Working Inside Someone Else's IP: Hey Dude x Lilo & Stitch

Hey Dude's collaboration with Disney for the Lilo & Stitch live action film gave us stills, video, and a logo lockup to build, all featuring Stitch reimagined in a fully 3D island world. It was also the most tightly guarded brief we have worked to this year, because Stitch is not our character to reinterpret. He is Disney's, and Disney knows exactly how he is allowed to look.

Licensed character work runs on approval documents most client briefs never need: reference sheets specifying exact proportions, fur direction, eye shape and expression range, colour values checked against a master palette rather than eyeballed. Our job was to build a fluffy, textured version of Stitch that felt native to a 3D product world, sitting convincingly inside a scene built from cotton wool waves and paper flowers rather than Disney's own animated style, without drifting outside what the studio would sign off.

The tension in a brief like this is specific: push too far toward your own studio's visual language and you risk a rejected asset, several days of work redone against notes. Play it too safe and the result looks like clip art dropped into someone else's scene rather than a genuine 3D reimagining. We built early exploratory frames of Stitch's fur and expression specifically to find that edge quickly, spending review cycles on a handful of test frames before committing to full production, rather than discovering the boundary only after the whole piece was built.

The upside of working this tightly is that the guardrails do some of the creative work for you. Knowing exactly what cannot change forces genuine invention into the parts of the brief that are actually open: the environment, the camera language, the surfboard and the wave itself, all built entirely in ZKO's own style around a character we were never going to be allowed to redesign. Constraint, handled well, is not the enemy of a good idea. It is usually where one gets found.