Ernest Chan: Animation Supervisor, DreamWorks Animation

Ernest Chan has helped build some of the most watched animated worlds on TV, from Spongebob Squarepants to Kung Fu Panda to Fast and Furious Spy Racers. As an animation supervisor, he guides how characters move, react, and land the beats that carry a scene. The early choices he makes set the limits, the intent, and the mechanics a shot has to support. We talked about movement, clarity, and the small decisions that hold a sequence together.

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When you start a new episode, what’s the first unseen choice that tells you how the animation should move?

Information about a character’s performance should be clearly explained before an animator starts a shot. This comes from the storyboards, the animatic, and the launch notes or direction from the director and supervisor. Understanding the character and what they’re experiencing in that moment should guide the performance the animator creates. If an animator has to guess at what they should be doing, that’s a bad sign.

What’s the earliest technical signal that a scene is about to fall apart?

I would say the first signal comes with the initial pass of the shot in motion during the layout and blocking stage. Unless the storyboards and animatic are extremely detailed, there’s room for misinterpretation because you’re working from a medium that’s limited in information and motion yet trying to convey the full breadth of a shot or sequence. At this stage it’s easy for the viewer to fill in the blanks based on what they assume is correct, but only after seeing the shot properly assembled in motion can you evaluate whether the intent can be fully realized.

In supervising teams, what invisible habit separates a strong animator from a weak one?

Getting up and physically moving is very helpful when animating. So much of animating is stationary that an animator can get stuck inside their head and just wiggling the mouse. Getting up and moving your whole body with the shot helps. Even changing from sitting to a standing desk can have an impact. It puts you on your feet, and as you play the shot in your head it starts to move through your body. You feel the weight shifts and what your back and shoulders are doing, and it helps you stay in tune with the shot.

In long-running franchises, what’s the small deviation that tells you the show is drifting off tone?

If a project starts to focus more on what’s obvious and “cool” about the property than on the original story that made the franchise special in the first place, that tells me it’s drifting in the wrong direction.

After twenty years, what quiet moment still tells you a project has real heart before anyone watches it?

If a project can have what I call its “quiet moment,” then it has a chance at being something special. Action and comedy are what the audience consumes the fastest. The harder work is when the story turns inward and makes you pause, think, and feel. That’s when a project starts speaking on a level that’s difficult to pull off but, when it works, really resonates.

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When Ernest talks about animation, he isn’t talking about tools or render times. He’s talking about the choices that define intent and keep a shot on track. For him, the work sits in the small decisions that make the performance clear and the scene read the way it was meant to.

Learn more about Ernest at:

• IMDb

• Website

• LinkedIn