Conan at the Oscars: a real actor inside an animated Oscar film
- Project98th Oscars · Cold Open
- RoleHair, lookdev, lighting, render, compositing
- ToolsOrnatrix · Cinema 4D · Redshift · After Effects
When Conan O'Brien opened the 98th Academy Awards (2026), he did it in style — as Aunt Gladys, the bright-red-haired character from the horror film Weapons. In the classic Oscars cold-open tradition, the host runs through the year's nominated films; Conan does it chased by the "Weapons kids." One of the films he runs through is the hit animated KPop Demon Hunters — and that's the shot Enter Studio built.
The brief
Our task: take the real Conan — shot live as Aunt Gladys, with the bright red hair and pale makeup (one critic called the look "Bette Davis with lupus") — and place him into a scene from the animated KPop Demon Hunters, so he looks like part of the film while the kids chase him. A real, live-action person who had to sit inside a fully animated world. A reference inside a reference: the Weapons makeup, stylized into the aesthetic of KPop Demon Hunters. A proper Inception.
Our part of the pipeline
The Conan character modelling, rigging and animation were produced by animation and VFX studio Mostly Very True. We received the Maya files and took over hair, textures, lookdev, lighting, rendering and compositing — the parts that make a shot feel finished and sit inside the animation.
The hair (Ornatrix)
Conan's hair went through several lookdev passes. The goal wasn't photorealism but a stylized version of the wig from the live footage — drawn like the animation. It was built with Ornatrix and rendered in Cinema 4D with Redshift. We also had to replicate his heavy makeup — red wig and smeared-clown look — translated into the film's aesthetic.
Cutting the kids off the green screen — the hard part
One of the trickiest tasks turned out to be keying the kids off the green screen. The catch: the floor wasn't green — they were shot on the studio floor — and there was a lot of motion blur, which makes a clean key nearly impossible. We used a mix of AI and standard tools to pull the cleanest possible key. This was the only part with a bit of AI — everything else is human work, because it demands a lot of control and specific client notes.
Matching the animation
To make the live plate sit in the animated world, we relit the shot to match the KPop scene. We made the motion read as animation "on 2s" — the timing technique where each drawing is held for two frames, typical of classic animation. We added smoke and a final composite in After Effects to finish the frame — Conan running, the characters chasing him.
In the press
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