Kindness Counts
Dou Hong, Art Director
Invincible, Skybound Animation Studio
Inspiration: Derrick Wyatt
It’s easy to tell a person what they’re doing right and make them feel good about themselves. But to tell someone what they’re doing wrong and have them still feel positive is a special skill. This is something Dou Hong values about her first boss, Art Director Derrick Wyatt, who passed away in 2021.
Raised in Ohio, Hong loved cartoons, but “I didn’t realize that these shows were created by living, breathing human beings,” she says. She also didn’t know about art schools out of state, so she attended the University of Cincinnati where she majored in automotive design.
But her passion for animation remained, so she would give herself small assignments, drawing and posting fan art, then tagging the shows on her social media. This got her noticed by people in the industry, and she scored freelance work on Ben Ten: Omniverse. As graduation neared, she let it be known she was looking for a job. Offered a role that required a move across the country to Burbank, she found herself working in character design under Wyatt, who had been a Character Designer on Teen Titans, a series Hong calls revolutionary for her as an artist.
Although Hong loved Wyatt’s work, “doing fan art for yourself is not the same thing as working on a team,” she says. She struggled to adapt to his style, so much so that she was moved off character design to props: “But I slowly got back to it because he was very patient.” She recalls how he helped her correct her work while also letting her know that if she couldn’t handle the assignments, he would have to look elsewhere. “It’s that sort of honesty, but with kindness, that I really did appreciate when it came to him. I knew I was not doing work up to par, but he never made me feel bad about it.”
“I think the number one thing I learned from Derrick is patience.”
As Hong’s career progressed, she eventually realized that she wanted to become an Art Director, but it wasn’t until Invincible that the opportunity arose. Having done character design on Season 1, she returned as Character Prop Lead on Season 2 to help trouble-shoot. “We spent 11 weeks just blasting through the last three episodes of an eight-episode season,” she says, calling this experience “a test I didn’t know I was a part of.” She was hired onto Season 3 as Art Director, a role she maintains to this day.
Hong sees her job as a balance of setting her artists up for success and making sure she’s able to defend their work. This means that she has to do for them what Wyatt once did for her: “Letting them know what they’re doing right, and what they’re doing maybe not so right,” she says.
Like Wyatt, she is firm but kind, an approach she realized also relates to her own leadership role. “Derrick was always really nice to me, but his vision was his vision,” Hong says. “It was my job to do what he asked. That’s what I was being paid for.”
As a first-time Art Director, Hong used his example to define her own space with her artists. “It’s really on me to stand my ground and to be like, ‘I know what you’re trying to go for, I appreciate your concerns, but right now we’re going with this particular vision. We’ll see if it works. If it doesn’t, then we’ll pivot.’”
“That was one thing with Derrick,” she says. “A lot of ideas were purely his own, and he had confidence in them.” It’s a lesson she says sits in the back of her mind: “You’re the Art Director. It’s your job to lead. Don’t let other people lead you.”
Hong says it was a blessing to have had such a posi- tive experience starting out. As for being able to work as an Art Director and carry on Wyatt’s legacy, it’s “a nice little roundabout,” she says, “and a celebration of him, too.”
Attention to Detail
Ryan Quincy, Animation Director
Long Story Short, Netflix/ShadowMachine
Inspiration: Jack Shih
Ryan Quincy has worked around his fair share of what he calls “titans of the industry.” Well-known names like Glen Keane, James Baxter, and Craig McCracken. But when asked who inspires him, his thoughts jump back to his first animated feature job. Coming off Mad TV, he was hired as an animator on South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. So too was first-timer Jack Shih.
“We were in the trenches on South Park,” Quincy says of the years they worked on the franchise in various roles, Quincy as Animation Director and Lead Animator, and Shih as Animation Director and Producer. Quincy eventually moved on to his own series, Out There, and says he “did my time” at studios like Disney TVA, Nickelodeon, and Warner Bros. Then in the fall of 2024, a friend asked if he knew of anyone for the role of Animation Director on the series Long Story Short. Quincy replied: “How about me?”
