If you haven’t seen the galleries yet, this May/June, Light Grey Art Lab hosted a virtual exhibition to showcase the work of art grads from around the world! This project is to celebrate their work, connect them with industry professionals, and welcome the grads to the greater creative community!
Find the Senior Show Galleries here : lightgreyartlab.com/seniorshow2020
Meet Jasmine Soompholphadky, one of the artists in the Senior Show 2020 exhibit. Jasmine is a recent animation graduate from Maryland Institute College of Art. You can find more of her work here: cool-beens.com
My name is Jasmine, or some may know me as Beens. I’m a Lao 2D animator who also likes to dabble in 3D, play video games with friends, make funny jokes, and eat flamin’ hot flavored foods. I hope to work in the TV animation industry in storyboarding, but I can see myself doing anything.
Still from Jasmine’s thesis project, Hack Attack. View Jasmine’s thesis animation here.
Can you tell me about the event that inspired Hack Attack? What about the event interested you in focusing your thesis around it?
Talking about the inspiration of Hack Attack is always slightly embarrassing to me because it really puts a timestamp on how recently I was playing ROBLOX. Sometime during my junior year of college, my ROBLOX account was hacked. I like to check in on it every now and then because it's something very close to my heart that I’ve had for more than ten years. One day, I caught that my account’s username and password were changed, and all of my items in the game were gone. I was able to email the game and get my account recovered. While thinking of ideas to do my thesis on, I just kinda thought of this story like, wouldn’t be funny if one of my characters had this happen to her? And by using her chaotic energy, she travels through computers to attack the culprit– WITH A KNIFE? Then I developed the story around that joke. I decided to pick this as my thesis because, by the end of junior year, I fleshed out the story so much and had so many jokes I wanted to make. My multiple jokes made me want to make this thesis, but also kept me working on it. I never got sick of making my film, cause after one joke I had another joke I wanted to make next!
Still from Hack Attack. View Jasmine’s thesis animation here.
You experienced what the being on the internet was like for kids growing up in the early 2000s, which is evident in Hack Attack. What about these platforms influences and inspires you?
I really was a 2000s/2010s internet kid. My family was never able to afford gaming consoles, so most of my life has been me using my dad’s home PC we had in the house since he worked with computers. My first memory of computer games is going on Barbie or Polly Pocket websites to play their flash games. I remember there was one game where you choose a flower to paint nails and stuff? LOVED that one. The most impactful one to me though is ROBLOX, of course. These old sites really inspire me because of nostalgia 100%. However, I think just the chaos, creativity, and the unknown of the internet is what really inspired me. Everything was so stylized and crazy. Nothing was really censored– not in a nasty way though. But because of that, the internet was full of creativity. I feel like the internet now is more reserved, conscious, and lacking in creativity. Every website is the same. Everyone’s trying to look like an iPad! I miss funky website designs and funky games. ROBLOX used to have new top games every day made by regular kids– did they suck? Yeah. Were they fun? Oh man, they were. Now everything seems too serious and made perfect enough that people can make a dollar off of it. I feel nostalgic for the old internet because of its creativity and how unpredictably chaotic it is, and it inspires me in my work.
Still from Hack Attack. View Jasmine’s thesis animation here.
Do you have any new projects planned, in the works, or that you hope to do?
Right now, I’ve been doing doodles of this kappa character I reworked from my old one, and its been really fun to draw! I made up some little scenarios, but I decided to take up animating some real short-shorts of it. I also animate snippets from the radio show Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig on Beats 1 for fun, so I’ll definitely be continuing to do that. I actually currently have another short for that in the works, I just had to shelve it for a bit because I decided to change the concept of it. Just personal projects and doing things for fun for now.
Still from Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig Animated. Watch here.
What other media inspires you and your work?
Things I always look back to are Tekkonkinkreet, Adventure Time, and Apple and Onion, which is my current favorite. I love the 3D works of Julian Glander. Japanese mascots inspire me as well, and I started to like Kappas after becoming a fan of Kapal from Shiki City, and of course, ROBLOX. Music-wise, my favorite band is Joyce Manor! I also have been listening to Inner Wave, Ecco2k, Girlfriends, Chicano Batman, and Now, Now, Every Children (But only their In The City ep/Cars album).
What advice would you want to pass along to aspiring artists?
Art is hard. Especially now that I’ve graduated, things don’t come easy. I’d say to make sure you have fun and you like what you do. Experiment a lot and figure yourself out and don’t be afraid to bend the rules to keep practicing what you want to do. Also, manage your time well and don't overestimate yourself. It’s easy to take up a lot of things and overwork yourself– you really gotta know and figure out who you are. It doesn’t come easy but have confidence, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, and make work! Not everything is going to be perfect either; sometimes you just gotta make something bad to make something good. Practice, practice, practice, and move on, and keep making!
What personal goals do you have for your artistic practice?
My personal goals… right now it’s financial-wise. It’s hard to think of anything else right now. But my goal is to make meaningful content and make people laugh. I want to make people happy! So it always makes me happy to hear that I’ve made someone’s day with a video. And sometimes people keep going back. I’m glad that something I made can make an impact on someone’s day.
Thanks, Jasmine! Best of luck with your career!
You can find Jasmine on Instagram, Twitter, and see more of her work on her website.
If you would like to see more projects from Senior Show, click here!