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- Morphing Mousedeer!
By Ann Lee
 "Using your own imagination and creativity, draw a 6-frame storyboard featuring your toy design in a short story...Use hand-drawn or 2D/3D computer software. Full colour."
Here's a tale about a boy from Sungei Petani who just wants to work in Hollywood. Pixar Animation Studios, to be exact, as a digital animator. All he needs is RM150,000 to finish a BA in Digital Media from RMIT, Australia. Or an Uncle or Aunty who knows someone at Pixar.
 Someone out there should give this boy a fighting chance. For 20-year-old Tan Jin Ho is something of a mousedeer that can roar. Not one of the forest regulars.
Right now, he's studying in the final semester of an Electronic Design and Multimedia diploma course at a local college, Limkokwing Institute of Creative Technology (LICT), which sells creativity as if it were the only natural resource worth plundering. (The fevered pitch would be right when you have petroleum and palm oil to push for room on the pedestal.) Imagination. It puts the 'value' in 'value-added' where the serious money is; the real gold in the liquid gold and golden crop. If only the country's auditors and economists would put a value to it.
Tan recently won First Prize in the advanced category for tertiary students at the Digital Art & Design Award competition, an initiative of the One Academy of Communication Design, jointly organised with The Star's In Tech section, supported by the Multimedia Development Corporation, and sponsored by Packard Bell. The annual competition is only two years old but it has sparked interest in the digital arts, and certainly added fuel to the fire in the hearts of the country's youngest artists and designers who work in the digital medium and want a chance to win.
Tan won with his Chevro2020, a remote-controlled toy for 12-16 year olds who know how to control and navigate. He says the project took him two weeks to develop - discussing with friends (4-5 days), thinking the storyboard through to show what the toy can do (4-5 days), and then the modelling, texturing and rendering (a week). He picked Sang Kancil because "it's a mascot people can relate to. It symbolises cleverness, it's small and easy, has four legs, easy to move. Cute also."
 "I went to the Net to look up transformation, like in the cartoon 'Transformers', how to put the joints here and there, and roughly figure out how to make it look like a mousedeer." Tan used NewTek's Lightwave 3D software to do so, and various other software downloaded free from the Net.
The storyboard features a rooster chasing various remote-controlled cars. When they reach a drain, most of the cars brake and stop. But the Chevro2020, (from Chevrotain, the French moniker for Kancil) transforms into a mousedeer that walks over a branch lying across the drain and escapes. Rooster outwitted. Competition routed. First prize, kau tim. At the very least, it looks like the perfect giveaway for Perodua Kancil customers' kids to collect.
"I wanted to get the cracking cement in the longkang just right," says Tan. "The lighting during that time of day. And the typical seaside kampung houses for the background where the rooster is."
Tan's work, says Norhayati Saad, programme leader for Electronic Design and Multimedia at LICT, is "exceptional". "It's not just the competition that he has excelled at." She uses more words that must make Tan's schoolteacher father and housewife mother very proud (except perhaps 'workaholic') and notes that in the two years on the course, Tan has been totally dedicated. "Lecturers are challenged by him." She puts Tan in the category of industry professionals and he does take on freelance jobs. He is currently working on a project that may well earn him in the region of RM20,000 for a week's work. Which he will put straight back into buying licenses for software.
Tan, who is reserved and soft-spoken - the humility is genuine and refreshing - spends "many, many hours" in front of a computer screen. All he reads are software manuals, tutorials, and other tips and tricks. "It is limited," he says, "but it's the truth. It's what I need to read to execute what I need to do. If I could split myself in two, I would, so that I have a balance of outdoor and indoor activities. In 3D design, you need to do it everyday, practise and practise. If you don't do it for one week, you...cannot."
He started playing games on "an old 1980s Apple". He decided he liked the graphics and started basic programming, using a Wintel platform.
 His joy in life is rendering. "I don't mind spending time doing the wire-frame, the lighting, texture, colorisation. It's like baking a cake, preparing the raw materials, putting in the oven. When I hit the render key and it turns out so nice, that makes me very satisfied."
And when it turns out not so nice, he is resolute. "It is frustrating when I have been working so hard but I don't get the result I want. Never mind...I still have to find the fastest and easiest and most effective way to solve the problem."
Otherwise, he takes a break and goes out with his girlfriend and other friends to the 3D mamak stalls.
"I'm very interested in Hollywood," says Tan. "To get into the film industry and do special visual effects."
Somebody make a smart move on this guy.
© 2000 AgendaMalaysia
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