DNEG Rebuilt Red From Scratch for 'Angry Birds Movie 3'

By Daniel Okafor

DNEG Animation rebuilt Red from bare geometry for "The Angry Birds Movie 3" and, in the process, built a system that automated character-effects work on roughly 75% of the film's shots. The Paramount release opens Dec. 23.

"He's similar by choice," VFX supervisor Patrick Harboun said at View Conference in Turin on Friday.

The studio had no alternative to a rebuild. Sony Pictures Animation, which made the first two films, used proprietary grooming, rigging and surfacing tools that could not simply transfer to DNEG's pipeline. "We had to start from this. A plucked chicken version of Red," Harboun joked, showing a bare digital model.

DNEG takes over the franchise with director John Rice at the helm. Jason Sudeikis returns as Red, Rachel Bloom as Silver, and the pair now navigates parenthood alongside their adventure.

Why Red looks the same — on purpose

The rebuild deliberately avoided a makeover. Red's plumage became slightly softer; 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 team studied the earlier films frame by frame. "We analyzed the past movies to find the unwritten rules of animation," he explained. Animators cataloged beak angles, eye geometry and the exact point where a stretched expression stopped feeling like Red. The findings became a style guide and a reusable library of facial expressions.

How did automation reach 75% of shots?

The efficiency story is the quiet headline. Building on DNEG's work for "The Garfield Movie," a performance-effects process automatically simulated selected effects on fur, feathers and deformation once animation was approved, rendered previews and flagged shots needing bespoke artist attention.

Early in production, about 25% of shots could pass through the automated process. By later stages, that figure reached 75%. "This frees up a lot of artists for hero work," Harboun said. The percentage covers character-effects processing only — not shots animated or finished without artists.

"It's not machine learning, it's human learning," Harboun underlined. Artists maintained the reusable templates for each character throughout.

The new characters got more room for experimentation. The family now includes more than 20 newcomers: Glider, voiced by Walker Scobell; June, played by Emma Myers; baby Olly, voiced by Psalm West; and Fuzzy the pet spider, voiced by James Austin Johnson. "The goal was to make a spider that even an arachnophobe would love," Harboun said.

Olly posed a distinct problem. His glasses function as animated eyes, complete with moving eyelids and brows. DNEG's fix, nicknamed "Pancake Eyes," duplicated and flattened portions of the baby's facial rig (the digital controls driving expression) behind the lenses, then restored curvature so the expressions could follow his exaggerated squash-and-stretch movement.

Other inventions included a normally invisible second layer of fur that appears when characters stretch, preventing bald patches, and one-click tools for ropes, hay and props that animators could manipulate without calling on other departments.

What stayed hardest to control?

Lighting. Production designer Jeanie Chang's saturated tropical palette meant lighting references were painted directly over layout images, and differently colored characters still needed individual 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. The opening sequence switched from night to day late in production. And Harboun, no 3D enthusiast, made one recommendation: "I'm usually not a fan of 3D, but I really recommend that you check out the 3D version."

The lesson for studios watching DNEG's numbers: innovation earns its keep only when audiences can't see it. Red was rebuilt, re-rigged and re-feathered, and he still reads as the same bird.