The red-feathered hero of “The Angry Birds Movie 3” looks reassuringly familiar, but DNEG Animation had to rebuild much of him to bring the franchise back to theaters. And as the studio reconstructed Red’s fur, facial rig and expressions, it also developed a system that ultimately automated character-effects work on roughly 75% of the film’s shots.
“He’s similar by choice,” VFX supervisor Patrick Harboun said at View Conference in Turin on Friday.
The upcoming Paramount release, directed by John Rice, reunites Jason Sudeikis’ Red with Silver, voiced by Rachel Bloom, as they navigate parenthood alongside their latest adventure. DNEG takes over animation duties from the Sony Pictures Animation productions behind the first two films.
The technical handover was anything but straightforward. In fact, proprietary grooming, rigging and surfacing tools used on the predecessors could not simply be transferred to DNEG’s pipeline. “We had to start from this. A plucked chicken version of Red,” Harboun joked, displaying a bare digital model. Even its underlying geometry needed reworking before the team could reconstruct its feathers.
The result deliberately avoided a radical makeover. Red’s plumage became slightly softer, while his eyes and beak gained firmer, more toy-like surfaces. “Once an IP becomes popular, it kind of belongs to the fans, and we have to respect that,” Harboun said. “We can’t just add our own spin just to give our mark.”
The studio scrutinized the earlier movies frame by frame. “We analyzed the past movies to find the unwritten rules of animation,” he explained. Animators cataloged the angles of Red’s beak, the geometry of his narrowed eyes and the boundaries beyond which a stretched expression stopped feeling like Red. The lessons became a style guide and a reusable library of facial expressions.
There was more room for experimentation with over 20 new characters, including Red and Silver’s children: aspiring athlete Glider, voiced by Walker Scobell; temperamental June, played by Emma Myers; and baby Olly, voiced by Psalm West. The family also has a pet spider named Fuzzy, voiced by James Austin Johnson. “The goal was to make a spider that even an arachnophobe would love,” Harboun said.
Olly created a distinctive technical challenge because his glasses effectively serve as animated eyes, complete with moving eyelids and brows. DNEG’s solution, nicknamed “Pancake Eyes,” involved duplicating and flattening portions of the baby’s facial rig behind the lenses, then restoring curvature and allowing the expressions to respond to the character’s exaggerated squash-and-stretch movement.
The biggest efficiency gain came through a performance-effects process building on DNEG’s earlier work for “The Garfield Movie.” Following approval of a character’s animation, the system automatically simulated selected effects on fur, feathers and deformation, rendered a preview and identified shots requiring bespoke artist attention. As the crew encountered new problems, they improved reusable templates for each character.
“It’s not machine learning, it’s human learning,” Harboun underlined, stressing that artists maintained those templates. Early in production, around 25% of shots could pass through the automated process; by later stages, that figure had risen to 75%. “This frees up a lot of artists for hero work,” he explained. The percentage applies to character-effects processing, not to shots being animated or completed without artists.
Other inventions included a secondary, normally invisible layer of fur that appears when characters stretch, preventing bald patches, and one-click tools for building ropes, hay and props that animators could manipulate independently, without repeatedly calling on other departments.
Production designer Jeanie Chang’s saturated tropical palette posed another challenge. Lighting references were painted directly over layout images so artists could match intended compositions, but differently colored characters still required individual lighting adjustments within the same scene. “In every given situation, Red always needs to be red,” Harboun said.
The film also expands Bird Island with Pigtropolis, a city for its pig residents. Harboun revealed that the opening sequence was changed from night to day late in production. He encouraged audiences to seek out the 3D version when the film opens Dec. 23: “I’m usually not a fan of 3D, but I really recommend that you check out the 3D version.”
For Harboun, such innovations only work when they reinforce what audiences already recognize. The characters may have been rebuilt and their workflows reinvented, but their familiar identities remain the foundation.