Finding Ningyo

Set in 1911, The Ningyo follows a professor who specializes in cryptozoology, the search for mythological creatures. The title stems from a Japanese myth about a fish-like creature known as the ningyo that can curse a person with immortality. When a map leading to one is discovered, it sets off a globe-spanning hunt that takes our protagonist from his university office to a secret cryptozoo and the bottom of the sea.

The Ningyo began in 2013 as a Kickstarter campaign seeking $50,000, and thanks to the donations of 1,025 contributors, the project went on to far surpass its goal and receive over $80,000. One of the largest contributors was Chaos Group, which supported the project as part of its Partners in Art program, an initiative designed to help independent filmmakers by providing financial backing, software licenses and custom tools.

To create The Ningyo, Ortega and Ma turned their living room into the primary sound stage, while their bedroom doubled as a Victorian-style college professor’s office. Even the stairway played a role, transforming into a cavern’s sloping entrance. Each set consisted of physical objects paired with black screens rather than green, in order to help establish the Lovecraftian tone while honoring the look and feel of films like The Godfather, which is famous for using darkness to help create atmosphere.

“We started by getting the environments to look good in CG first, so the lighting was already perfect when the actor hit the set,” recalled Ortega. “If you think about it, it's kind of crazy to light a guy in front of a green screen first, and then make all of the environment work for a person that's only taking up 10-percent of the screen. So we did it in reverse using V-Ray, resulting in a seamless blend of practical and digital.”

Once each scene was filmed, Ortega and Ma would break down the set and begin creating the next. The process could take months, as each new scene needed to first be populated with real-world objects that fit with the film’s turn-of-the-century look and feel. Some were created by altering modern objects, while others were vintage items purchased online. Once filming was complete, Ortega and Ma began digitally enhancing the scenes, which included the creation of several studio-quality creatures that were meticulously sculpted in Mudbox before being rendered in V-Ray for Maya.

“By jumping back and forth between camera trickery and then just straight up visual effects, people are kind of thrown off balance, they’re not sure,” said Ortega. “They can't say ‘oh, that's a CG shot’ or ‘oh that's a practical shot’ because it's jumping back and forth.” 

Ortega and Ma came to the project with more than 20 years of VFX experience between them, having worked on blockbuster films such as Marvel’s Thor, Transformers 3, The Mist and more. The Ningyo, however, challenged them to use tools and processes they had never needed to learn until now. The two had worked with V-Ray and Nuke on their previous short, the award-winning The Green Ruby Pumpkin, but with nearly 90-percent of the CG coming from just the two of them, the process was at times slow going. 

“It has been a learning experience,” said Ortega. “For a lot of this stuff, we just had no idea how to do it. We didn't know how to do cloth simulations, we didn't know how to do fur, we didn't know how to do volumetrics, and this is the stuff that we learned as we went. We would render it and it would be like ‘yeah, that looks good, now we need to do 80 digital doubles for the lecture hall. Can V-Ray handle that?’ Bam, it handled it. We kept throwing more and more at V-Ray, and it was great.” 

Once the short film — subtitled “Episode One” — was complete, Ortega and Ma began to submit their project to film festivals in March 2017. Initially, the film met with resistance, as some festival directors didn’t believe The Ningyo should qualify as an indie film because the visual effects appeared to be “too good” to originate outside of the Hollywood studio system, while others didn’t realize there were visual effects at all.

“What’s funny about it is we didn’t win one single visual effects award until we won at FilmQuest, because a lot of people thought that most of the stuff in the film wasn’t digital, or they thought we spent millions of dollars,” said Ortega. “The irony is that we didn’t have anything. There’s one shot where the actor shuts the camera off himself, because we didn’t have a cinematographer that day. We’re making this at home — you can’t get more indie than that. We just happen to know visual effects.” 

The Ningyo has since gone on to earn over 30 festival nominations, including winning Best Fantastic Short at FilmQuest US, Best Sci-Fi Fantasy Short Film and Best Fantasy Film at the GenreBlast Film Festival, Best Cinematography at the HollyShorts Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Something Wicked Film Festival and more. 

Following the success of The Ningyo on the festival circuit, Ortega and Ma signed a deal with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the largest entertainment agencies in the world. Soon after, the team confirmed that they had struck a deal with an as yet unnamed studio to adapt the short into a major motion picture. Details on The Ningyo’s next act will be announced in the near future. 

Miguel was recently interviewed on the CG Garage podcast. Tune in for an uncensored chat about the making of The Ningyo.