Composer Scot Stafford talks about his highly collaborative experience providing the music for Shannon Tindle’s thrilling hit animated film about an egotistical baseball star turned superhero and reluctant parent to a young kaiju, now streaming on Netflix.
Considering how important music is in narrative film – from heightening the impact of key action scenes to conveying the emotional nuance in quieter moments – it’s perhaps surprising that composers (with the exception of, say, John Williams and Hans Zimmer) aren’t more celebrated than they are. The role of the composer is arguably even more critical in animated features, which depend on exacting timing and rhythm to make the desired connection with their audience.
In Ultraman: Rising, writer/director Shannon Tindle’s all-new story of a Japanese pop-culture icon, which had its worldwide première June 14 on Netflix, this task fell to Scot Stafford. A multiple award-winning sound supervisor and composer, Stafford previously worked with Tindle on Netflix’s critically-acclaimed mini-series Lost Ollie and received an Annie Award for his musical contribution to Patrick Osborne’s 2016 Oscar-nominated short film Pearl.
In Ultraman: Rising – which chronicles the hero’s journey of an egotistical baseball star who takes over his father’s superhero role, while also becoming the reluctant parent to Emi, a baby monster, when her mother Gigantron is killed – Stafford had a lot to deal with, thematically and kinetically. Yet, despite the considerable challenges, working on the film was among his favorite projects, thanks in no small part to the collaborative atmosphere that defined the production. We spoke with him about all that and more.
Dan Sarto: How early did you get involved in the production and how did you and Shannon develop the concepts for the score?
Scot Stafford: I went down to Netflix very early on, when it was just Shannon, Tom Knott, the producer, John Aoshima, the co-director, and [production supervisor Makiko Wakita]. And we looked at some early art by Sunmin Inn, the art director, and her drawings just sucked me into the world. This was back in February of 2020. And then, of course, the pandemic hit, about two weeks later, which threw things off, but gave me a long time to percolate.
The first idea Shannon pitched for the music was a combination of orchestra and eight-bit sounds, meaning sounds from some of the late 70s and early 80s video game consoles – the first Nintendo, the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600. It's a very nostalgic, very quirky and fun sound to play with. I wasn't sure if that was going to work, but, with the help of an engineer, I was able to hack a Super Nintendo Entertainment system into being a playable synthesizer. That was literally the first thing I did.
About a year later, and this is still three and a half years before the release, I was doing very basic spotting sessions to storyboard. There was one scene that had been boarded by John, a scene where Gigantron dies, and Emi is born. It's one of the most powerful scenes in the whole movie, and it literally plays exactly like the storyboards did back in March of 2021. Other than being performed beautifully by some of the best musicians in London at the AIR Lyndhurst Hall, the score is virtually unchanged from what I originally sent in.
So that presented an amazing opportunity to be involved very early, to fail early and often, and also for my music to seep into the production workflow so that some of the animators and visual effects artists at ILM would be hearing my music as they were working. That really set the tone for one of the hallmarks of the entire process of making Ultraman, which is that it was a team effort that was highly collaborative.
Very early on, sound designer Randy Thom and I would sit together at Skywalker Sound, with supervising sound editor Leff Lefferts, watching early cuts of the film and talking about it. This is very rare, because normally music and sound design develop independently, and it can become almost an adversarial relationship when you get to the final mix. But, in this case, we were already working together for a couple of years. So it was something unique about this project, the collaboration that Shannon and the producers set up very early on.
DS: Did you collaborate with the songwriters at all?
SS: There were two original songs, including one by Diplo. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to collaborate with him, but the song that plays over the final credits at the top features the amazing singer Alicia Creti. And, in this case, we were able to collaborate, so that you can actually hear the family theme that I composed for the score in her song as well. It's a small thing, but it helped it feel like it wasn't just needle-dropped, that the two things were intertwined, and that they both reflected the story.
Also, Shannon was very keen to work with a band called Polyphia, which has these two unbelievably talented guitarists. Shannon was thinking of using a preexisting Polyphia song in the soundtrack, but I wound up collaborating with one of the guitarists, Tim Henson. I pulled him in as a musician to perform on three of the biggest scenes in the film. Normally these things are done assembly-line style, hiring people for as little time as possible in this very streamlined operation, until it results in a soundtrack. In this case, it was messier, but it was a beautiful mess.
