Yibing's Idea

My name is Yibing Jiang. I'm a filmmaker, artist and engineer.

I'm a Chinese girl came to US to chase my animation dream.  I went to engineering school back in China, got myself a degree of Artificial Intelligence. But now, I'm a Writer/Director of an animation short called Windup, nothing related to Artificial Intelligence. The cool part is this film is fully rendered Real-Time using Unity Engine. We are using techniques from the AAA game production that push the visual bar while rendering 3 million times faster than regular animation films! 3 Million? Yep, you can do the math 30 frames per second compares with 30 hours per frame... :)
So far Windup has been qualitfied for 93rd Academy Awards The Best Animated Short, and it has been officially selected into 22 major film festivals, in which 11 of them are Oscar-qualifying festivals.

My professional experience also includes:
Uncharted 4, The Last of Us 2 - Naughty Dog
Monsters University, Cars 2 - Pixar Animation Studios
Wreck it Ralph - Walt Disney Animation Studios
The Order 1886 - Ready at Dawn

Windup is the story of a father who tries to stay connected with his hospitalized daughter through music. Windup is not a light-hearted story, but it is inspired by my own personal experience. Since I was often sick when I was a kid, my memories of those days were foggy. On the other hand, from my parents’ perspective, the event was more serious. They told me they spent countless nights taking care of me; fighting their own emotions and try to stay strong. I didn’t know why they were so worried, since as kids, we think we’re invincible. But when I got older, I started to empathize more with my parents. Especially since I’ve moved to the US. My family and I are far apart and it makes me the one who always worries about them.

Everyone knows the outbreak of the coronavirus. Wuhan is actually my hometown. Quickly after the news of the whole city shutting down, I got word that my uncle had to stop his cancer treatment because of the overwhelming number of COVID patients. Also, both of my cousins still needed to work in the hospital, where half of their coworkers were already infected, and more and more people got sick every day. I was terrified and not sure what I could do. I video chatted with my families as often as we could. But once the camera turns off, all the horrible thoughts would rush back in… And that was the time we were crunching for this film, I remember we were animating the hospital sequence when the father character feels hopeless and sits on the floor. At that moment, I could totally sympathize with his pain. “Life imitates Art” I guess?