The dream sequence was designed and laid-out at DreamWorks Animation under the direction of Jen Yuh Nelson with Production Designer Ramone Zibach and Art Director Tang Heng, who developed the sharp, high-contrast, highly-graphic, anime-influenced style. Once the backgrounds were complete, they were delivered to James Baxter Animation; everything from animation through compositing of the final shots.

James Baxter tackled the animation in unique ways. In one shot he would hand-draw the animation completely from start to finish, and in another he would do just a few drawings that were then digitally manipulated in After Effects. In addition, all effects animation consisted of traditional hand-drawn effects as well as digitally-manipulated elements from the original Photoshop files. Can you tell which is which? Being the master animator that Baxter is, the merging of the two is seamless. It helped keep the James Baxter Animation crew to only 12 people.

Working hand-in-hand with design and branding studio Shine on this was a real pleasure, with open and frequent communication being the key to the collaboration. Since Shine and our 2D animation crew were working on the sequence simultaneously, we delivered the rough pencil tests as early as possible to be used as reference for their camera moves and the ‘Po-dummy’ animation.

The Po-dummy animation for each scene was indicated by the animators in the roughs but it was only in the clean-ups if the character directly interacted with it (eg. Shifu animation). Otherwise, a full turnaround of the dummy was drawn, finished, and delivered to Shine so that they could easily integrate it into their final sequence using the roughs as a guide (eg. Crane animation).