Jan 15, 2026
From Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse to KPop Demon Hunters: Spotlighting the Evolution of SPA × Imageworks Collaborations
Infinity Festival panel featuring Jacky Priddle, Josh Beveridge, and Michelle Wong. Moderated by The Wrap’s Drew Taylor on October 10, 2025.
Under the soft light of the theater at Sony Pictures Imageworks’ (Imageworks) Los Angeles campus, the audience at this year’s Infinity Festival leaned in as KPop Demon Hunters’ Animation Director Josh Beveridge joined the film’s producers on stage to describe the impossible balancing act behind a musical animation unlike anything Sony Pictures Animation (SPA) and Imageworks had attempted before.
Released in June 2025, the film became Netflix’s most-watched original animated feature and topped the U.S. box office during a limited sing-along release. Its success helped cement it as both a cultural phenomenon and a creative milestone for SPA and Imageworks, earning numerous nominations and wins.
Netflix
It was also one of the most technically ambitious animated productions ever attempted—blending the precision of a musical, the visual energy of anime, and the emotional nuance of a K-drama into a single, synchronized performance. Every beat—from choreography to dialogue—had to move in harmony.
Netflix
“Every aspect—performance, camera, timing—had to interlock like a machine,” said Beveridge.
While Beveridge’s remarks captured the creative challenges in real time, the broader story of how KPop Demon Hunters came together—the technology, workflows, and cross-studio collaboration that powered it—emerged later through in-depth conversations with the teams at SPA and Imageworks.
For SPA and Imageworks, the film wasn’t just a creative challenge. It was the culmination of two decades of technical collaboration between studios that have quietly rewritten how animation is made.
A Legacy of Shared Vision
When Imageworks was founded in 1992, it was a visual-effects house working on In the Line of Fire and later on Contact. SPA arrived a decade later with a mandate to create wholly animated features. From the start, their relationship was less client-vendor and more equal partners.
Yiotis Katsambas, Head of Technology and Production at SPA, said, “In the pre-production phase, we explore what we want the movie to look like visually. There’s room for creative freedom before the production side (i.e. Imageworks) has to figure out how to bring those visuals to life.” That feedback loop, he said, defines the partnership. “What makes this relationship unique is that we can push our visual style pretty far, and Imageworks has the technical abilities to meet that challenge.”
Across decades, the two studios have fed off each other’s momentum. SPA dreaming in storytelling, and character development, and Imageworks translating those ideas into geometry, animation, and renderings.
From Hotel Transylvania to the Spider-Verse franchise, each film forged a new technical vocabulary. Imageworks engineers developed industry tools such as Katana (for lighting and look development) and open-source frameworks like OpenColorIO and Open Shading Language—software that now anchors pipelines worldwide.
That same spirit of innovation has carried both studios through every major shift in CG and VFX—from The Mitchells vs. The Machines pioneering “Katie-Vision” and 2D mixed-media visuals to Spider-Verse reinventing animation through procedural line-art rendering. Those breakthroughs paved the way for KPop Demon Hunters, where real-time visualization moved ideas from concept to camera in days instead of weeks.
The awards wall at Sony Imageworks, Los Angeles Campus.
Mike Ford, Chief Technology Officer at Imageworks, said, “We build technology to serve creativity, not the other way around.”
Most studios treat production like a relay race: art hands off to engineering, and the baton is passed downstream. SPA and Imageworks work more like a feedback circuit.
“We exchange ideas, design, 3D models, and notes on both sides continually,” Katsambas said.
Mike Ford, Chief Technology Officer at Sony Imageworks, Los Angeles Campus.
Ford described collaboration at Imageworks as “a living organism—it feeds on itself.”
Katsambas explained that SPA and Imageworks rebuilt their shot-publishing system so materials could move from production to editorial in minutes, allowing directors to walk from Imageworks to editorial and see updates already cut into the film. This shift transformed iteration speed and made feedback loops faster.
Building the Aesthetic Engine
If KPop Demon Hunters proved anything, it was that stylization can be engineered. The film’s look required Imageworks and SPA to merge anime-style exaggeration with K-drama realism and the physical expressiveness of live-action dance.
Beveridge described the aesthetic jigsaw: “The challenge was that two of our influences—glamour and dramatic photography—were highly photographic. But anime is very graphic and two-dimensional. Getting those to coexist without clashing was the puzzle.”
Netflix
To solve it, Beveridge and the Imageworks team designed modular systems that embedded artistic control directly into the pipeline.
“We built a system we called the Chibi Face—a network of interchangeable facial features that let animators push expression beyond realism. Sometimes the mouth would even break dimension—floating off the face, like, a foot in front of it. It looked ridiculous from other angles, but it worked beautifully on camera.”
“Chibi Face”: Developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks for Kpop Demon Hunters, this custom process overlays exaggerated manga expression onto 3D animated characters to achieve a unique aesthetic.Netflix
The Chibi system acted as a dynamic facial-rig library, swapping blend-shapes and meshes per frame to reproduce 2D expressive language within a 3D pipeline.
They also re-engineered lighting itself.
“Because of the ultra-soft lighting, we created what we called ‘Motion-Blur Spheres,’” Beveridge said. “Animators could control where blur appeared or didn’t, so characters stayed crisp against dreamy lighting.” This localized blur control gave the team cinematographic depth without sacrificing anime-style sharpness.
Rejecting full motion capture was also a creative statement. “Dance timing is hard, and mocap can help, but we wanted to show the choices of artists on screen—not the choices of technology,” Beveridge noted.
