My friend Ellie sent it to me, and it was a lot of fun. The challenge is to make a comic everyday for a week or so, with different challenges along the way. I don't know if I'll be able to finish, as I'm about to have carpal tunnel surgery (1 of 2) so I won't be able to use my drawing arm for a while.
Day 1: Create a four panel comic. There's multiple avenues to go about this, so I went with a fairly mundane instance from my own life. It's cute and funny. I decided to forgo color to keep it quick and easy.
Okay, I don't think that bonus panel is cheating, but maybe it is. Lol
I painted a Zelda bg. Can't reveal what it's for just yet, but it was fun.
The Great Deku tree always made me feel so sad. I can't explain what I feel necessarily, but when I think about the Lost Woods, and Saria, I always feel like I'm missing a part of my childhood. Such a weird feeling.
So I decided to go back to my fundamentals and practice shape language and the like. Eventually, I'd like to make this graphic novel I've had in my head, but I've got to practice first.
So this comic came to me as I was playing Super Mario Wonder, which is a great game. I don't know if you can see the Nintendo-influence on the characters, but I was trying something new with the entire comic. It's silly and dumb, but I was trying to experiment with panel shapes, character expressions, and screen tone. It's a lot tougher than it looks.
Anyhow, the original comic was just going to be 4 panels, but I wanted to try to push it to develop a little more story.
So remember that Diversity Day video we made in 2014? Apparently it got shared with the State Coordinators of the Maine Civil Rights Team Project, where it was a big hit! They were quickly reaching the anniversary of the project and wanted to commemorate it with a big recruitment video. According to them, they talked and talked about what they wanted to do, and curiously, my name kept popping up again and again.
Eventually, they just decided, 'Why don't we just HIRE him?' And so, here is the culmination of that decision! Months of hard work. I wrote, directed, voice acted, and animated (thankfully with help) the recruitment video for the Maine Civil Rights Team Project. It's shown all across the State of Maine, to schools all over. Apparently it's helped their recruitment numbers up too, so it did its job!
The Recruitment video.
There's a shorter cut for elementary schools, but it's essentially the same video, just with some younger students.
I'm really happy with how it came out, and even happier that I got to return the favor to the Civil Rights Team Project. It really helped me out back in the day.
During all of the Covid pandemic, one troubling pattern arose, that felt so consistent, it became impossible to deny, and that was Anti-Asian attacks and hate crimes. I saw headline after headline, and it was scary. Not just for me, but all my loved ones. There was no way of knowing if anyone would be safe,
My old high school homeroom teacher, Jeff Bailey, reached out to me to see how I was doing, as well as if I wouldn't mind contributing as a guest writer for this Anti-discrimination blog. I thought about it, and afterwards said yes. What I wrote was painful and infuriating, as it trudged up old memories that I didn't want to remember.
Back when lockdown first started happening, I didn't really know what to make of it. My grandfather had just died, and I was doom-scrolling on a daily basis. It wasn't good for my mental health, and I imagine that nobody was in a good place. The world as a whole should've handle it a lot better, and day in and day out it was incredibly distressing to see the death count climb.
I drew this during the first few days of lockdown, and it's hard to look back on and not think about what's different. My cat's gone, I live in a new place, and I don't work at the same job anymore. Life changes constantly, but the only thing that seems to stay the same is the news. Tragedy after tragedy and some greedy people making a killing.
I got hired to work on this movie, Funan (2018) as a voice actor! It was my first paid professional character work on a movie. (Gkids) I got to work directly with Stephanie Sheh, the voice actress for the English Dub of Sailor Moon! She's incredibly talented, and really funny. It was pretty intimidating, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous as hell. But the engineers were super nice, and I really enjoyed working on the movie. I think it came out okay, but I'd really like to try it again. My voice tends to get a lot of good feedback, especially my villain-voice.
Funan is a beautiful, but tragic film about the Cambodian Genocide. It was incredibly personal for me, and part of the reason I got hired was because of my Khmer heritage. The story is taken nearly directly from the Director (Denis Do) and his mother. He was a graduate of the Gobelins animation school (a really prestigious animation school) and I was really surprised I got chosen, but I honestly have no idea how many Cambodian American actors there are working today. I know of 2, and they don't actually identify as Cambodian.
I played the role of Sok, the cousin of the main characters. Sok was a complex role. It'd be simple to label him as an extremist villain, willing to subjugate his own people, his own FAMILY for the "revolution." However, I feel like he was more than that. He was someone who desperately wanted things to improve in the world, and his idealist hopes didn't match up with the reality of the situation, and he ended up overlooking abuse and corruption. I feel like part of my challenge was to try to convey this conflicted part of this character without leaning towards either good or bad. He was in morally gray area, one that we could all find ourselves in when confronted by our family with our own ideals.
Anyhow, the film is available online now for purchase. It gets put on and taken off of Netflix from time to time, but I'm sure you can find it fairly easily elsewhere.
