KPOP DEMON HUNTERS
Sony Pictures
“A world-renowned K-Pop girl group balance their lives in the spotlight with their secret identities as demon hunters.”
Building Virtual Concerts
I was one of the first dedicated compositors on KPOP. Joining well before lighting had started sequence work, and was quickly put on a small team of specialist to try and sort out how we would tackle the many large scale, dynamic, and music driven concert sequences.
It quickly became apparent that compositors on the project would need to manipulate a lot of AOVs for all the concert lighting, and there wasn’t a toolset in nuke that could handle that scale of work. So I built a system which allowed users to collect AOVs by name, wildcard searches, and keywords, and quickly grade them all in a non-destructive way. This allowed us to render out the lighting in either pure white, or coloured but not animated, and finish the look in comp, hitting all the timing beats easier. After we could send that data back to Katana for full integration.
The Light In Their Eyes
Next on my to-do list was to build a new Eye Pings (Specularity) tool for Nuke. That would allow artist to quickly place reflected shapes onto the eyes of the characters. I had done something like this before on other projects, and with my ReflectionBuddy tool, but there was an extra special feature in the KPOP version that allowed artist to interpolate between the pings being sticky or realistic. This was the hardest part to develop by far, but something I have always wanted to have in a tool like this, so the challenge was worth it!
Making Art
After those development projects were done, and a few smaller ones, I moved fully into a lead role, and finally got to do some actual key shot work, for many of the concert sequences in the film. This was a lot of fun! and as a result I had the songs stuck in my head about a year before most everyone else :)
Each concert sequence had wildly different colour pallets and overall styles, from the super colorful Soda Pop, to the dark and scary Take Down, it was a compositors dream to work on them, and as a lead, help others do the same!
Couch! Couch! Couch!
Kpop Demon Hunters was a lot of work, not just for myself but for everyone involved, so seeing it absolutely blow up around the world and become a global sensation, has been very rewarding to see!
I’m going to need a short break now though, cya soon!