Netflix
Instead, hand-keyed animation preserved performance intent while allowing hyper-stylized poses impossible through capture. Ford saw this as the next evolution of Imageworks’ tradition of engineering artistry.
The Perfect Storm of Innovation
As production on KPop Demon Hunters accelerated, Sony’s teams were facing what several called “a perfect storm.”
To meet these challenges of specialized animation and production, SPA’s internal Sandbox Team in Vancouver began experimenting with Unreal Engine, enabling lighting, choreography, and camera moves to be tested instantly instead of being rendered overnight.
“Before Unreal, we couldn’t make real-time lighting decisions—it was too time-consuming,” Katsambas said. “With Unreal, directors could see something much closer to the final shot, make better creative decisions earlier, and the lights flowed through the whole production.”
Ford added, “On KPop Demon Hunters, we completely reimagined our layout department using Unreal Engine. It gave directors an interactive sandbox and made production far more efficient.”
Mandy Tankenson, SVP, Head of Production at Imageworks.
Mandy Tankenson, SVP, Head of Production at Imageworks, called it a “big risk that paid off,” explaining that moving Rough Layout into real-time required a cultural shift from a linear hand-off pipeline to an agile, iterative process. The Sony–Epic partnership provided direct engineering support, letting Imageworks and SPA shape Unreal’s toolset for feature animation.
KPop Demon Hunters’ Animation Director, Josh Beveridge.
Adam Holmes, Head of Visualization at Sony Pictures Imageworks, explained that implementing Unreal Engine into both SPA and Imagework’s pipelines was designed to bring cinematic visualization into both the earliest stages of pre-production, and throughout the entire Rough Layout process.
“Unreal is the ultimate game changer for pre-production and production,” Holmes said. “Artist teams at Imageworks and SPA can solve creative story challenges as the film’s design is taking shape, using collaborative real-time tools and workflows, and directly sharing datasets between studios so information isn't lost in translation.”
Netflix
By engaging in 3D visualization early—while characters, environments, and cinematic goals are still forming—Sandbox helps filmmakers envision key moments of the film before production begins. “World creation, scale validation, lens testing, and dynamic action planning can all happen in pre-production,” Holmes added. “That early exploration impacts the story, assets, and sequences across the entire film.”
On KPop Demon Hunters, Sandbox collaborated with SPA and Imageworks using Unreal Engine to scout lighting setups in Seoul, choreograph fight sequences in a virtual bathhouse, and fill Jamsil Olympic Stadium with thousands of fans. “Unreal supercharged creativity and maximized visual quality for our filmmakers while clearly communicating visual intent to downstream departments,” Holmes noted.
He emphasized that visualization isn’t an optional luxury. It’s a creative backbone that informs everything from story decisions to technical planning. “There are critical answers that can only be found through proper story scouting, testing scale and lens relationships, and prevising action before pushing sequences into animation,” Holmes said. “Iterating early reduces rework and ultimately lowers cost.”
Holmes also pointed out that the shift to real-time workflows was more than a technical upgrade; it changed how stories were told. “Using real-time software has unlocked interactive decision-making much earlier in production. Artists can stay in a creative flow-state and respond to notes interactively, removing guesswork from the offline approach of the past.”
The People Engine
Technology only works when people trust it—and each other. That’s where Tankenson believes Imageworks distinguishes itself. “What I’m most proud of isn’t just a single project—it’s that we retain such incredible talent. People want to stay.”
She credits structured mentorship and leadership programs for that stability.
“We’ve formalized that mentoring process, helping producers progress step by step. Our leadership program focuses on the difference between management and leadership. The aim is teams that feel supported enough to experiment and recover quickly when something breaks.”
The Sony Flywheel
The partnership between SPA and Imageworks doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s part of a larger Sony ecosystem that connects film, music, games, and research.
An example of this collaboration’s outcomes even focuses on Sony hardware.
“We use Bravia TVs all across the studio,” he said. “They’re super color-accurate, which makes them ideal for reviewing lighting and color work. The Bravia team has even implemented improvements specifically for our production environment.”
Ford views such collaboration as strategic infrastructure. “We’re developing a standard called the Open Digital Asset (ODA) format—a sort of ‘PDF for 3D.’ It packages geometry, materials, and metadata so an asset can move between film, games, or XR without re-authoring,” he said. By linking ODA to Unreal, a character built for a movie could one day walk directly into a game world or virtual concert.
Programs like STEF—the Sony Technology Exchange Fair—and engineer-exchange initiatives have further tightened those feedback loops across divisions, turning Sony’s R&D network into a shared engine for experimentation.
Always in Motion
The Infinity Festival panel offered a rare public glimpse into the creative and technical balancing act behind KPop Demon Hunters. Beveridge and the producers unpacked the project’s many layers—from the challenge of syncing dance, music, and performance to the engineering feats that made it possible.
But the deeper story of how those solutions came together emerged in conversations afterward with SPA and Imageworks, where the ongoing partnership between artists and technologists continues to evolve daily.
For Tankenson, that evolution is the point. “Spider-Verse opened a door, but technology keeps evolving daily,” she said. “I love that we don’t know what’s coming next! That sense of discovery keeps it exciting.”
Katsambas agreed that innovation comes from dialogue more than disruption. “The tools are converging, but imagination still leads,” he said. “Processes that used to take days now take minutes, but the ideas still take as long as they need.”
“Collaboration is in our DNA,” said Ford. And as Beveridge reflected, “There’s only one boss on a movie: the movie itself.”
Related Links
KPop Demon Hunters: Sony Pictures Animation x Imageworks Collaborations Interview