Quincy’s job is to oversee an in-house team of about a dozen animators. Once an episode returns from the overseas studio and is reviewed by the show’s leaders, he addresses their notes, going through them with a fine-tooth comb. “Everything from ‘oh, his head’s missing for three frames’ to a very emotional moment where we need to land the nuance of a specific kind of acting,” Quincy says. “Really hands-on, nitty gritty.”
“[Jack] wants to get the best out of people, and he likes to challenge people at times.”
For this kind of work, Quincy finds inspiration in working with Shih—again. Shih is the show’s Supervising Director, and while the two are peers with their own notable achievements, including Emmy wins for each, Quincy says he finds himself learning under Shih’s leadership.
He notes how Shih is invested in the importance of detail, from what kind of iPhone was out during a specific year to the look of a ticket stub from a Golden State Warrior basketball game during a particular season. “We would get down to miniscule minutia,” Quincy says. But it wasn’t just about Shih wanting to make sure every detail was perfect. Quincy emphasizes how good Shih is at it, and not only when it comes to interesting props. In some of the show’s especially emotional scenes, Quincy says he would think they were nailing it, but Shih would continue trying to improve. “Things that the layperson or everyday Joe wouldn’t notice,” Quincy says. “A head tilt or an eyebrow [lift]—he would really push to get it just right.”
Photo credit: Agnes ShihKeeping details straight is tough enough on a typical linear series. Long Story Short has a shifting timeline that spans from 1959 to 2022. Quincy observes that Shih excels at not getting overwhelmed: “He’s like, all right, we have all these plates spinning. Let’s just not break them.” They use timelines taped to their office walls to track continuity, and Quincy calls it “A Beautiful Mind, red yarn kind of setup,” noting that Shih is also able to keep all of the information in his head. “Jack really has a great knowledge… I think that’s what’s most inspiring,” he says.
While Quincy admires what Shih is capable of doing, that admiration is grounded in how Shih engages others in the process. “He wants to get the best out of people,” says Quincy. “There are guidelines, and there are ways to go about things, but [the show] definitely encourages creative freedom. That’s what Jack is great at.”
Having known Shih for so long, Quincy values the trust they share and the relationship they’ve built. “We were kids on South Park, and now we have families—it’s fun to go on these parallel paths and then come back together and see how we’ve both grown.”
Flying Colors
Jackie Gorman, Color Designer
Solar Opposites, 20th Television
Inspiration: Lauren MacMullan
Jackie Gorman has never met Lauren MacMullan, but that doesn’t stop her from feeling kinship with the industry veteran whose credits range from The Simpsons to Avatar: The Last Airbender. MacMullan’s work, especially as the Production Designer on Mission Hill, has had a monumental influence on Gorman’s career.
Gorman recalls sneakily watching the adult-oriented series when she was in grade school, and then rewatching it in college, bingeing it over and over during the process of working on her senior thesis film. “Lauren came up with the general look,” Gorman says, “and the color specifically was something I had never seen—such unique saturated color palettes in an adult cartoon.”
Gorman admits that she didn’t really know what color design entailed as a job when she was starting out. She came to the role in a roundabout way as a Design Assistant on Solar Opposites. She was hoping to get into props, but she didn’t pass a props test. Then the Art Director, who had seen her personal work, asked if she’d like to test for color. This led to a role as a Color Designer on Seasons 4 through 6.
“I had to study Lauren’s art style, [and] I carried a lot of it with me professionally, her attention to detail and intention.”
Working with a color design team of two, Gorman is responsible for anything that isn’t background, from a massive alien monster to a crumb. Along with standard base colors, she has to decide on tints when, for example, lights are dimming or the time of day is changing. It’s here that she often leans on lessons observed from MacMullan’s work on Mission Hill. She recalls a particular scene with the show’s blue-haired brothers. It took place at night, and MacMullan changed the color of their hair to black. “Using true black, and so much of it, is an unusual and bold choice in animation,” Gorman says. “I thought it was very effective, very unique. I hadn’t seen [this], where you’re changing the whole palette of the character.”
