Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
Feature Film

‘Mutant Mayhem’ Director Jeff Rowe Is Using The Film’s Buzz To Promote Artists Who Worked On The Film

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Filmmakers using social media to promote their upcoming films is nothing new, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem director Jeff Rowe is using his time in the spotlight to share that attention with the artists and technicians who have spent the last few years working on the film.

An artist’s name showing up in the credit reel of a film is important, but this extra bit of exposure means a lot to artists and can be a big help in securing future work.

For several months now, Rowe has been using his Instagram to prop up his below-the-line colleagues. Back in March, he shared a group of stills and singled out the work of Mutant Mayhem artists Gabe Lin, Yashar Kassai, Sean Sevestre, and the lighting team at Mikros Animation, where most of the film was animated. Cinesite in Vancouver also animated parts of the film.

When the film’s trailer dropped, he gave a shout-out to screenwriters Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg as well as his co-director Kyler Spears, art directors Arthur Fong and Tiffany Lam Almack, head of cinematography Kent Seki, and editor Greg Levitan.

In late June, the film’s mixing crew wrapped and Rowe once again took to Instagram to pay respect to more than a dozen artists and technicians who worked on the film’s sound, music, and dialogue.

Rowe used his Twitter account to promote the standout work of animator Christine Sévigny, explaining exactly why the work she did was so impressive. His thread explained:

There’s a 41-second-long take in here animated by the incredible Christine Sévigny. It’s unbelievable. Four characters acting for 41 seconds, completely naturalistically, in a shot whose length you probably don’t notice because it’s not flashy in its camera blocking. Why?

Long takes are always hard but are especially tricky in animation. It’s so technically demanding and time-consuming. But meeting the characters for the first time, we wanted to invite the audience to hang out with the turtles and introduce them as a foursome, not individuals.

Cutting to coverage might emphasize one character over another or ruin the fly-on-the-wall feeling of hanging with your best buds and watching them joke around. We needed to establish our naturalistic filmmaking style early on. Christine rose to the challenge and crushed this.

There are shots at least twice as long as this later in the film, but this was the creative foundation on which the rest of the movie was built. Teens hanging out and bantering shot like b-roll in a skate video. Christine made the dream reality!

In other tweets, he praised the work of Mikros animation supervisor Arnaud Philippe-Giraux:

And storyboard artist Hannah Cho:

And in a reply to a tweet about the film’s score, composed by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, Rowe didn’t forget to mention the scene’s storyboard artist Adel Sabi or concept artist Kaye Kang.

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