DS: What instrument do you compose with? What's your musical pen or pencil?
SS: Well, often I write literally with a pen or pencil. I'm very old school in that way. Often I work directly in the computer. Sometimes people will say, I would love to watch you compose, which would probably look like somebody operating a spreadsheet. I'm entering and manipulating sounds directly into the computer, but it's very important for me to take a break from that to make sure the ideas are really good. That's where I go back to the piano or the guitar or, in many cases, to a real musician. Working with a musician and looking into non-traditional performance techniques, where you're really hearing the bow on the string and they're doing things that they're not supposed to do on the instrument, you come up with ideas that are unique.
DS: What's your approach on a film like this? Is it essentially linear, or do you break it down in terms of what will require the most effort, or do you use some other criteria?
SS: The first thing I work on is usually character or big idea sketches, themes that would really work to express a certain concept or hint at the arc of a character. But then, when you're spotting the film and actually making it work to picture and in between dialogue, it's a whole new ball game. Sometimes what you thought was going to work great doesn't. Oddly enough, and I don't think this is that uncommon, we actually worked in an order that had more to do with the production timeline than with any creative process. I think it was something like reel two, four, three, five, six, one.
What's funny is I think that was a perfect order, because it's very hard to start a film without knowing where it's going to go. One of the pieces that I'm the most proud of is the prologue scene that starts in Ken's childhood. I was really happy with how I was able to introduce and weave together the themes, and go from playful to very emotional to suddenly very scary when Gigantron first shows up. If I had just started with scene one, I don't think it would've been as good as what I wrote. Actually, I think the prologue might've been literally the last cue that I scored.
DS: Aside from dealing with the pandemic, what were the biggest challenges on this film for you?
SS: I think it was the sheer complexity of the number of ideas that we had on the table. I also wanted to create a score that was built out of melodic themes and a classic style, but I wanted to go a little bit further and make a lot of the themes interrelate with one another. So the sheer number of compositional ideas, orchestration ideas, character arc ideas, it was a massive puzzle to solve – I'm really glad that I had time to work it all out.
Also, what's extraordinary about working in animation, which I love, is that animators tend to be pretty sensitive and informed about music, and their process mirrors it quite closely. I actually think the norm for me, when I'm working on an animated project, is for the director to start with the music right off the bat. I've worked about 30 animated projects, and I would say 25 of them have used that approach. I think there's something about animation and animators that makes people think that way.
DS: Music is integral to virtually all films, and certainly to animation. Yet, in publicizing movies, studios rarely highlight the contributions of the composer, and in general the music tends to get short shrift. Why do you think that is?
SS: Partly, of course, it's budgetary. I mean, think how much they're spending on visual effects and animation, as opposed to music. I mean, understandably, the visuals are the main event. Music happens in another building. It's not something they see. It's not something that they're directly a part of, and there's a little bit less at stake. The decision to work with one team versus another is not going to involve tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
But something that was really neat with the music in Ultraman is that we decided to put out the entire score as a soundtrack. The usual, and most commercial, way to do it is to weave together the highlights in an album order. But I very intentionally wanted to make it for the fan that I remember being when I was a kid listening to the Star Wars soundtrack. I would get my Star Wars cards out, I would open the album gatefold and look at all the information in there, and I would listen from the beginning of the movie all the way to the end. I want people, when they hear the soundtrack, to think of the story.
When we were doing the final mix at Skywalker, Gary Rizzo, one of the two re-recording mixers, reassured me that, in the soundtrack version, they would turn the music back up. And I said, this is the version of my score that I want people to hear. It's the version that's in the movie. And he said that was the first time he’d ever heard a composer say that, because most composers, with very good reason, are trying to preserve the integrity of this amazing music that they've written. Whereas I want people to listen to the soundtrack and think about the story. I want people to think like, oh, this is the scene where Gigantron dies. Oh, this is the scene where Emi has acid reflux.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
