Clash of the titans
Trevor Hogg gets a ringside seat for the epic fights featured in Godzilla vs. Kong…
We go behind the scenes of the epic, action-packed VFX of Godzilla vs. Kong
Awelcomed rematch takes place between two iconic titans that originally clashed in King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962, as Godzilla vs. Kong
(2021) has proven that there is still a demand for the theatrical experience as the fourth instalment of Warner Bros’ Monsterverse has earned $391 million worldwide during the coronavirus pandemic. Directing the epic Hollywood blockbuster is Adam Wingard (The
Guest) who partnered with visual effects supervisor John ‘DJ’ Des Jardin (Sucker
Punch) to have the giant gorilla and massive lizard share the screen together. In total 960 visual effects were created with the main vendors being Scanline VFX, MPC and Weta Digital. A shot that has served as the cornerstone of the marketing campaign, of Kong punching Godzilla in the face while onboard an aircraft carrier, almost did not make it into the final cut. “It ended up being one of the four shots that I had Bryan Hirota at Scanline test, which got the producers jazzed about the movie,” states John ‘DJ’ Des Jardin. “Way down the line, we’re shooting in Australia, and happen to be looking through the edit and that shot wasn’t there. We were told it was taken out because the producers need to save some money, so when Adam and Alex Garcia
[Enola Holmes], the main creative executive on the show, got into editorial to go over sequences with us, I asked, ‘What about this? This shot is cool and it seems like the telltale shot of the title of the movie.’ We even all agreed that if we keep that shot in you are going to market the movie with that. Now here we are a couple of years later and that’s exactly what happened!”
Unlike the model of Godzilla which was inherited from Godzilla: King Of The
Monsters, Kong received a substantial upgrade from Kong: Skull Island. “We got the model from ILM but we needed to make him even bigger so that he looked reasonably powerful next to Godzilla,” notes DJ. “Then we also aged him up. They were saying to me, ‘He’s more like an
adolescent because that’s back in the 1970s. It has been 40 years and now he’s getting to be a more ‘older man’ Kong, so the beard is longer and the fur is greyer. The fur is not as brown and red as it was in Skull Island.
The initial scars at the beginning of the movie are the same ones that he has in Skull
Island. We made sure that Kong looked the same so he would be identifiable as the same character.”
Entering into the melee is the robotic Mechagodzilla, which becomes sentient and develops a great hatred towards its real-life inspiration. “Production designers Owen Paterson [The Matrix] and Tom Hammock [Death Note] took me through their war room of all of these concepts back
John ‘DJ’ Des Jardin, visual effects supervisor, Godzilla vs. Kong
in March of 2018. Most of the views that the art department had done of the model were full body, so we added a lot of the weathering and fine details from the grease and rivets to make it look big enough.” The technology is situated in the near future. “It’s kind of magical but is based on the sci-fi that is already embedded in the series.
Mechagodzilla was always meant to be a slicker version of Godzilla and therefore look more lethal. It has some of Godzilla’s powers but then a lot of mechanical things with a couple of extra tricks up its sleeve too. Adam wanted to use the tail in a scorpion fashion because there’s an extra danger to that.”
“WE HAD TO MAKE KONG EVEN BIGGER TO LOOK POWERFUL NEXT TO GODZILLA”
Principal photography concluded in Hong Kong in April 2019 with postproduction finishing in June 2020. “It wasn’t a normal pipeline of previs, shoot a bunch of stuff, postvis and then finish the shots,” explains DJ. “When we got into the postvis phase, since the assets were far along, we had a lot of time to use the pipelines of Scanline, Weta Digital and MPC to fine-tune sequences to the point that Adam could come to me and say, ‘I want Mechagodzilla to pin Kong up against something and threaten him with his tail. Godzilla does something to help Kong. Kong is then able to take him out.’ I could talk to whatever vendor was handling that scene and say, ