It has been such a success that Sony Pictures Animation, the studio behind it, decided also to release it in cinemas. An action-adventure-musical animation based on a mixture of Korean pop culture and myth, the film cleared a healthy $25 million at the US box office, despite being something you could just as easily have watched from your sofaplex rather than paid to see at the cineplex.<\/p>\n
Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang\u2019s movie features some home-grown involvement. Ireland and Northern Ireland have become, jointly and separately, moviemaking powerhouses over the past two decades, with productions from Star Wars to Blue Lights making the most of the island\u2019s locations, actors, artists and other talent. <\/p>\n
We\u2019re also exporting some of those artists to the wider world, which is why James Carson is talking to The Irish Times from his home in Vancouver \u2013 another movie powerhouse location.<\/p>\n
Carson, who is originally from Belfast, is a CG supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks, a spin-off that produces computer graphics for live-action special effects as well as for animation. <\/p>\n
He\u2019s one of the huge team of animators and technical wizards who, starting with nothing more than some pencil sketches and computer code, have built a wild, complex and thrilling animated world and populated it with characters who will inevitably be your kids\u2019 next Halloween costumes.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0What is K-pop and why is it everywhere?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n So how do you do it? Leaving aside K-Pop\u2019s huge success, how do you go from nothing to amazing, while never leaving your desk?<\/p>\n \u201cBefore clients come to us, they\u2019ve worked on the movie already. They\u2019ll have concept art and imagery, and it\u2019ll all have a lot of intention in it,\u201d says Carson, who next month will be talking about his work at Rendr<\/a>, Belfast\u2019s creativity and tech festival. <\/p>\n \u201cSo they\u2019ll come to us with the ideas, and then we have to start to interpret it, and we kind of have to say to the clients, \u2018You\u2019ve had your ideas. Now we need to understand it to make it work.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The process of creating on-screen animated characters isn\u2019t easy. You might assume that a sketch of one of the characters would simply be fed into a computer and told to move about, but according to Carson it\u2019s a series of one step forward, two steps back. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a constant, iterative process,\u201d he says. \u201cSometimes we go too far in one direction; sometimes we haven\u2019t gone far enough. So while it starts with still images, and working with them, in the background the animation is always working up.\u201d<\/p>\n The process is also incredibly multilayered. It\u2019s not just a case of drawing a first picture and then adding a second that\u2019s slightly different, repeating the process until you\u2019ve created the illusion of life. Modern CG animation has different teams working on movement, shadow, colour, background and even light. <\/p>\n The last of these is Carson\u2019s speciality: creating lighting effects for animated characters that exist only in a computer but look like they would in the real world, or at least similar enough so that we get drawn into the action rather than being left at one remove by an uncanny valley.<\/p>\n Lighting is \u201cpretty much the final pixels of what the movie will look like\u201d, he says, \u201cbut then there\u2019s the animation department, and they\u2019re also finding the shape language, and the body language, and how the characters move. And the clients are constantly busy with this through several of the departments, and we\u2019re all trying to get a bit of their time and find the look of the movie that way.\u201d<\/p>\n While K-Pop Demon Hunters credits two directors \u2013 Appelhans and Kang \u2013 it effectively has hundreds, as each team of animators and artists takes the script, the voice tracks laid down by the actors, and the directors\u2019 instructions and works their own magic from that starting line.<\/p>\n What makes it work, according to Carson, is that the teams \u2013 unlike the backflipping, kicking and punching stars of the film \u2013 keep their feet on the ground when it comes to working out how things should look. <\/p>\n \u201cIt could be easy to wander off into something that\u2019s not grounded, but I think one of its main strengths is we actually do VFX, which is the grounded stuff,\u201d Carson says.<\/p>\n VFX are visual effects that enhance live-action footage. K-Pop Demon Hunters, on the other hand, is a film in which eyes become popcorn dispensers and demons sprout from the bodies of air stewards. Yet you can see his point: there\u2019s enough realism in the images to sell the crazy, mythical stuff.<\/p>\n Carson says much of that comes from working in special effects for live-action films, including the upcoming Project Hail Mary, a sci-fi blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling.<\/p>\n![\"K-Pop](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/HJRIUJ4R3VCVBBZO73F6ROP6IY.jpg\")
K-Pop Demon Hunters: a shot goes through test phases (top and middle) before reaching its final version (above). Photographs: Sony Pictures Imageworks <\/p>\n
![\"James](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/PIFTBHBQORHERA4O3QJCNWRAVA.jpeg\")
James Carson of Sony Pictures Imageworks <\/p>\n