January and February  are consistently the slowest months for movie ticket sales but Hollywood is tapping in a new niche and long forgotten market, the Chinese New Year, when millions of people go home to spend time with their families, which is a great time to spend in theaters watching family-friendly flicks. "Kung Fu Panda 3" the new animated family-friendly comedy from DreamWorks can be the new model for that as the studio had partnered with their newly born Oriental DreamWorks to co-produce the animation which will be the first movie from the asian studio that feels completely chinese but was created simultaneously between the two studios. It was created in english and mandarin, with chinese actors voicing the characters with a ⅓ of the movie reanimated and rewritten to bring the chinese authenticity to the film. The Chinese government has historically blocked Western movies from playing during the Holidays but "Kung Fu Panda 3" will be an exception as the co-production has made a film that feels completely chinese and will be released at the same time in both USA and China during the Chinese New Year holiday.

"Kung Fu Panda 3," which could be the most important movie of the year since is creating this precedent and might encourage others studios to tap into this same formula, is an American-Chinese computer-animated action-comedy martial-arts film voiced by Jack Black (Po). Po (Jack Black) is a panda that lost his family as a baby and was raised by his adoptive father, noodle-shop owner Mr. Ping (James Hong). One's of Po's many attributes is being a master dumpling eater but his dumpling-eating record is suddenly broken by a town visitor named Li Shan (Bryan Cranston) which ends up being Po's long lost father; the two end up recognizing each other as father-son and with the town in danger under the spell of villain Kai (J. K. Simmons) that has been stealing every masters' chi, the two pandas embark on a journey to find their true self in a secluded, hidden and overprotected last standing panda village. There, Po finds his true calling, he masters his chi and takes down the villain Kai freeing the great masters, Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), who retired and passed the role of teacher to Po, as well as the Furious Five members, Master Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Master Crane (David Cross), Master Mantis (Seth Rogen), Master Viper (Lucy Liu), and Master Monkey (Jackie Chan). Finally bringing them all together and uniting both villages as one.

The movie is sure to make you shed a tear or two, it's emotional, dramatic, funny but more visually delightful than any of the ones before definitely worth seeing in 3D.

Entertainment Affair had the chance to spend an afternoon at the studios talking with the amazing directors Jennifer Yuh Nelson and Alessandro Carloni; and two of the animators Pablo Valle the CG Supervisor (Lighting) and Frank Abney one of the head animators in the film.

Valle showed us the intricate process of lighting and rendering a film as complex as Kung Fu Panda, that was also made to be in 3D. The lighting comes at the end of the process of animating the film and here we show a some shots of the process that he showed us at the presentation.

Background is a painting, not an animated object, and is done by an artist by hand and then inserted digitally as a "static object" with all the 3D objects that can be animated and manipulated on top to create the whole scene.

Then layers of clouds, fog, snow, mountains are added in separate components. Lighting is the last part and the one that adds the dramatism and the focus to the scene.

Colors and lighting are manipulated to dramatize the scene even more making the characters the main focus point so they pop and are not lost between all the intricate details of the scene.

Frank Abney shared with us what is his process when animating the characters. He first gets from layout a rough outline of what they want for the character and where is located in the scene and what is doing and sometimes the director might want to include certain gestures that they pick from the actors that voice the characters. After the animator gets this rough outline, he then starts with a couple of quick thumbnail sketches of what the poses would be for a specific feeling or line of the script, he writes some comments next to the sketches like "Po is resistant to change", "He may be afraid he is not enough for a bigger plan", "Shifu is frustrated" and on and on, to get a better sense of what kind of feeling is the scene evoking. Then he goes into the shot and compares how that pose will read throughout the scene. Abney shares that he wants to make sure that the emotion carries thru the film and is not jumping at you like it doesn't belong.

Here is the rough outline he gets as a layout to sculpt the gestures and poses into the character.

Then the thumbnail sketches with phrases and ideas of what the character must evoke.

The most fun part is when Abney goes into the reference room, or the "acting room" where he gets to interpret the poses, movements and mannerisms he has chosen for the characters; he tapes himself and then introduce all of those things to the character.

Abney acting the scene as a study of the poses.

Here is Po now with the added poses and gestures.

This is the final look of the scene with the poses, movements and gestures in the animation as well as the lighting and all the details of the background and objects included.

As part of our afternoon with the directors that acted as moderators throughout the presentation by the animators, as well as accompanying us for an informal Q&A lunch, we had the privilege of being toured around the DreamWorks campus and here are a couple things we learned.

Ten interesting facts about DreamWorks from our tour through the campus:

1. DreamWorks has a "Secret Room" that is no longer secret. The Secret Service came for a visit and they never mentioned the room to them but they still found the secret room and left a sweet note inside for "Dreamworkers" to find out later.
2. 40 hours of work from just 1 employee creates 3 seconds of animation.
3. The movie is drawn completely 6 to 8 times before deciding what it will look like and over the course of animating the movie they draw about 100,000 storyboards going back and forth to decide the final look and feel of the animation.
4. An animated movie takes about 5-7 years from initial idea to completion.
5. They dedicate a whole floor to each movie in their buildings conglomerate that makes up their campus and everything is designed, arranged and decorated around the movie; to have the look and the feel in a way to inspire and immerse the animators into the style of the movie they are creating.
6. The actors don't do the voice overs while watching the movie, they do this so the actors have more creative freedom when interpreting their characters. They tape the actors and sometimes use their manerism and movements to animate their characters.
7. The animators have their "acting room" where they can tape themselves acting the characters in many different ways until they agree on the right movements, reactions and mannerism, then animate the characters according to those. When the movie is finished and screened at the studio they do their own "Academy Awards" afterwards with very funny award categories, showcasing the great acting of their animators.
8. Shrek was the Hallmark movie for DreamWorks and a huge success but the dragon from Shrek was a huge technological challenge for the studio to animate and to render so they had to limit how much of the dragon they could show. Then a couple years later the Marketing Department said that people love dragons and they ought to do a movie about dragons. This movie was to be named "How to Train Your Dragon". When it was proposed they remembered what happened with Shrek so their technology had to catch up, new software was developed and everything in DreamWorks got a huge injection of money and an spectacular upgrade that situated the Animation Studio as a true Pixar competitor.
9. DreamWorks started a joint venture with various Chinese corporations creating a Shanghai based family entertainment company named Oriental DreamWorks. This new animation studio co-produce Kung Fu Panda 3 along with Dreamworks with 1/3 of the film being produced in China, with Chinese actors voicing the characters. Kung Fu Panda 3 will be release as a Chinese movie in China.
10. DreamWorks is producing a TROLLS MOVIE!!! The expected release date is November 4, 2016.

Kung Fu Panda 3 now in theaters.