SCOTT: What about your background led you into the Mummy project?

HSU: I actually was trained as an architect, but I grew up reading comics and watching all kinds of cartoons, and I just wanted to be an artist. And so six years ago, after about five years as a licensed architect, I decided to make a switch. I wanted to get into the comic book industry, and through a detour, I ended up in the animation business..

SCOTT: What were your first experiences in animation?

HSU: I started out actually doing layouts and background designs, because that was the natural progression of things. But once I understood how animation works, I realized that I could probably give a stab at doing storyboards and characters designs. So I basically do everything. Whatever comes my way, I’ll do it.

SCOTT: How did you come into The Mummy project?

HSU: The associate producer called me and said that the producers wanted to do something new --somewhat stylized, but not too stylized. Something maybe like Batman, but not quite pushed that far. But at the same time, not a typical Marvel comic. So I started just reaching to the back, going to my background: drawing classic comics and what I really like to do.

SCOTT: When you conceived the Rick O’Connell character, did you use the Brendan Fraser from the live action Mummy films as a model?

HSU: Good question, because I did. I was asked to keep it legal to modify him to make him be less so. I knew that he was going to look kind of heroic but at the same time he’d been tripping over his feet. He has a sort of faux hero quality about him.

SCOTT: How about the other two main human characters?

HSU: Once Rick was out of the way, pretty much I knew that I couldn’t do anything from the movie, you know, except for the Mummy and the villains and stuff. So I think one of the first I tackled was actually Alex. Alex was a brand new character at the time, because Alex was coming up in the sequel, but it wasn’t in the first movie, so I had no reference to work with and nobody to tie my hands. If you look at Alex, he is probably very Manga-like. Even though his eyes are not super huge or anything like that, he’s somewhat stylized. And actually it worked out pretty well. There’s a lot of finessing going on, eventually making all the characters look more or less the same. But I would say that Rick and Alex are the ones that gave us the initial springboard to derive that whole look that eventually the whole show was based on.

SCOTT: How about the mother character?

HSU: The mother character is one is just sort of pulled out of my hat. I knew what she had to be. She had to be somewhat sexy--not super sexy because she has to be a mother. So she’d look attractive, but not super attractive. She obviously could not look like Rachel Weisz.

SCOTT: How about Im Ho Tep himself?

HSU: There are three different stages of great degradation or grotesqueness. And again, it just had to steer away from something that would look like the actor in the movie. It was something that just came to me, and I just kept studying him. And I knew he had to be a threatening character, and gave him all the--the “usual suspects” kind of look. And, yeah, at the end there was a lot of sort of dialogue between me and the producers..

SCOTT: For the first stage, he’s all in the bandages. That’s almost like the classic Boris Karloff stage.

HSU: Yeah, but everybody knows what a wrapped mummy looks like. So it was just a matter of trying to make him logistically workable in terms of animation, so it’s not overly difficult and complicated. It’s only somewhat stylized.

SCOTT: In the next stage, he’s sort of decrepit. How did you come up with that stage?

HSU: That was a half-skeletal stage. Once again, it’s going to the movie, and the movie is very grotesque. We don’t want to do something that’s entirely like the movie, so we’d push it. There’s certain things you can achieve in animation that you can’t really do in live action even with something like CG, which is that you can do lines. Eliminate where skin ends and the skeleton begins and all that. You can also handle with color a little bit more, and use brighter colors and so on. So in that stage of the mummy, there is more a combination of the skin and the whole wrapping over the skeleton. That was really another fun character.

SCOTT: And then the final stage, he’s really more human. He looks like Arnold Vosloo in the movie, but not exactly.

HSU: I guess that was the trick throughout the entire development stage, trying to not depart too far from the movie, but at the same time, there’s certain things where we either take liberty. So it doesn’t look too much similar to the movie, or too far away from it.

SCOTT: To design the Minotaur, did you have to do any research on what a Minotaur looked like?

HSU: To some degree, yeah. But ultimately--we had some liberty also to just make whatever we think looks cool. I did some research; what historically how they were depicted. And then sort of took some cues and developed my own. It’s probably a little bit more contemporary looking. Obviously the leg structure is still more animal-like, less humanoid. But the upper body is Jack Kirby who did The Hulk. Your typical super-hero kind of thing.

SCOTT: Did the colors also come to you at this point, or just the look in the initial stages?

HSU: You know, I deferred all that. I was already on Stuart Little 2, so at the time, I told them that I didn’t deal with color, and it was just too much to do. It would have gotten too involved. So I just dealt with the look and I hoped that somebody would carry the ball. And supervising producer Joe Baruso and his staff just sort of went from there and did a great job.

SCOTT: So when you’re doing the human characters, are you working in pencil in the very beginning? How are you designing these?

HSU: I’ve developed almost my own technique over the years, and just started almost exclusively working with pen now, just ’cause it’s faster for me. When I first broke into animation coming from an architecture background I didn’t ever put anything down in ink at first. It was always with a pencil. And then, you learned whatever technique suits you best, and in my first few jobs in animation, I was still searching for my technique. And eventually I developed this whole process of working rough — very, very rough as if I were working in pencil, but instead using ink. And then I would go back and clean up. So typically I use a light box, so I don’t use trace lines. I don’t have a whole lot of trace lines in my final drawings. It’s layered over, and cleaned up.

