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MillimeterXing Xing in the Jing
May 1, 2008 10:00 AM, By S. D. Katz
Animation and visual effects in the East.
Xing Xing has moved from simple wire removal in such movies as The Forbidden Kingdom (pictured) to more complex work for John Woo's Red Cliff.
Right time, right place. That's what it's like to be an animation company in China today. Production is never easy, but being in the capital city of the world's fastest-growing economy takes the edge off the long hours. It also doesn't hurt to look forward to a domestic box office that is growing at 30 percent a year or 2 billion-plus eyeballs that are underserved for movies, games, and TV.
One of China's leading animation companies, Xing Xing Digital, is balancing a huge opportunity with the challenges of a rapidly changing society that's kicking the tires of capitalism. Hollywood execs and their soldiers are piling up the frequent-flyer miles to the Middle Kingdom to make sure that when markets open up, they have a piece of the action.
I work at one of the most Westernized of the many animation studios in China. Xing Xing is a privately held company founded in 2004 by Lifeng Wang and Becky Bristow. Since then, the studio has grown from four artists to 220 artists, and it expects to have 350 employees by the end of 2008. The studio is busy with projects that include 52 episodes of Fireman Sam for Hit Entertainment in the United Kingdom; Color City, a DVD feature for Exodus Film Group; and visual-effects work for several Hollywood features. The company also does production work for some of the biggest developers in the game industry, as well as Flash for domestic and international clients. The majority of the studio's clients are in the West.
Xing Xing is located in Beijing in Dashanzi, an area known for its creative services and galleries. The studio has 240 artists and is expanding into a new space to accommodate rapid growth. Part of the expansion includes additional classrooms for Xing Xing's training school, which—in addition to Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects, and Apple Shake training—offers life-drawing classes for animators.
Asian production companies offer animation and visual-effects services at approximately half the price of the West for comparable work. If both client and vendor are buttoned up, the savings can be even greater. Naturally, this drives a lot of work to the East, and it has created a big demand for Chinese CG artists. Xing Xing runs a CGI school, which is first a good business and second a source of talent. Finding experienced talent in Asia's fast-growing (and very young) animation-outsource industry is an ongoing challenge. Flash back to 1993 in Los Angeles, and you will see the same problem — the solution there was the enormous investment in visual-effects movies that continually pushed the visual envelope with the side effect of training hundreds of artists. There is no equivalent movement in China, which has produced a handful of movies requiring sophisticated visual effects. Ironically, visual effects for the Korean horror movie The Host were outsourced to The Orphanage in San Francisco.
Bristow, the creative director at Xing Xing, is responsible for guiding the growth of animation talent. Former chair of the animation department at the California Institute of the Arts with 30 years of experience as an animator and director, Bristow has focused Xing Xing on character work with a strong emphasis on storytelling. As Bristow acknowledges, this is no small challenge because China's animation industry has never developed a significant style, and 3D animation in China is about 10 years behind that of the West. The lasting effect of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution — which simultaneously persecuted artists and intellectuals and sought to indoctrinate the masses — combined with a much older tradition of Confucianism that emphasizes tradition and obedience, has produced a generation whose children are very good at imitation, but not at originating ideas. For the time being, studios in China offer a high level of craftsmanship in bringing Western TV shows to life, but they do not offer much in the way of design and scriptwriting. Bristow is working to assemble a team of artists that can push beyond the boundaries of other local studios and develop original content for an international market.
After receiving his master's in computer programming, Xing Xing's CEO, Lifeng Wang, spent several years in Canada working as a programmer for Vertigo Software, and eventually he formed a company to create his own game. As a CEO, Wang has all the normal responsibilities to investors and clients — but with the added challenge of playing technical catch up with Hollywood visual-effects and animation studios while fending off competition from India, Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Sitting between Bristow's and Lifeng's offices is the translation department, with nine full-time translators working 10 hours daily to translate scripts, client notes, and storyboards and to check the lip sync of English-speaking characters animated by artists for whom English is a second language. Xing Xing has discovered that the path from translator to production coordinator and even producer is a natural one, so the recruiting requirements for translators now includes not only excellent speaking and reading skills, but good organizational chops as well. Xing Xing is hoping to implement a training program for production managers, something no other school in China offers.
While Xing Xing's inhouse training program is an essential part of its growth strategy — providing mid-level artists for episodic television and clean-up artists for visual effects — it does not provide a solution for the high-end visual effects Xing Xing is dedicated to doing. To be able to create work that is comparable to what Hollywood puts in the cineplex every weekend of the year, Xing Xing — and the rest of Asia — has to recruit high-priced talent from the West.
The long-running stop-motion hit series Fireman Sam was recently converted to an all-CGI show. All 52 episodes are being done by Xing Xing. It was absolutely critical that this extremely well-known character be replicated exactly as he is remembered by kids and adults who know every detail of the town and inhabitants of Fireman Sam's world.
The first generation of Chinese animators were trained by expatriate, mid-level artists that began coming to the mainland from Hollywood after 2003. They helped teach the current generation of artists who are now the equal of their former teachers. Xing Xing and other studios now need even more knowledgeable Western artists to raise the technical bar for all of Asia. This has proven to be difficult. It's extremely hard to lure high-priced tech and artistic stars from Sony, Pixar, DreamWorks, and the better visual-effects boutiques in Los Angeles to the East. The best artists are rarely able to take time off for an adventure in Asia if that means a minimum commitment of eight to 12 weeks. Cost is also a factor, but eventually, Chinese studios will have to pony up the yuan. The cost of noncommitment is stagnation.
On the creative front, Xing Xing has launched a development department to establish its own publishing brand and make its mark as a creator of original movies and television programs. It is likely that 90 percent of the Asian studios' business plans promise that they will be the next Pixar, but a more pertinent goal might be to become the next Studio Ghibli, home of Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki. Studio Ghibli only makes 2D movies. While they're beautiful, they arguably do not attain the technical level of Disney's better-animated films — but they may surpass them artistically. Xing Xing's philosophy is that while technical excellence is essential, if the studio were to approach the level of craftsmanship of 1996's Toy Story with a great original story, it would be able to reach an eager public today. The company knows it's aiming very high, but what better moment for a grand dream than the arrival of an economic superpower and the rise of a new generation of artists awakening from 50 years of the Cultural Revolution?
China today is not so different then Los Angeles or New York in 1993. Back then, the future for CGI was miraculously bright and every technical challenge was a major hurdle. Artists were working 18-hour days, and recruiting the best and brightest artists coming out of the schools was a heated battle between the visual-effects houses. Every aspect of the work was difficult, and if the software wasn't breaking, the render times were astounding. That's China today. The problems are somewhat different, but the same inevitable success and reward is within sight.
