At $2 million an episode, Father of the Pride is a huge Vegas-style gamble for both NBC and DreamWorks. All images © DreamWorks.

Much is being said about the new primetime 3D-animated show Father of the Pride, co-created by DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg and produced by DreamWorks in collaboration with the Hong Kong-based studio Imagi. Because the show imagines the off-stage antics of the white tigers in the famed animal act of Siegfried & Roy, some industry watchers have wondered whether Roy Horn's mauling by a tiger would halt or postpone production. Others have wondered if the show's edgy dialogue — voiced by the likes of John Goodman and Carl Reiner — would confuse viewers who think animal animation implies family-friendly fare. But one thing that isn't debatable is that Father of the Pride represents a breakthrough trans-Pacific collaboration for the Glendale, California-based DreamWorks Animation, which selected the three-year-old Imagi to generate the 13 inaugural episodes ordered by NBC. The network has slated Father of the Pride for the Tuesday, 9:00 pm slot vacated by the perennial hit Frasier, so the show will certainly be given a chance to shine.

DreamWorks execs Richard Chuang and Joe Aguilar were instrumental in setting up the collaboration with Imagi and making it work.

VFXWorld spoke to two key DreamWorks execs, Richard Chuang and Joe Aguilar, who were instrumental in setting up the collaboration with Imagi and making it work. Chuang, who supervised this international production, was one of the founders of PDI, the DreamWorks company that produced the two Shrek blockbusters, while co-exec producer Aguilar previously won an Emmy for the Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries Taken.

It was Chuang's responsibility to find the Asian studio that would handle the modeling, animation, lighting effects, compositing and rendering for Father of the Pride. He recalls, "I happened to be on the board of the Tokyo International Film Festival and in my travels I visited studios throughout Asia. This stirred up interest at DreamWorks, so I spent about six months visiting studios. Because of my years of experience, I had `open doors' from everybody, in terms of getting insight into how they worked. I came up with a model of what it would take to elevate these studios to the level that we needed. Having been on their end for 20 years (during PDI's independent days) I didn't want us at DreamWorks to be a bad client. I wanted us to be a studio to that brings value to the table."

From Imagi's perspective, it was a huge break. The studio had been founded with just 10 employees, and was originally a division of a company that manufactured artificial Christmas trees. But under the direction of founder Francis Kao, a graduate of Sacramento State University in California, Imagi began pursuing an ambitious strategy to make its name in animation. Their cartoon series Zentrix was shown in France and Japan and won film festival honors in Hong Kong as well. While Imagi had grown to about 120 employees when Chuang first visited, substantial growth was required. To accommodate DreamWorks' needs, they doubled their staff, including several twenty-something animators. Kao notes, "Most of our animators have been with the company for more than two years making the CG TV series Zentrix. New animators are usually hired fresh out of school and require six months of training until they're fully productive."

Aguilar notes that "Imagi was working on its own project but they were willing to put that aside and devote all of their staffing to our project. Some of the other studios that Richard talked to had existing projects that they wanted to continue working on as well as take on Father of the Pride. There were going to be competing interests, from our point of view, in terms of how much energy they were going to devote to just our project. Imagi was not fully ramped up in terms of employees to do our project — they definitely had to ramp up further — but yet they were willing to put their own project on the back burner and focus all of their energy on Father of the Pride."

Chuang adds, "They really wanted to be a partner. They were able to give us 140 people right away and that really helped us out tremendously. Because they had never done anybody else's project; I spent several months over there helping them put their production pipeline in place, and helping them find and train some of their production management. We trained them with both Maya and PDI processes. It was less about the tools and more about understanding our production `language.' I found in my travels that this is the biggest hurdle. Everybody uses similar tools, but they have a different way of looking at the process. When we talk about a `review' or a `test' we have to be speaking about the same thing."