Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1533763
www.postmagazine.com 27 POST MAR/APR 2025 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." 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 peo- ple 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 people'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 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 design, so that was my degree. But after 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 Cinesite in London, and it was great. "I've kind of been at every style of company. I've been in big companies, small 10 to 15 people out- fits, and everything in between. It's been a great, really-fun career, having such a variety of effects." Tell us about your ongoing collaboration with Shannon Tindle, and how your work on Lost Ollie led to Ultraman: 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 animator 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 experience ever!' "That's what Shannon's like. He's never dissect- ing 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 sto- ry forward. It's just a wonderful thing to behold." How did you establish the film's distinctive visual style? Hayden Jones: "I think with Ultraman, as with most shows, you always have to start with the artwork. We were so lucky to have Marcos [Mateu Mestre], the production designer, and Sunmin [Inn], the art director, producing such a large vol- ume of amazing artwork. "Sometimes in the early stages there was a backwards and forwards 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, others with lighting and composit- ing, 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 & 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 solution, we'd al- ways 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 so it almost felt like it had been drawn by a human hand, which is great." The 3D animation is based on 2D artwork. Translating the 2D into 3D was a challenge. The hand-drawn look is part of the film's style.