AFTER 12 years in the industry, Daniel Chong has been able to acquire an incredible amount of experience in animation.
And he has worked for Pixar, Illumination Entertainment and The Walt Disney Company on numerous feature film animations.
Now he has decided to step into the TV realm by creating his first animation for Cartoon Network – We Bare Bears.
The animation follows three best friends – Grizzly, Panda and Ice Bear – as they try to assimilate to a more civilised lifestyle in their interactions with humans.
Grizzly is fun-loving. But his social interactions often end up as jinxed encounters for the other guys. Meanwhile, Panda is the tech-savvy one in the group. He is also an incurable romantic who spends most of his time on dating websites as well as being a vegetarian with an allergy to peanuts.
Ice Bear is the strong, silent type. He also inadvertently provides the comic relief as a skilled chef, salsa dancer and martial artist. Talk about multi-talented.
Chong has been with Cartoon Network for just over a year. “Before that,”he says, “I worked at different companies; particularly in feature film animation. This is my first time in TV professionally. And it has been an interesting change.”
Recalling some of the projects he worked on, he reveals, “I worked on Cars 2, a couple of Toy Story shots, Despicable Me. The first one I ever worked on was Bolt. Overall, I worked in a lot of different movies, here and there.”
Shedding light on his gravitation to the industry, he notes, “I always liked drawing as a kid. It was something that was a bit of a hobby until college, where I studied it. Animation spoke to my sensibilities. I loved the comic-style of it. It was exciting. I also loved comic strips and things like that.”
On the germination of We Bare Bears, he laughs, “It started out as a comic strip that I did and put online. It was just something I was messing around with, trying to make my girlfriend laugh. I only did about six or seven of them. And it started developing from there.”
Switching from film to TV is not as effortless as it is for actors, it seems.
“Time is the big factor. In a movie, you have a lot more time to develop and, even if you make mistakes, you can rewrite and redraw constantly. In TV, you have to go after two of three attempts. Also, in a feature, you are focused on one story. In TV, it can become quite challenging to keep coming up with different adventures and new stories.”
Challenges and learning curves aside, Chong is chuffed about his “new baby” and the reception so far.