Learning on the job is one of the best ways to gain experience. But what if you can’t get the job because you don’t have the necessary experience? Under the umbrella of Asians in Animation (AIA), the animatic pilot Tea Leaves Last is helping solve that catch-22 for more than a hundred aspiring and professional animation creatives.
AIA is a nonprofit dedicated to nurturing Asian talent in the animation industry, and “they wanted to move toward more hands-on educational training,” says TAG member Saira Umar, Executive Producer, Supervising Director, and Writer on Tea Leaves Last. “They’d been experimenting with making short films, and they had an idea—what if we do something longer?” A fully boarded feature film was considered, but Umar, an AIA volunteer for the last four years, felt it might be too long. Coming from a TV background, she suggested an animatic pilot.
Even then, it’s the most ambitious project AIA has undertaken, according to Writer and Story Editor Stephanie Sim, a TAG member whose past experience included Production Assistant and Freelance Writer. The organization has a short film program called The Immersive Lab, “but from there it’s a big leap to a 45-minute pilot,” she says.
Tea Leaves Last is a fantasy adventure story about a young adult, Mya, who leaves her homeland in search of the mysterious, elusive Houses of Tea to revive ceremonial tea magic. Discovering a colonizing force that threatens to destroy her family’s historic tea farm, she needs to band together with the other Tea Houses to save their heritage.
As the idea for the pilot was first being discussed, Umar—who’d worked so far as a Production Assistant and Writer—knew she wanted to serve as the Showrunner, which is her goal in the industry. And when it came to the story, “I thought it would be fun if we had a writers’ room,” she says, “and everyone came together, pitched ideas, [and] we found something that we were all excited about and could build together.”
The team, for their part, wanted a concept Umar could make her own. “I knew her interests were historical time periods, YA, and magical girls,” says Sim. She considered how magical girl shows are themed. In Sailor Moon, for example, each character is associated with a planet. When Sim came up with the idea for tea, which is rooted in Asian culture and history, she says: “We realized we could really take this and deepen the themes.” They landed on seven different types of tea across seven different cultures and assigned one to each House of Tea.
They also wanted their team to have the chance to inject their personal life experiences into the show. “Everyone passionately chimed in for the discussion whenever we talked about it,” says Director Hye Lynn Park, another TAG member on the leadership team. It could be something as simple as snacking on sunflower seeds, but if it resonated, it was considered. “Any bits of their culture and their family that they wanted to slide in, this is the perfect place to do that,” says Sim. “We’re not going to have execs tell you that doesn’t make sense or that’s not what the audience is looking for. We’re here to uplift Asian talent.”
While the story came easily, logistics proved tricky. Because the entire crew was made up of volunteers, most people had other commitments, so they averaged 20 hours a week. Although leadership often worked more, in order to keep to a realistic TV schedule, the show had to hire twice as many people as would be typically needed. Adjustments were made because training was often taking place while people were doing their jobs, but “it was pretty much run on the industry scale,” Umar says.
As a first-time Director, Park notes that directing such a large team was challenging, especially since the entire production was done virtually. At the same time, because there wasn’t studio pressure, she could experiment with the role. Working as a Storyboard Artist in the past, she sometimes felt like she didn’t understand characters well enough before she started boarding. Tea Leaves Last had 12 Storyboard Artists, and one thing Park wanted to try before they worked on the boards were exercises to practice drawing the characters based on character sheets from the art team. She says that usually on a TV schedule production is moving too quickly to set aside this kind of time. But because there was a lot of subtext and nuance to the characters, says Sim, this experiment paid off.
While Tea Leaves Last was never intended to be a fully polished project, Umar says they weren’t going for a typical raw animatic, either. They wanted some finished backgrounds and prop colors, as well as sound effects and recording that wasn’t a temporary scratch track. But finding the balance was a gradual process. “I think our first goal was just making sure the characters were recognizable and appealing,” Umar says. “Then as we went along, we’d slowly be like, oh, we could make it a little cleaner.”
“We were so blown away by the art team and how beautiful their drawings were, especially the environment and the background,” Sim adds. “I think part of how clean the animatic is—we just wanted to showcase their work more.”
This approach ended up serving the ultimate goal of the project. “For people who are already in the industry,” says Umar, “maybe they can move up to a higher position.” And for those just getting started, “we hope they can use this experience to springboard their careers.”
Learn more at asiansinanimation.org/tea-leaves-last.html.
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