‘Ultraman: Rising’ VFX supervisor Hayden Jones and composer Scot Stafford on ‘exciting challenges’ of Netflix animated film

The animation team behind Netflix’s “Ultraman: Rising” held a recent press event at Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the complex work that went into directors Shannon Tindle and John Aoshima‘s film about Ken Sato, a superstar baseball player who returns to Japan to become the latest hero to carry the mantle of Ultraman. Ken’s world gets complicated when he is compelled to raise a newborn kaiju monster, the offspring of his greatest enemy, as his own child.

Visual effects supervisor Hayden Jones and composer Scot Stafford each sat down with Gold Derby to discuss their work on the film. Watch the video interviews above. 

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Jones won an Emmy for his work on “The Mandalorian” in 2020, and explains how the challenges of VFX in animation are different than live action. “It’s scope and scale,” he says. “You have to build absolutely everything from scratch when you’re working in feature animation. There is nothing off the shelf. Everything is designed by the art department and the production designer. When you’re dealing with something like ‘Ultraman: Rising,’ where you have a style as well, everyone thinks the style is maybe something that gets applied afterwards. Actually, it’s the entire process. It’s the way you model something. It’s the way you build your textures. It’s the way you develop your shaders. It’s the way the lighting works. Everything has to work in tandem for the style to come into its own. That was one of the real challenges. Doing something this styled is really quite new for Industrial Light & Magic. We really were excited by the challenges involved.”

The VFX supervisor calls working with the animators of “Ultraman: Rising” a “real honor,” adding, “You have people who’ve got such an eye for performance. Working with Shannon, who is a character designer as well, it was great understanding what the general shape and performance was going to be, but then giving the animators the tool set to really take those performances to the next level. Everyone’s working in service of story. At the heart of it, we’re always really focused on making sure the performances are there, and everything is working to tell the story in every single frame.”

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Jones says his favorite scene in the movie is when Emi is on the Tokyo Tower. “It was really iconic,” he shares. “There’s one moment in it where Emi’s broken her arm and she’s being cradled in Ultraman’s hands. For the first time, you see Ken as the protective father. His head his lowered and he glares into camera. As soon as I saw that I thought, ‘That’s such a good shot.’ It feels like Ken is owning his destiny for the first time. We knew we were onto a winner with that.”

Stafford has been a fan of the Ultraman character since he was just a kid, watching it on TV with his brother. “He kind of disappeared from US pop culture for decades,” the composer explains. When Stafford saw a new film was being created for Netflix he thought, “Oh my God, I would be the luckiest person alive if I got to work on this project.”

The composer began writing music for the film in February of 2020, before animation had even taken place. He explains the first three things he did, beginning with honoring the legacy of Ultraman by using the theme music from the original series. “I needed to figure out how to make that sound modern without sounding like I was forgetting the point of the theme to begin with,” he says. “Number two, Gigantron, I just fell in love with her. I wrote her theme very quickly. I needed the sound of a roar, coming from a real instrument. It needed to be played by a human being, sound classic, timeless. Third, I worked with the concept art, for the emotional scene of the birth of a child. Seeing that moment of a father figure looking at a baby for the first time allowed me to score the first scene, which was the death of Gigantron and the birth of Emi. I did that when it was just an early storyboard.”

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