Kung Fu Panda 2

Scope of Work

On Kung Fu Panda 2, my primary function was as Technical Director and secondary as Lighting Artist. As TD, I wrote artist tools, devised the 'Level of Detail' system for fur, wrote crowd data validation tools and resolved several day to day technical problems on the show. As artist, I completed lighting and compositing for several shots.

Tasks of note

I had the good fortune of being assigned the lighting of one of the key moments in the film - the flashback of Po's mother's sacrifice when she had to abandon him as a baby. This sequence was heavily art directed and took several months of iteration between lighting and FX to bring to final completion.
Before the flashback, there is a moment where Po sees a reflection of himself as a child inside a pool of water. The reflection was 2D animation created by the art department. And we had to time it with the water's ripple motion from a raindrop. This also took a lot of iterations and a simultaneous collaboration between 3 departments.

Challenges

This was my first film doing official shot work. Being able to handle the high artistic complexity of some of the shots along with supporting up to 20 artists in the department (at a time) and doing tool work was quite a challenge.

Fun Fact

To my happy surprise, the flashback sequence with Po's mother was repeated in the sequel - Kung Fu Panda 3. So it was worth spending all those months on these shots! :)

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