We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Clara Chou a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Clara, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I’ve always known that I wanted to do something artistic as a career, but I didn’t expect myself to be a filmmaker, especially not an animator! It was my love for acting and my love for photography brought me to the journey of animation. I wanted to be an actress but didn’t have the courage to purchase the dream when my parents didn’t support it. I started to watch a lot of films in high school because of my love for acting, and I started to get interested in filmmaking as a way to express myself. It was about the same time that I joined a photography club where I first learned about cinematography and how to use my frame to tell stories.

Also, my love for entertainment started when I was very young. I used to memorize jokes from the joke book and tell the jokes during family events. I love the feeling of making people feel happy, and that’s probably why I love creating funny and cute animations so much.

Combining all of these, I guess that’s why I’ve become who I am, and am doing what I’m doing right now!

Clara, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My animation journey started when I was 17 years old and left Taiwan to study in the UK. It was the first time I was alone in a foreign country and I was too nervous to even speak the language. I soon realized that I could communicate through animation and fell in love with making animated shorts to express my feelings. After graduating from undergrad I moved back to Taiwan and worked as a generalist at Taipei Post Production. While there I learned 3D animation, compositing, and rigging and further fell in love with animation. I was committed to learning all I could about animation and enrolled at USC for an MFA in filmmaking and character animation. I met many good friends who have the same passion as I do there and had the opportunity to learn all sorts of techniques and even develop my own artistic style. I was fortunate to complete a Layout Internship at Pixar Animation Studios, where I had many masters who taught me visual storytelling skills that really broadened my horizons.

Most importantly, I am passionate about creating art that is personal and emotional. For example, my thesis film is about a lady who doesn’t act like herself because she assumes her colleagues would laugh at her if she acted like herself. The story was inspired by the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan. While many people recognize same-sex marriage, there is still a lot of prejudice and thoughts against the legalization. For me, it was sad, because I truly believe that everyone should be able to be their true selves and love whoever they want to love. I put my soul, my mind, and my passion into my film, and feel really proud of the outcome.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me, the best reward of being an artist is to be able to live for yourself and use the experience as a reference for your art. Learning to record your feelings, and let everything that happens to you become your inspiration. If you want to be a filmmaker, just watch films and make films. If you want to be a cinematic designer for games, just play more games! Whatever you do will always be useful at some point in your career. Observation is a great way to make you a greater artist. All you get to do is live in the moment and learn from the experience.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I’m a layout artist with a character animation background. One big difference between these two disciplines is that character animators usually work on one shot of a sequence while layout might be working on a whole sequence with a lot of shots. During my time at Pixar, I learned that I needed to give up my character animator workflow and quickly finish the rough pass for the first sequence, and even explore more ideas before diving into each shot and making them perfect. It was a totally different type of workflow that I learned from this experience and I’m grateful for this oppotunity to make me a better artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://clarachou.com/
• Instagram: https://clarachou.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarayunchengchou/

Image Credits
Jeremy Lasky, and Sunguk Chun. (They are my mentors at Pixar Animation Studios)