[Interview] ‘ULTRAMAN: RISING’ Composer Scot Stafford Hits the Perfect Notes

Courtney Howard // Film Critic

Composer Scot Stafford and co-writer/ director Shannon Tindle took an unconventional route when it came to ULTRAMAN: RISING’s score. Tindle brought his frequent collaborator on board early in the development process, which rarely happens, asking for an “orchestra meets 8-bit sound.”

The animated film tells the story of a family in flux; Famous baseball player/ prodigal son Ken (Christopher Sean) returns home to Japan after his mother goes missing to pick up the superhero mantle – or rather, costume – from his retired father Professor Sato (Gedde Watanabe). There, while out on a mission, Ken unwittingly becomes a surrogate father to baby kaiju Emi, whose mother has perished at the hands of overzealous Dr. Onda (Keone Young).

Both Stafford and Tindle found interesting in-roads into characters’ individual soundtrack themes, from the first notes played on a harp (“an instrument that pulls everything back to a simple emotional core”) to their application of a Pocket Miku (“it sounds like a really loveable jibberish”) to represent Emi. “Shannon sent it to me and said, ‘It sounds like Emi feels.’”

How do you not repeat yourself sonically from film to film, especially on movies that carry similar emotional poignancy?

“I think I could fall into that pattern. Even though this is our third project together, ULTRAMAN: RISING is so different from LOST OLLIE. LOST OLLIE was supposed to be – in Shannon’s words – the Appalachian LORD OF THE RINGS, which was one of the more interesting directions I’ve ever gotten. Not an easy task. I’ve been lucky enough to work on such different stories and different worlds.

I also am a bit of a chameleon. Early on in my career, I was coached by many times, by many people, saying, ‘You need to have a signature sound. You need to have a schtick that you do so that everyone knows, if you want the Stafford sound, you go to Stafford.’ I never had any interest in that. I want to have the biggest range. I want to get lost in the work to where I disappear and if I start seeing a signature, I’m like ‘Oh let’s get rid of that.’ I’m lucky in the sense that I want to lose myself completely in every story – and I work on amazing stories with amazing storytellers.”

Do you see it as a compliment when people say, ‘I didn’t notice your work in this movie,’ or is that derogatory?

“If you liked it [laughs]. To be honest, every once in awhile, someone will say, ‘I heard what you were doing there.’ Of course that’s special, but what we’re going for is that I don’t need people to notice it. If people like it, that’s wonderful. But our entire job is to support the story and what’s interesting is how intelligent people are – people who know nothing about the craft of filmmaking or music composition – and have very high standards. So much that if I introduce an emotion one or two seconds before I’ve earned it, the score becomes manipulative and cheesy. Sometimes I can move it later where I’ve earned it.”

With this score, you’re blending lots of different sounds and instruments. What’s the magic of creating that broth?

“That’s a good word for it. Once you create it, it’s like ‘Where’s the garlic?’ By the way, one of the signs of a good artist is if their first love is food and their second love is what they do for a career. Shannon and I talk about recipes so I’m game for the broth analogy. The idea is it’s all about clarity. It’s just like, to follow your analogy, you just need four ingredients and everything else, you’ve lost the taste of the garlic, or the beef stock. It’s the exact same thing. I had this sprawling palate, which were 20% these insane ideas that came from Shannon and were part of his initial pitch that got the movie greenlit at Netflix and I gotta go with that. If Shannon pitches the idea of 8-bit with orchestra, I gotta do it. I needed to reign in that insane palate and I needed it to be cohesive. I was desperately looking for ways to do that and that’s how I came up with the idea of having the emotional core of the film be one instrument – and guess what, it’s the harp. That’s not what people would guess for a Sunday matinee, popcorn superhero action movie. And have all the melodic themes tying the score together, have them all interrelate, really closely, such that in some cases, the first few notes of the family theme, I just change by one half step and make it Dr. Onda’s theme, which is a broken form of the family theme.”

At what part of the process do you come in and work your magic?

“Normally, a composer comes in as part of the post-production process. Day 1 is watching a complete cut of the film. Going against that, the entire system is streamlined towards that process. Getting brought in 4 years early, before animation is even begun is a messy, really interesting process that has a lot of risk involved. You can come up with a theme that seems right when you’re looking at storyboards and then you’ll see it at the end and think, ‘I need to start all over.’

When you’re working with such amazing people and you have trust built up over the years and you have the ability to be directly impacted by concept art, I could score that. It’s a piece of static art, but it was so beautiful and so evocative. You get to play with theses building blocks before they’re done. In turn, the music you write starts to influence animators and other parts of the process. No one has the luxury of waiting until it was all done. It was just you jump in and swim. It was an unusual and really cool process.”

ULTRAMAN: RISING is available to stream on Netflix.