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www.postmagazine.com 26 POST MAR/APR 2025 work done on it, but I had a different take on it. I wanted to set it in my hometown. "When you start a project and you know that there's going to be a big CG element — a live action series with CGI characters in it — you're going to test a lot of different studios. There was an executive on the Netflix VFX side, and they said, 'Look, all the bids are coming in at about the same amount. ILM is going to get it done the right way, so maybe you should work with them.' "I love working with them so much because they are so malleable. They're so open to new ideas, trying new things. That's a place I wanted to work with when I was a little kid. I thought, 'Man, if I could work at ILM one day, that would be incredi- ble.' Of course, I was basing it on the kind of prac- tical effects work that they were doing on the Star Wars films and in Raiders of the Lost Ark. "Now I want to work with them on everything. We've got a rapport. And when you have that chemistry with fellow creators, you know that you can get a lot more bang for your buck because you're kind of speaking the same language, and you're finishing each other's sentences. I've loved my collaboration with them so far, and I want to continue to work with them on everything I do." You encouraged your animators to bring their personal experiences? Shannon Tindle: "I would start to tell a very per- sonal story about something that happened to me. And the animator's like, 'I'm trying to understand what's going on. He's not talking about animation. He's not talking about posing.' Until I got to the end of the story and said, 'That's what this scene is about. That's where it came from, and that's what I want you to put into it.' "I tried to encourage that with the team, where I was telling stuff that was deeply personal. I was getting emotional talking about it, and I wanted them to feel the freedom to be able to express their emotions in that way, in that room, to be able to say, 'I went through something similar.' Because I feel like the more open and vulnerable you are, the more open and vulnerable they can be in their work. And you see it up on the screen. You see those moments up on the screen where they've gone through something. "In Ollie, Ollie [a CG character in a live-action en- vironment] can only be seen by Billy, except in one instance where Billy's mother is dying, and she can see him. She says, 'Can you give me some water?' It was something that I'd gone through with a family member, lying in bed dying. That scene I knew was a tricky one. They put the cup on a rod, and I told them, 'Look, if done wrong, people will laugh, and they cannot laugh in this moment.' They were so thoughtful in the approach. Ollie is so gentle in it. "But again, because I was willing to express something that happened 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 some- thing. 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." How did you integrate real lenses and camera rigs into the film? 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…not just an incredi- ble filmmaker, but an incredible person. Hal Hickel, who's a good friend of mine and was the anima- tion 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 edu- cation 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 su- pervisor 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 lay- outs 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 Animators were encouraged to express their own emotions through their work. The film looks as if it had been shot with practical cameras and lenses.