way back on tuesday, november 15 i was invited by hyejin to join her for a lecture at an animation college just outside seoul. she was invited by eric, who had also gone to calarts and i had met at pisaf just a few weeks before.

i met up with hyejin at a subway stop between our workplaces and we traveled to the college together. hyejin has been working as a producer in the animation industry in korea, but also has experience in the american animation industry, so she had a lot of valuable info to convey to the group of about twenty or so second year students who attended. for the beginning i mostly just hung out, and it was a bit boring since of course she spoke in korean and i couldn't understand.

hyejin did show some animation clips to go along with her talk, one of which was my good friend charles alleneck's 2000 calarts student film onion john. it had been years since i'd seen it, so i got a huge kick out of seeing it again. it also brought back a lot of great memories since we shared a cube together, along with anna, during our last year of school and the making of that film.

once hyejin finished up, it was my turn. luckily it was getting a bit late, so i didn't have to fill up too much time. i was ready to talk for about 45 minutes, but ended up filling about 35 minutes or so, with hyejin translating what i said. mostly i just talked about the only thing i really felt qualified to talk about, which was the making of your student film. over my four years at calarts i made four films and i think eventually came up with some good tips on how to make the most of your time and efforts. mostly i focused on developing the story and making a story reel or animatic for your film. planning ahead as much as possible gives you the best chance to make a good film, in my opinion. hopefully it was useful information for them, but it was hard to tell how they thought of my ideas.

it was pretty much the first time i'd done anything like that, so it was a fun challenge and i'm definitely glad i did it. afterwards eric took us out for 삼겹살 (sam gyeop sal) and we reminisced about the old days at calarts, which i hadn't done for a while.