Seki sought to utilize a “cinema vérité” style to film Leo, Raph, Donnie, and Mikey as they engage in their antics, both comedic and action, with the seminal work of Emmanuel Lubezki and Spike Jonze informing that look, while the film’s lead character designer, Woodrow White, goes even further when describing the individual look of each sibling, moving away from the “mono-style except by mask” of the classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and applying elements to truly showcase the four heroes as young, budding teens.
“Jeff and I were on the same page with the Turtles, the ‘teenage’ being emphasized in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—we wanted them to sound and look like teenagers,” White says. “So we were always pushing for a less bulky version of the Turtles compared to the previous versions…the vision in our head was that we wanted something new and fresh and more relatable. We always had in mind a slightly skinnier version of the Turtles, kind of more teenage builds.”
White even expands on some of the finer details of some of the brothers. “We always knew we wanted Donnie to have glasses. It’s just he’s commonly [known as] the brainy one, but also, I just think a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle [wearing] glasses is funny. Not necessarily as a defining trait of wisdom or geekiness but rather a defining trait of adolescence. Glasses on Donny, braces on Mikey… they’re all these sort of visual growing pains that we can all relate to being a teenager.”
The Turtles’ adolescent narrative journey is meant to butt up against the adult world, at once steady, confusing, and… well, ugly (but in a good way). If the Turtles’ world is shot to look spontaneous, reactive, and “in the moment,” the adult world around them is more controlled, formalized, and grounded.
“What we wanted to do was contrast the handheld Spike Jonze of it all with the kids,” Seki says. “We took another inspiration from early Paul Thomas Anderson [and] his work with [cinematographer] Robert Elswit on Boogie Nights, where there’s a more formal camera language. So, we have the spontaneous, where you’re just trying to follow the action, and then we have the more formal, camera-driven world of PTA. Those two worlds are separate.”
Seki continues: “When we shot scenes, we would use these different techniques to support the subtext of what was happening. So if the kids were being reprimanded by Splinter, [we] would be much steadier with the camerawork, and then when we cut back to the kids, they’d be a little bit more handheld, a little more loose, and those kinds of things started to creep into the cinematography. So we had this dichotomy of the teenage world and the adult world.”