From August 2022 to February 2023, I interned at a local animation studio called Chips and Toon as part of my final semester of my final year at Singapore Polytechnic. During my time there, I had the frankly amazing opportunity to write my own original animated series and submit it to the MediaCorp commissioning call. I was very surprised and honoured to have been given free reign over this project, since this was technically my first job ever. My supervisor Seb also helped me a lot with the story themes and ideation process - he explained Chinese and Southeast Asian folklore and mythology in a way that genuinely piqued my interest.
The story was inspired by my favourite anime of all time, Mob Psycho 100, I was so hyper-fixated at the time that I kinda just went, "What if I made it Singaporean?" and boom! So the genres of the story are very much supernatural, very much comedy, with deeper issues rooted in it such as academic pressures and generational trauma. I had the loveliest time creating and projecting myself into the characters. The whole concept has sort of become my baby...
"A young genius named Penny discovers a cellphone from Hell and uses its
supernatural technology to run a local ghostbusting business."
The most surreal about this entire experience was to see professional artists do concept art for my original story. I'm no artist myself, but I certainly had fun drawing up a few storyboards to try and visualise how the episodes would play out.
In late 2022, my boss pitched Penny at a local media event, where BiliBili, a famous Chinese animation company, was in attendance. They provided feedback for the concept, and despite the version pitched being one of my earliest, roughest drafts, they rated it a 65% complete. I'm a huge fan of BiliBili's works, so the fact that they thought my story was doing well at that point was already a massive achievement to me.
In early 2023, we received an e-mail from MediaCorp stating that Penny For Your Soul had been shortlisted for a face-to-face pitch, and they would decide from there whether they would fund the show's creation! It was exciting and extremely nerve-wracking - this was the biggest pitch of my life, in front of the actual industry professionals of the country, and in spite of my anxiety it ended up going perfectly.
I'm proud to announce that Penny For Your Soul will officially go into production
as an original animated series, in collaboration with Xanthus Animation Studio in Taiwan!
I'll never forget this whole experience of bringing Penny to new heights, and I'm super grateful she managed to get this far. If you're curious to know more about the story, here's two snippets from the world of Penny Ting, a haunted Singapore:
S01E01: The Bai Cai (Webtoon Script)
While the series is currently in production, we wanted to branch out to other forms of media as well. These are the first few pages of the pilot episode, written for a Webtoon adaptation.
Heibai Wuchang Minisode
Part of a 12-minute prequel focusing on two side characters, the Heibai Wuchang, who are mythologically known to hunt down spirits evading occult punishment in Hell. This is what a Tuesday evening is like for them.