Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532695
CGW: Can you share any career advice you wish you had known when you were starting out? Shannon Tindle: Listen as much as you talk. Hire, not just people who are great at their jobs, but who are just good people. We had an incredible production team led by my producers, Tom Knott and Lisa Poole, on the film. They're just good people and they treat our folks well. I think that a lot of times people think in order to make good films you have to be a bully, or you have to be uncompromising. What I say is, you can't make films without your team, and they need to have a good balance between life and work. If you allow that, and you allow them to participate in a real way in the movie, you're going to get a much bigger film in a way that's not going to be detrimental to peo- ple's health. The film is going to be better and you're going to feel better at the end of it. So I would just say, be cool, be sweet, be thoughtful. Think about what other folks are going through and listen to them. VISUAL EFFECTS CGW: Can you tell us about your career path and what brought you to ILM? Hayden Jones: Many, many years ago, I actually started in car de- sign, so that was my degree. But aer four years of drawing cars, I decided I maybe wanted a little bit of a change. So I started doing video games, first of all. Then a few years later I realized I was fooling myself and I always really wanted a job in the visual effects industry. So I took myself off to a SIGGRAPH and interviewed everywhere. I finally got a job at Ci- nesite in London, and it was great. I've kind of been at every style of company. I've been in big com- panies, small 10-15 people outfits, and everything in between. It's been a great, really fun career, having such a variety of effects. CGW: Can you tell us about your ongoing collaboration with Shannon Tindle, and how your work on Lost Ollie led to Ultra- man: Rising? Hayden Jones: Lost Ollie was just such a joy to work on. I think the reason why we hit it off, and the reason that Shannon's such a good writer, director, and showrunner is he's so collaborative. He's always sharing the backstory behind every character. You're hearing what his thoughts are for music. You're hearing how your work is going to form into the pattern of the whole piece, and so you always feel so included at every level. And it's not that he's just talking to me, the supervisor. Literally every single artist on the team, he'll talk to and listen to ideas from, and it feels like such an interesting and just a fantastic way of running a show. It's just beautiful. I remember one time when we were doing the original test, and we were still working out how does he likes things presented and how is he going to give feedback? We had an artist who was a very junior animator do one of the shots in the test. Shannon, with the anima-