Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532695
pened to me, they felt they'd been given permission to express that in their work. It's one of my favorite scenes in anything that I've done because the animators allowed themselves to be so open and vulnerable and understood what we needed to accomplish in that scene. These things take a long time to make. That's why I have to have an emotional connection with anything that I make. Even if it's a big character, I have to be able to find my way into it in a personal way because, especially in animation, it's going to take four or five years sometimes to make. That's what gets me through it, knowing that at least for me, there's an importance to it. It's not just throwaway, it's not just a commercial for something. It's something that's meaningful for me. That helps justify the hours that I'm working. Because when you're in the middle of a project, you're never not thinking about it. So if you can incorporate your life into your projects, I think you can find a nice balance, which is what Ultraman: Rising is all about—finding balance. CGW: How did you integrate real lenses and camera rigs into the animation? Shannon Tindle: It was one of the things that I loved about Pacific Rim. I've gotten to know Guillermo [del Toro] and he's such a—not just incredible filmmaker, but an incredible person. Hal Hickel, who's a good friend of mine and was the animation supervisor on that film, was like, "We use real rigs." If it was a Technocrane or even if it was a digital version or a virtual version of that camera, Guillermo wanted it to be grounded. Because even if an audience doesn't know what lenses you're using or what cameras you're using, they've seen enough movies. They've got a pretty good education and can feel when something's off or when you're cheating. Even though it's a big, broad film—we have a 35-foot-tall baby— we're dealing with issues where I wanted people to feel like it was their child. I thought one way to get there and to understand Ken's story and the loneliness he feels is to try as best as we can, not just to have practical prime lenses, but also to have the artifacts that you get with those lenses. So Hayden Jones, who is our visual effects supervisor on not just Ollie but also Ultraman: Rising, did this deep dive research. They found examples of what lens flares look like on TohoScope lenses, and how do we recreate that in this style? All those elements, even though we had a stylized look, felt like a practical camera was on it. There's that scene when Emi [the kaiju infant] is being born and she's out in the ocean. A lot of times the way that you show scale is by showing a small object next to a big thing. You have a bird fly off the shoulder of Ultraman. I knew I didn't want to do any of that stuff, so our head of final layouts said, "What if we had a little helicopter jitter?" Because when you're shooting a helicopter shot in a film, it's because you're shooting something big and wide that's expansive. You need to be far away from it. So he put just a little bit of helicopter jitter in there subliminally. Again, the audience may not know what a helicopter shot or a drone shot is, but they've seen enough films that incorporate it and they know when they have it. Bringing those very grounded elements from real cameras and lenses into the filmmaking helped us tell a believable story. Kuwahara shading soened the edges and added a watercolor feel.