On a sci-fi show like Solar Opposites, where backgrounds range from the mundane to the other-worldly, MacMullan’s outside-the-box approach has been invaluable to Gorman. “For me, the hardest thing in color design, the most challenging thing for me really, is working with a character, prop, or effect that appears in multiple scenes [with] very different backgrounds,” she says. “A character has to be able to pop out against a normal kitchen background, but they also have to pop out against a lava scene and an ice scene.”
Gorman says she looks at how playful MacMullan gets with tints, noting how delicately she can tweak a color, “shifting it just enough to be its own thing and separate from the background… The goal with color is to have nice crisp storytelling and framing… I think she did some really creative workarounds.”
Gorman’s interest in MacMullan’s style has paid off in surprising ways. In 2023 she was hired to illustrate posters and help design merchandise for Mission Hill’s 25th anniversary tour. This gave her an opportunity to dive even deeper into MacMullan’s work as she tried to capture the essence of each city on the tour while staying true to the show’s color palettes.
Not only does Gorman use what she continues to learn from MacMullan on the job. MacMullan has also influenced Gorman’s personal art. Because of Mission Hill, Gorman finds herself trying new styles, mixing bright, saturated colors with more muted tones. “Getting into her mind a little bit about what her thought process was for some of these color palettes,” Gorman says, “I’m definitely testing out things I wouldn’t have done in the past.”
Creative Freedom
Henrique Jardim, Episodic Director
Mating Season, Netflix/Titmouse
Inspiration: Mike Roth
For many people, the most memorable career influences come early on, when they’re still figuring out exactly what they want to do and how to do it. Not so for Henrique Jardim. He already had a full slate of Revisionist and Storyboard Artist credits under his belt, including Archer, Turbo FAST, Breadwinners, and Rick and Morty, when he met Mike Roth.
It was 2016 when Cartoon Network’s shorts program accepted a pitch from Jardim. At the time, Roth—who had recently spent five years as a Writer and Supervising Producer on Regular Show—was overseeing the program. As the two worked together, “there were all these elements that the studio was initially interested in, way back from my initial pitch,” says Jardim, “[and] we were trying to cram it all into these eight minutes.” He recalls that while Roth had clever ideas for how to do this, “he never wanted to take over your idea. That’s not what he was there for, and he understood that.”
Jardim found this collaboration inspiring, that someone who was in a position of power to call the shots could respect that an idea was not his creative baby. “He essentially guided us into what we wanted to do with our vision,” says Jardim.
“[Roth] never wanted to take over your idea… He essentially guided us into what we wanted to do with our vision.”
While they were trying to address the network’s notes, he and Roth found themselves working until midnight for several days in a row. Jardim says Roth finally told him, “This is your idea. Do what you think is best… At some point there [has] to be a line drawn. You can’t please everybody.”
“So that’s exactly what I did,” Jardim says. “I went home, and I retooled everything.” He ditched elements that weren’t working or that he felt pressured to include, and when he brought the piece back to Roth, Roth loved it. He helped Jardim polish it a little and told him to write an email describing why he made the choices he did. “Because he gave me the confidence to do so, I explained everything, and lo and behold the network was like, ‘You were right, this is way better,’” Jardim says.
While producing his short, Cadette in Charge, Jardim landed his first directing job, a turning point in his career. He went on to direct on Ben 10, Big Mouth, and Human Resources before arriving at the new series Mating Season as an Episodic Director. He says that this role requires constant communication with Storyboard Artists and Revisionists to make sure every shot fits together to create a cohesive episode. As well, he’s always talking with his fellow Episodic Directors so that the episodes flow over the course of the season.
This need for micro-management could lead to a tight rein, but Jardim has carried his time with Roth forward: “I think about those lessons and how it’s not just about one person. Directing and helping all these board artists get their scenes out the door, they will have unique takes on things, unique ways of approaching a scene … I would like for them to have their fingerprints on what they created.”
Jardim says that while, at the end of the day, most animators work for big corporations, “we’re still making art at the same time. Every scene that we get, every file that we work on, it can be an opportunity to grow as an artist. I see the people on my team who are younger than me, they have these passions they need to get out. I can relate to that.” Not only can he relate, he has a map for how to support them through his own formative experience with Roth.
Portraits of Dou Hong, Ryan Quincy, and Henrique Jardim by Tim Sullens.
