Hanlin Su has been telling stories since before he knew what he was doing.
Su, a first-year psychology student, runs Retrever Entertainment, a boutique animation studio he launched after enrolling at UCLA last fall. Working entirely on Blender – a free, open source 3D software – Su recently designed the official 10th anniversary music video for Norwegian DJ and producer Alan Walker’s song “Faded.” Since its release Dec. 24, the video has surpassed 1 million views on YouTube and over 10 million across social platforms. Su said he created the entire animation in his dorm room, merging his art style with Walker’s characteristic visuals.
“Some people describe it (Su’s animation style) as old-fashioned, because, compared to some animations these days, (they) have a ton of special effects,” Su said. “But we go from a story, and then we see what kind of style fits the story.”
Su, who grew up in the Bay Area, said his entry point into the field happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. While locked inside, he discovered Roblox animation and taught himself how to navigate Blender, he added. After he launched his own YouTube channel, Su said he quickly amassed a following, gaining over 100,000 subscribers and reaching over 10 million views on one of his early animations.
Starting high school, Su said the animation uploads slowed down but opened up a different door. Through the Roblox Video Stars creator program, he said he found himself in early conversations with music teams about creating animations for artists. While none of the early negotiations moved forward, they taught him how the industry worked, he added. When college acceptances came in, Su said he decided to brave cold emailing music managers and labels to pitch different ideas.
“I was up at 3 a.m. back during high school studying for a calculus exam, and something just popped up in my mind,” Su said. “I was like, ‘I love Alan Walker songs. What if I just email Alan Walker and ask his team if they would be interested?’”
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Su said he pitched a specific concept for one of Walker’s latest songs to his manager, and then his manager connected Su to Walker’s team. From there, Su said it was a lot of back-and-forth and hopping on meetings before they settled on working on the 10th anniversary video of “Faded.”
Pre-production began in October, when he wrote the scripts and storyboard scenes and sent drafts to the team for notes, Su said. He added that they went through around four versions before production started a month later, with a target release date of Dec. 3 – the exact anniversary date. The release date was eventually pushed to Christmas.
Working alongside Su was David Berube, who became Retrever’s head of production after Su reached out to him on Discord after seeing an animation he had made, Berube said. The two spent time pulling all-nighters, building stories and animating characters frame by frame, Su said. Berube said his role involves working with assets – the individual and reusable digital elements used to build a scene, like visual models, sound effects and programmed movement data.
“We’d send them (drafts) to Alan’s team and they’d give feedback … and while that was happening, I was working on assets and stuff to make the visuals more polished,” Berube said. “We did work for a couple months, and then we’d send the in-progress to the team.”
Thuyen Tran, a fourth-year economics student who does marketing and distribution for Retrever, said she was in the same creative spaces with Roblox and UGC, leading her to join Su’s team. She said her role in distribution involves identifying the process and logistics of posting a video and figuring out deals. She added that, with the Walker video, a lot of this work was done for them because of the already big following of Walker’s music.
“With this one, it was actually really interesting because the video itself was really high quality, and Alan Walker’s team really liked it, so when they posted it, it instantly went viral,” Tran said. “We’re really lucky because it got a ton of views and people started just organically reposting it through TikTok. … We kept just building on it and continuing to push it out with other creators.”
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Su said his animation style is driven by story first. He and his team assess what a narrative needs visually and then work from that point, he said.For “Faded,” that meant leaning into Walker’s signature ambiance of muted blues, heavy shadows and other colors matching the song’s melancholic weight, he added. Su said this was different from other work he has made, such as the four animated films he produced in high school for the Children’s Cancer Research Fund, where he said he made warm, bright stories designed to bring light into the days of pediatric cancer patients.
Su said a big inspiration for him is Hayao Miyazaki because he admires the way Miyazaki uses storytelling to comment on society while staying true to his craft – something Su tries to carry into his work. He added that being in Los Angeles has been its own source of inspiration and when he feels stuck on a script, he will head downtown and walk around until an idea surfaces.
“I do think that psychology and animation or the art of storytelling go hand-in-hand,” he said. “Because with storytelling, you’re making stories for humans, and psychology by itself is understanding people and why they do what they do.”
In the future, Su said he wants to build original intellectual property under the Retrever name with his own world of characters. He said he is also thinking about concert films and documentary-style narratives about artists. Retrever was named after his golden retriever Marshmallow, who Su said is both the CEO and moral support. Building the production studio, Su added, has coincidentally felt a little bit like playing fetch with Marshmallow.
“It’s trial and error, you can’t really succeed if you don’t fail,” Su said. “It’s always throwing the tennis ball out there and then retrieving it and coming back and seeing what works and what doesn’t.”
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