SCOTT: Do you submit the pen drawings to Korea where they do the animation?

HSU: Yeah. They send all of our drawings, my drawings included, everybody’s, storyboards and everything, background. We have an overseas supervisor that supervises everything to be sure everything ruins smoothly.

SCOTT: How many drawings will you do per episode?

HSU: That varies. I think there are episodes where I would do like 20, 25 characters. And other shows, it depends on how many recurring characters we have. I could do as few as three or four. It’s really different.

SCOTT: Do you storyboard or draw the backgrounds for all the episodes as well?

HSU: No, I didn’t, unfortunately. Although for some of the marketing purposes, I actually do some of the key set-ups, both backgrounds and the characters. In fact, if you go to the official Mummy website [www.themummytv.com]. There are wallpapers you can pull down which are my drawings. They were colored by somebody else, but I did the background and the characters, all integrated into one scene.

SCOTT: With the process of working on a show like The Mummy, how would you say it differs or is similar to other shows you’ve worked on?

HSU: This show is very unique in the sense that it’s got a period setting. The period look is something that you don’t see every day. It’s romanticized — far more so than your typical superhero Saturday morning cartoons, and whether it’s futuristic or it’s present day, I just think it has that romantic side to it that is really its biggest appeal.

SCOTT: Is there a specific date to the setting, or just supposed to be Thirties?

HSU: It’s the early Thirties. Sometimes the costume design varies from Twenties to Thirties, there’s that range there. We do have some characters like Albert Einstein and Babe Ruth showing up.

SCOTT: Take us through the process a little. How will it happen for you?

HSU: I don’t typically do the breakdown. The producers will go through the script and they will determine how many characters they need. Then I’m given a list and then I go over the script to find out the subtle details that’s required in these characters. I’m doing the best I can to understand these characters. Some of the characters are pretty straightforward, especially the background characters--they’re just wallpaper in a way. But some of the main characters, I have to pay a lot more attention in terms of the scene. Intricate details about them. And then try to integrate all that.

SCOTT: And then what will happen after you go through the script?

HSU: Very simply, I just start sketching, really rough. I’ll sometimes do a few versions for myself. Just whatever comes to my head, and see which one sticks. And when I come up with something that I like, I fax it over to production to get their take and approval. And the process goes on from there. If it comes back okay, then either I make modifications or just go straight to clean up.

SCOTT: And when the final drawing goes off, your work stops at that point — for that particular show?

HSU: For that particular show, yes, and then we push on to the next episode, because we are on a very tight schedule. Right now, I’m actually involved with going back to the past shows. And when they do their boards, there are additional characters that might be required, or some of the characters might have to be changed for whatever their purposes might call for. Then I might go back and do additional characters, or modify characters.

SCOTT: How long of a process is it per show that you are working on it?

HSU: Theoretically, it’s one week for roughs and one week for clean-ups. I say theoretically because a lot of times they overlap. Sometimes the scripts get delayed and you get a bunch of back work. There could be a bottleneck of different shows coming at the same time. But typically it’s about a two-week process.

SCOTT: When you’re working on features, how does that differ from, The Mummy TV series?

HSU: I think the added restrictions or limitations that you have in terms of your budget and how many set-ups you can have in TV, it’s sometimes far more challenging than making a big budget movie. Well, what I do for movies is different; I do storyboards. I think the process probably isn’t so different from doing a storyboard for The Mummy. But it is different in a TV series, where you’re a little bit more aware of what you can do with a camera, and what your limitations are with a camera. You can’t have a camera rotating around the room in a shot in a typical Saturday morning cartoon. They just don’t have the budget; to animate that would be too laborious. And the simple fact that there’s just a bigger budget, so you can have as many set-ups as you want. You can have your own cuts as you think is necessary. So you’re never confined by the budget. You’re much more confined by how many set-ups you can have in a TV show, because each time the camera changes an angle, somebody here has to design that background. You send it overseas, and somebody has to paint that. So there’s that limitation with TV.

SCOTT: With the limitations, are you able to find creative solutions?

HSU: Yeah, it’s always a challenge. And it’s a lot of fun, actually, to be able to do that. I like character design as pure self-_expression. But I think when you start dealing with storyboards, you start dealing with a whole bunch of different elements. And it’s more challenging. So I have a lot of respect for people, other storyboard artists who work TV, because they’re tremendously talented. Not to take away anything from feature film artists, but it is--there is that limitation that I defined.

SCOTT: What do you think the strength of The Mummy is for you as a designer?

HSU: Ultimately, it is about a mummy and it is about Egypt. And that’s what’s appealing to the audience. So we have all come to recognize that. Stay with that look. I’m having a ball, really, doing what I do. And hopefully this will continue. And I would love to maybe get involved with directing further on in the future. Whatever capacity comes my way. The whole process is invigorating. It’s a lot of fun to go create something that winds up in an animated show.