4P Program - February 2025

Production Memo: Pilot Pre-Production Program (4P) – February 2025 – Asians in Animation

Welcome, welcome! It’s that time again, where we spill the tea and share our excitement!

The big moment this month was our Rough Boards Pitch, which took place during the second week. As our storyboards hit this milestone, all other departments were able to build off this accordingly. Get ready for your monthly update below!

Storyboards

On February 6th, members across all departments gathered to watch the entire episode as rough boards! And here’s the scoop: it has 14 sections and a total duration of around 40 minutes! The timing is still a work in progress, but our teams will keep tweaking it to ensure we’re telling the full story in the most effective way!

For many of our crew members, this was their first time seeing the story visually come together—seeing how the art and records they’ve worked on behind the scenes now sync up with the story to create a complete experience. It was an incredibly exciting day—no surprise there!

Next, the Story department took a brief breather and then jumped right into cleaning up and refining their boards. We have another milestone straight ahead: Clean Boards Pitch at the end of this month. By then, we’ll get an even clearer picture of how our story is shaping up, but we’ll save the rest of the details for next month’s update!

Design: Pre-Design

Here’s an example of how time flies: it feels like we’ve just waved goodbye to Visual Development, and now the Pre-Design is counting down! To better plan for the remainder of this period, our Production team quickly jumped into action, completing an early design breakdown based on the Rough Boards Pitch. With the breakdown and a report on our current progress, the team now has a clearer view of where we stand in relation to our goals, and has adjusted our game plan accordingly to bridge that gap.

We’re seeing more and more pieces enter the clean-up and coloring stages (54 approvals so far!). For this month’s featured designs, we’ve decided to do a special foodie edition! Bon appétit on the delicious bites from TEA world!

Tray of Bao & Pastries

By Genna Davis

Falooda

By Ginny Sutichavengkul

Dried Sour Plums & Sunflower Seeds

By Henry Nguyen and Claire Chong

Dosa, Paratha, Pakora & Digestives

By Henry Nguyen and Claire Chong

We’ve also started building our Color Script to explore a visual guide of the mood and tone of each scene! Here’s a peek at some of our progress: (Some scenes blocked out to avoid spoilers!)

Writing

After the rough pitch, we took another look at the script to do light dialogue re-writes to help the story and characters work even better now that we have visuals. We also did our final pass on writing some bonus material that we hope to get to after the pilot.

Editorial

More launches after our Rough Pitch! The Editorial, Music and Records team held various Launches + Spotting Sessions, during which our team went through the rough stringout together and identified spots needing SFX, lines needing pickups, and music. They’ve also started building an SFX library based on the SFX breakdown in preparation of later animatic builds.

We also did our second round of Scratch, or temporary dialogue based on some light re-writes or acting shifts needed for boards.

Music

After our music spotting session, we have a clearer picture and comps of what our score will sound like. We’re still at work developing our opening titles song for now!

Some more good news! We’re wrapping up our latest round of artist & trainees recruitment, welcoming 3 for the BG team, 2 for Characters, 1 PR/FX Designer, 3 BG Painters, and 4 for the Color Stylist team. This brings us to our current numbers…

Production Team: 11 Crew + 3 Trainees
Writing: 6 Writers + 6 Summit
Art: 33 Crew + 5 Trainees
Story: 16 Artists/Revisionists
Cast: 14 Cast
Edit: 4 Crew
Additional: 6 in other roles

Bringing us to 105 members of the TEA-m!

We’ve been gradually onboarding our new artists with the help of the Program team, and we can’t wait to see what our expanded crew brings to the table as we gear up for the Design phase! Plus, our total working hours have officially passed 7000—huge thanks to everyone for every single hour contributed, side by side, as one awesome team!

We’ll see you all next month!