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okay I'm kinda curious now was there a kdrama favourite HAHA

great job on the movie! 🙏🙏

the first one we watched together as a crew was Weightlifting Fairy cos the main girls were pretty exact matches to rumi, mira and zoey haha

we also got into Lovely Runner, Business Proposal, and My Mister

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having ocs is so fucked .... i miss them so bad but im the guy who has to create new content. but im sleepy

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What was it like for kpop, to be one lead of many, with so many animators on the team? I've heard Sony film turnarounds are shorter than other studios- was there a struggle to maintain a certain style, or keep things consistent, especially over a relatively short timeframe? I noticed being on 2s/1s was also something that fluctuated- were there sensibility differences between each lead? How involved was the animation director with style calls? Was there a style guide/how detailed?

Thank you I've just been siloed to kids TV for so long I'm deeply curious about the feature engine (and differences between productions)

- Vancouver TV chap ⚛️

great questions!

it's funny you mention shorter turnarounds because this was the second longest i've worked on a movie at sony, at 1.5 years. we only had four anim teams total (plus a crowds team), with one supervisor and two leads to a team. the sups were in charge of creative management, which made it easier to keep the style more consistent between the teams. the leads helped keep an eye out for style consistency too. the biggest struggle came from the freedom that we have to design the faces, because although we had a lot of control over the shapes, that made it very easy for the characters to go off model. we had some character experts on the crew that we could call on to give us draw-overs or rig poses for particularly tough shots (library poses only got us so far and needed to be very specific sometimes).

the idea of using 1s vs 2s on this one was to vary it up based on what the shot needed, either could be used as long as the shot didn't feel too soft or too strobey. this wasn't policed as much towards the end of production though as shots were being done faster and faster haha, most shots just ended up on twos. could have used more ones, personally. it's sometimes hard to tell if a shot is too strobey until it goes through lighting.

the animation director, or HOCA (head of character animation) has a huge say in the style! it's all a big collaboration between the directors, animation, and all the other departments on how to work together to create the final image. there's a ton of back and forth that the HOCA is heavily involved with, and is in charge of maintaining that consistent look. we experimented with a lot of design work in anim, and he directed us towards more specific ideas before presenting them to the directors.

this being an original IP, the only style guides we had were drawings and concept art. it took us a long time and a lot of experimentation to discover what was "on model" for each of the characters, with a lot of drawover help from the art team at SPA. we also took a lot of inspiration from live action reference like k dramas and the voice actors. once we knew more about the characters, we built the libraries and more in-depth style guides from there!

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Omg was the team's name for the tiger derpy? The bird and tiger are absolutely my favourite pair in the movie I adore them with my heart and soul 😌 congrats to you and the team for its success!!! Really fantastic job with the soundtrack and bold visuals ٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و everything is so wonderfully eye-catching and has such a strong aesthetic of it's own, it's no wonder the animation is getting appreciated like spiderverse! Did anything from atsv help with figuring out the look of kpdh?

it was never said in the movie but yeah! the tiger is derpy and the magpie is sussie (confirmed by the director maggie kang on twitter, sorry for linking to the Bad Place)

and thank you! that's a great question, because although we wanted a very different look from spiderverse, we used a lot of stuff that we learned from it. we used more of a mix of animating on ones and twos, as well as "expression lines" (though not nearly as much as we would on spidey). spiderverse is meant to look very flat, hard, graphic, and comic-y, like it was printed in ink. the directors wanted kpop to have a lot more depth, softness, elegance and glamour to it. a lot of inspiration was taken from k dramas, which we watched a bunch of together as a crew haha, it was fun!

in general, spiderverse opened the doors to style exploration and a lot of kpop wouldn't have been possible without the tools and workflows set up from before! kpop required a lot of new stuff too though, like costume management, chibi faces, crowd tools, fx rigs for weapon smears, hair dynamics, a visible "metronome" for the songs, and probably a few more that i'm forgetting lol

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Hey there! Congrats on the whole crew on movie being out. The whole thing looks absolutely amazing to look at 😍😍 I have to wonder, which part of the movie did you worked on? 👀👀

thank you so much!! the response to the movie has been so much more than i expected haha, it's awesome to see an original IP resonate so well with everyone <3

as a lead, i didn't get a chance to animate that much on kpop (though i did a few that i'll share when i can!). my job was more to help plan and set up sequences, help animators with notes and technical workflows, and overall organize and manage the team (alongside my fellow leads and supervisors!)

the biggest sequences that i worked on were the plane at the beginning ("how it's done" up until the fall), jinu pitching the boy band to gwima, the healer, the game show, derpy and rumi on the balcony, rumi and jinu's "date", the final climax ("what it sounds like" ending), and a whole lot more smaller sequences scattered throughout!

i started on the movie super early too so i got to help discover the hyper expressive faces and our design/workflow for those! it's been lovely to see folks specifically point those out, it's not often that animation specific stuff gets noticed on a non-spiderverse movie haha

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KPOP DEMON HUNTERS (2025), dir Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans

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My concept paintings for the romantic duet in KPop: Demon Hunters!

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I worked on Kpop Demon Hunters for about a year and a half and it's finally coming out on netflix tomorrow! yay!

this is a doodle I did and they ended up making it into crew merch lol

stupid sexy sajas

it's a super fun movie and like with every movie sony does now we tried some fun new things with the animation and style, so give it a watch and I hope you enjoy!

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i'm gonna show you, how it's done - done - done KPOP DEMON HUNTERS

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jeepeon (based on this image from Let's Find Pokemon)

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kabuterimon

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i think its so awesome that ocs exist. u can just make up some girl and put so many problems in her head

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sorry for being so obsessed with that little man who lives in my head. as if i have any choice

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haunted

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"New Neighbor"

Started a new AC: Wild World save and had an interesting interaction with Goldie during one of the tutorial errands.

After delivering something for Tom Nook to her and having some banter she said something like: " You can get anything you need from Nook's Cranny! Shovel, watering can, fishing rod, anything you need for so little bells! Except for the axe...not sure why you'd need to you that anyways, woof!"

Pretty harmless line but I couldn't help but think that in a different context that line sounds much creepier (idk maybe that's just me lol)