Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532695
12 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 2 tor in the room, said, "Who did this shot?" And I was thinking, "Oh no, maybe Shannon's not this nice person." I said, "Well, Shannon, you know, it's Anna. And Anna's in the room with us here if you'd like to give any feedback," and Shannon went, "Anna, come up to the screen." So Anna moved up. He went, "This is the best shot! I love it!" And he just gushed about what he loved about the shot. You could see this junior animator thinking, "This is absolutely the best experi- ence ever!" That's what Shannon's like. He's never dissecting something to say what's wrong. He will always show you what's right as well, and where he sees your ideas can bolster his and move the whole story forward. It's just a wonderful thing to behold. CGW: How did you establish the film's distinctive visual style? Hayden Jones: I think with Ultraman, as with most shows, you al- ways have to start with the artwork. We were so lucky to have Mar- cos [Mateu Mestre], the production designer, and Sunmin [Inn], the art director, producing such a large volume of amazing artwork. Sometimes in the early stages there was a backwards and for- wards because they were dual 2D concepts. You would go, "I have no idea how to create this in 3D. We've got a lot of techniques, but even this is pushing it." So we'd work through it together and there was a lot of communication. We had amazing teams at ILM—some doing shader design, oth- ers with lighting and compositing. Texture, look dev—everyone pulled together and communicated internally really efficiently so that we could work out which methodologies got us as close as possible to what Sunmin and Marcos' look went for. Most of the time you'd look at something like the linework that we surround every character with, and rather than having one solu- tion, we'd always end up with four or maybe five. There would be some that were automatic, there were some that were literally hand- drawn by the animators onto faces, some that were rigged into the faces so we could make sure they're consistent, and then others that were Houdini. Then there were some other moments that were Houdini-generated inclines, which really gave us a great baseline. We managed to get it looking like it almost felt like it had been drawn by a human hand, which is great. CGW: Can you tell us about the layers and shading that you utilized to achieve that look? Hayden Jones: So to create the look, you have to dissect all of the art images. Sunmin was fantastic in sending us the Photoshop lay- ered files, so we could actually almost see her process in how she built them up. We could start to examine whether we could build up our images in the same way. One of the big key pieces was this idea of Copic magic marker work. What we didn't want to do was to bake in too much of the lighting. Sometimes when you're working in a stylized world, you re- ally want to bake in as much as possible. So you have the stylization there and then the lighting just as a kind of light touch over the top. We wanted to go to the other side, where we were baking in as little as possible and we were allowing the shader to take on most of the heavy liing. Art director Sunmin Inn sent layered Photoshop files to the VFX team.