâm still learning how to solve some of those problems.
I see! Shame you found yourself in this situation, but this is a nice segue to another traditional project I want to ask you about, Boruto. You worked on Boruto a few months ago, episode #65 specifically. How did you get involved in this project? You were an interesting case because you are not affiliated with studio LAN like most of other foreign animators in that episode, as far as I know at least.
Spencer Wan: *laughs* I could see why it seemed a little out of nowhere. Itâs because Chengxi and I had already been talking on twitter for a while. I consider him a close friend. He asked me to animate for him and I agreed. It was as simple as that.
Looking at your original work and the final version in Boruto, I see that it went mostly uncorrected. Why is that? Were you just given a lot of freedom in that episode? Because of Chengxi and your aforementioned good relation with him?
Spencer: Oh, it was nothing like that. I was a lot more concerned with doing the work properly than trying to stand out or show off. Chengxiâs storyboards and the model sheets for Boruto were very clear. I followed them to the best of my ability, and my work ended up going uncorrected aside from a light fill being added. I shouldâve anticipated the need for that light fill, actually. I wasnât thinking about how it would look in color.
Boruto is more of a traditional animation(paper) show, right? Didnât you have problems with that this time? Â Iâm not too knowledgeable when it comes to Boruto specifically, so I donât know how much of its production is digitalized.
Spencer: The process was actually very similar to what I used on Castlevania, only this time there was no complicated camera movement to worry about, and I had Chengxi to help me with parts of the paper process that I didnât fully grasp yet. Some of the other foreign animators helped me out too- namely Guzzu. It was my first time not having to figure it all out on my own, and I was really grateful for that. I feel I learned a lot.
You are right, the nature of this scene is different. I thought maybe it was the Japanese industry being more used to this dual nature of digital and paper. So generally working on Boruto, although a Japanese show, wasnât different from Castlevania and other shows you worked on before?
Spencer: There are differences in style when it comes to x-sheets. For example, the Korean x-sheets Iâve written list the layer order completely backward from the Japanese ones used on Boruto. Americans will write âtruck outâ when they want the camera to pull out, but the Japanese shorthand is apparently T.B for âtrack backâ instead. Itâs a lot of differences like that, but the idea behind them is mostly the same. It was an adjustment, but not a very big one, and I was told I did an alright job writing them⊠I hope they werenât just being nice.
I was just watching Castlevania and now that you mentioned him, Chengxi did some animation! Also others such as Hero. Were you the one who invited them this time?
Spencer: I was the one who invited Chengxi. Sam invited the others after Iâd left the production.
And you inviting Chengxi and working on #7 was after boruto, I suppose?
Spencer: Actually it was beforehand! He had to cut his work short to start working on Boruto. He did such a brilliant job regardless. That guy is a genius.
Aha, interesting. That was the last of my questions, Iâm very grateful for the chance you gave me and for your amazing, detailed answers!
Spencer: No problem! I hope my answers werenât too boring. That technical stuff can get dense.
discoholicmusic
germansingergirl
gummygunk
annaxmalina
blakekathryn
pixelskylines
2087
jbbartram-illu
yousharknotpass
areudirty
