From two directors to 100+ Sony Pictures Imageworks animators to millions of Netflix viewers — KPop Demon Hunters has become a streaming sensation through an unexpected creative secret weapon:
“We have this giant Miro board with all of these references that are so big. You can zoom out like, forever on those.”
Maggie Kang, co-director of KPop Demon Hunters (Source: Cartoon Brew)
Let’s take a closer look at how Kang and her co-director Chris Appelhans used Miro to turn their original ideas into a supernatural story (and the sensation of the summer).
The creative challenge: coordinating a massive vision
Creating KPop Demon Hunters was a multi-year process, during which Kang and Appelhans orchestrated 100+ animators across 10,000+ storyboards, blending K-pop aesthetics with anime storytelling and original music.
The challenge they faced was significant: How do you ensure a large, distributed team understands and is able to executive on such a distinctive and original concept, all the way from ideation to film launch?
Amid this complexity, the directors found that a shared visual workspace provided the ideal canvas — one that kept their creative vision intact across a vast set of creative and technical team members.
The Miro solution: a shared creative brain
For Kang and Appelhans, Miro became their creative command center, containing the visual DNA that guided their entire production.
Central visual library
Their Miro boards contained GIFs, still images from music videos, magazines, and cultural references — all accessible to the entire Sony Pictures Imageworks team..
“It just became this huge library of information that we had been working on and collected for like I don’t know 3-4 years,” Kang explains.
This wasn’t just storage; it was the foundation that guided every creative decision and kept everyone aligned.
Seamless co-direction
The infinite zoom capabilities allowed the team to work together seamlessly, moving between macro vision and micro details.
“We joke that we shared a brain … It was just completely a collaborative process all the way to the end,” Kang says of their teamwork.
End-to-end creative production
The team transformed unstructured inputs like initial cultural research and visual inspiration into structured outputs in the form of final animations, all in Miro.
Capturing complex creative processes in a shared workspace, the KPop Demon Hunters team demonstrated that Miro delivers value far beyond brainstorming sessions.
The result speaks for itself: a 90-minute film that broke records on both Netflix and Spotify within weeks of release, proving that the right collaborative tools can accelerate complex creative processes while maintaining artistic excellence.
The bigger picture for creative teams
When you’re managing creative projects that span years and involve hundreds of contributors, traditional tools break down. Email chains lose context. File versions multiply. Creative vision gets diluted across departments.
KPop Demon Hunters proves a different approach works. By centralizing inspiration and making it accessible to everyone — from directors to animators to editors — creative teams can scale without losing their soul. The film’s breakthrough success came not despite its large team, but because that team stayed connected to a shared creative vision.
For creative leaders facing similar challenges, the lesson is clear: leverage your collaborative workspace as the visual foundation for keeping everyone aligned on what you’re building, even as your team grows and your project evolves.
