Meet Xinhui Ma | Animation Director & Illustrator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Xinhui Ma and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Xinhui, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
As an animation director, coming out of school and going into the freelance world, there’s a lot of people hiring me to make the whole animation video on my own, but I was still very new to the industry, as I hoped around from different gigs from all kinds of media like ads, tv and and feature, I also worked in house for a while at an advertising studio, over the course I became very familiar with different part of the process from script writing to design creatives to animation and delivery presentation and client communication, and since hiring me is like hiring an entire studio, I thought to myself why don’t I start my own, especially since I already operate in that way.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I grew up in China and moved here for college to study animation, it was hard in the beginning to overcome the language barrier to communicate my ideas and to understand others on top of the culture shock. There’s a gap between the communication mental shortcut within these 2 different culture. Same goes with my work, my work is very colorful, fun and character based visually, but storytelling wise it’s a little more abstract and experimental. I use to try really hard making sure people understand what I mean in my work, but I think I’ve learned to love it and made it my own, blending these aspects that supposedly is on the opposite end of spectrum and just leave things for interpretation.

At the moment, I’m working on my first comic book, it’s loosely based on my childhood and has a lot of darker and perhaps more serious analogy hidden in the undertone of the world building.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I’ll take them to griffith part and then the amc in downtown burbank and maybe the santa monica pier.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
So many people I wanna give thanks to that has supported me and my journey, my mom and my dad, mentors and senpais in the animation industry that are ahead of me on the same path whose so generously shared their experience and advice, all my friends that went through so much with me together, shout out to Kim Yuan Xu, we’ve literally witnessed each other’s growth since we’re back in school and then trying to make it as artists on top of working super hard just to stay in the country being immigrants, to now thriving and still trying maintain our visas. Could not have done without them and their support and insparations.

Website: https://www.xinhuima.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/xinhui_art/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xinhui-ma-993b01109

Other: http://vimeo.com/seaglo http://soundcloud.com/seaglo

Image Credits
Artist: Xinhui Ma