The entertainment industry loves its collection of lucky break stories, and on the surface, Simon Chong’s experience fits right into this category. A few years ago, in his spare time, while working at his advertising company in London, Chong created an animated short by blending characters from Bob’s Burgers and Archer. When he finished, he posted it online. Within 24 hours, he had a job offer from the creator of Bob’s Burgers, and within five months, he had sold all of his belongings, packed two suitcases and moved to L.A. to work as an assistant director on what he calls his “favorite animated show ever.”
Dive beneath the surface, though, and it’s quickly evident that luck had a helpmate—passion. “As soon as I could hold a pen, I was drawing. Endlessly, endlessly drawing,” Chong says of his childhood in a small Welsh town. But he didn’t know how to apply his obsession to anything until he saw Toy Story at the age of 10. “I remember coming out of the cinema and thinking, that’s what I want to do!”
It wasn’t until university that Chong had the opportunity to formally study design, graphics and animation, but once he graduated and moved to London, he was turned down for every job he applied for. It turned out, he had been taught how to use out-of-date software. Once he did manage to get a job, he had his work cut out for him. “I completely taught myself animation by using Lynda.com… [it] had the most fantastic tutorials, and I taught myself [Adobe] After Effects,” he says.
Chong eventually paired up with his former boss to create an advertising company, where he worked on social media advertising campaigns for Sony PlayStation, among other clients. He says that he was happy there, and had no thoughts of leaving. Instead, he was always looking for ways to teach himself different styles of animation to give his company an advantage over the competition.
Four years ago, wanting to see if he could imitate South Park, he created a short episode using the song “Hello!” and characters from The Book of Mormon. The short went viral, but more importantly, Chong learned new techniques from it. He began to think about what he might do next. “I was doodling one day, and I drew something in the Bob’s Burgers style that looked a bit like Archer. I wondered, what if I can animate the intro to Bob’s Burgers but with Archer references?” He did just that, and the challenge led him to take his side project further.
Chong spent the next seven months searching through episodes of Archer and Bob’s Burgers for audio that lined up, so he could animate a short where the conversations flowed and the characters crossed over. “I kept working on it in my spare time, all to just teach myself how to animate,” he says. “This was purely for fun and because I’m so passionate about animation and art. It was never made to get a job.”
In July of 2017, on his birthday, Chong put his episode online. When he mentioned the voice characters from both TV shows and Loren Bouchard, the creator of Bob’s Burgers, in his Twitter post, he didn’t realize that they were all together at Comic-Con in San Diego, halfway around the world. The next thing he knew, his “I Had Something for This Burger” short was getting buzz.
The rest, as they say, is history, and while there were obviously elements of luck involved, Chong recognizes that his success story relies more on the years of hard work he put into learning animation. But he does not say this with ego. He says this because he hopes his story—the whole story—will serve as inspiration.
“Get drawing, get animating, do anything you want,” he advises. “But start with small projects that might have elements of the bigger things you want to make so you can nail those first. Then, when it gets to the thing you want to make, you know that you’re going to create at the level you want. You don’t have to put [everything you create] online. Don’t make things with the idea that it’s absolutely going to go somewhere. My Bob’s/Archer thing, I never did that for a job. I did that, and any of the other videos I’ve ever made as well, because I love the animation.”
As for working on Bob’s Burgers, he says, “It’s everything I wanted it to be. I could not be more grateful for the opportunity.”
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