Netflix movie took inspiration from manga and anime

As ILM completed animation and visual effects on Netflix’s “Lost Ollie” (2022), the live-action/CG limited series about a floppy-eared toy trying to find his way home, creator Shannon Tindle shared part of the manga with them. — and anime-influenced artwork for his passion project with Netflix, “Ultraman: Rising” (currently streaming). His plan was to turn the Japanese pop culture phenomenon into an action-packed, heartwarming ode to parenthood and finding balance in life.

Tindle’s hope was to entice ILM to do the animation, even though the visual effects giant hadn’t made an animated feature since the Oscar-winning “Rango” (2011). Gathered in his Burbank office, Tindle showed off examples of Ultraman’s iconic red and silver look, battling kaiju in Tokyo and bonding with his adopted 35-foot, fire-breathing kaiju granddaughter.

“It looked amazing and I was completely sold,” ILM VFX supervisor Hayden Jones told IndieWire. “We had a production design from Marcos (Mateu-Mestre) that had a huge amount of detail and style. I didn’t know if ILM wanted to return to this area. We went and asked and took some artwork. And literally the first word out of everyone’s mouth was, “Yes, we have to do this.” »

ILM worked in London to complete “Lost Ollie,” but relied heavily on its Vancouver studio, doing the look development of shaders and textures and setting up its model and character pipeline. Jones worked closely with animation supervisor Mathieu Vig and a team of talented animators who were big fans of Ultraman (Japan’s answer to Superman and Green Lantern). They also completed the shots in Singapore, particularly the complex final battle, which featured a huge amount of simulated water effects.

Although the 2D aesthetic seems deceptively simple, Jones insisted that it is complicated to decipher. “We really wanted the style to feel pushed and stylized, but also natural and not too confusing,” Jones said. “There’s a theme in ‘Ultraman: Rising’ about balance. And I think balance is a really good way to think about how we achieved style. On the one hand, we were getting this very stylized, very illustrative, very two-dimensional artwork given to us in layered Photoshop files.

“And then we saw what Shannon and John Aoshima, the co-director, wanted for the kind of dynamic camerawork and dynamic lighting that was going to keep the style going,” Jones added. “And, initially, it was like: How do we marry these two styles? Initially we broke down all the individual layers and underneath it all was your base layer. This was supposed to represent some sort of Copic Marker watercolor layer. And for that, we relied heavily on a Kuwahara filtering system that smooths out large areas of very soft, gentle shading. So if you have a soft shadow rolling across the character’s face, this will blur it slightly and give you a marker-like finish. However, this also keeps the edges of the shadow very sharp.

“And so if you incorporate some of it into your tint and some of it into your composite, you can control it and refine it to give you a nice marker-like feel. And it’s going to move dynamically and it’s going to be completely impacted by the lighting.

Line work was also a complex problem, requiring a procedural solution using Houdini software to automatically generate large amounts of lines on multiple characters and throughout the scene. This also allowed the animators to control the thickness of the lines that were subject to randomization. But the main thing was to create a paper texture underneath. All of this combines to give a naturalistic slant.

But there were unforeseen problems, such as not being able to control the lines that appeared on the characters’ faces. So what they ended up doing was cleaning the face and writing a fake line system. This gave the animators complete control over all lines. “While the animators were hosting the show, they were also drawing the lines on important facial features,” Jones said.

There were also the massive Tokyo scenes that required a dedicated set of tools to keep the style consistent despite so much complexity and destruction. “One of my favorite online works was the one where Gigantron flies through the clouds and is chased,” Jones added. “And if you look closely, all the clouds have a very subtle ink line. So even though they are soft and voluminous, there are still small amounts of definition. And it gives you the feeling that everything was generated in 2D, but everything works in three dimensions and fits together as a whole.

Tindle also wanted to insert color and black-and-white graphic streaks to punctuate Ultraman’s emotional ups and downs since baseball superstar Ken Sato (Christopher Sean) reluctantly returns home to take on the superhero mantle from his father (Gedde Watanabe). These marker renderings were inspired by particular manga cover illustrations. “We called them Otomo moments,” Jones said, “because when we started talking to Shannon and the art department, they were looking at a lot of artwork by Katsushiro Otomo, who created “Akira.” He There were panels flooded with color, and that’s the feeling Shannon wanted to achieve to visually show the emotion in a scene, whether it’s anger or the baby’s crying (keiju).

One such moment occurs when Ultraman holds the baby for the first time, and behind him the clouds part, and there is what looks like a child’s mobile in the background. “And we literally used illustrations for that,” Jones added. “We took the Photoshop file and dropped it into the background, and we layered it into the composite in 3D so we could have a little bit of separation, and then we gave it a small amount of camera shading. “

Meanwhile, Ultraman was one of the most difficult characters to bring to life. He basically can’t move his face, it’s a full face mask, so he never has any lip movement, has no eyebrows, nothing that we normally associate with a character. “We took a little liberty with the original Ultraman character, whose eyes light up and look forward,” Jones said. “So we gave Ultraman pupils and also allowed intensity changes in the eyes. Doing very subtle eye darts was very successful. And the shading is quite complex because, again, the balance between illustration and three-dimensional rendering means we have to start thinking about how this stylization works with highlights, because most of Ultraman is a reflective surface.

“So, again, we go back to the Kuwahara filtering, but we also looked at how (art director) Sunmin Inn took some of the reflections and sharp edges in the reflections and put little spots around the edges,” Jones added . “So nothing was perfect, everything was slightly soft, slightly stylized in the way they were rendered. So we worked with texture lead Marco Firme to create several layers of invisible auxiliary textures that helped the composite team go in and spread out the edges of some of these highlights to mimic the artwork. We used the same technique on Ken’s hair (Tindle referring to Toshiro Mifune), which is a solid block that we were able to mount and give the animators full control.

One of the most interesting effects, however, was Ken’s transformation into Ultraman as a light force, led by Aleksei Chernogorod, associate visual effects supervisor of ILM in Singapore. “Ultraman comes from a land of light, and so a lot of his energy is light-based,” Jones explained. “He has the Spacium Beam, which is a kind of explosion of light. He has the Ultra Slash, which resembles a circular saw blade that he can throw at kaiju. We wanted to feel like when Ultraman transformed, he reformed into a different spectrum of light. So I had an in-depth conversation with Shannon and we came up with the idea that when it transforms, we split it into a kaleidoscope and it forms a rainbow, and as it shrinks, the arc -rainbow shows an echo of what it looks like.

“So we did a lot of testing and created a graphical image on each image,” Jones added. “But we had to make sure the effect worked. Whether you saw it in full screen at full speed or just took two or three frames of it, it had to register. I think they’ve created a really cool system so that we can kind of exploit the strengths of composite and really time each individual frame and each individual color.