Our Work on The Umbrella Academy: Season 3

The third season of the time-bending TV show The Umbrella Academy sees the Hargreeves siblings scramble to avoid ending yet another parallel world.

Building on our work from the previous seasons, we created an alternate version of Pogo, who we first see in a dojo, training the Sparrow Academy in the art of karate before he is ousted from the Academy and reinvents himself as a tattoo artist in a biker gang.

We redesigned Pogo’s physiology, bulking him up to help illustrate his life as member of The Mothers of Agony. By leveraging our extensive experience with CG primates and studying anatomical references and the chimpanzees at our local zoo, we built Pogo from the inside out with photoreal accuracy.

His wardrobe update included a patched leather jacket and jewellery designed by our art department. We used our in-house hair model to create his groom—a mullet with a ponytail—and used our long-haired crew for reference.

We created Pogo’s performance using a bespoke assemblage of animation methods. Plate photography with Ken Hall playing Pogo gave us cues for lighting and Pogo’s position in the scene. Back in the studio, our animators re-performed the scenes to create motion capture data for the base of our body animation. Pogo’s facial performance is hand animated based on ADR reference of Pogo’s voice actor, Adam Godley.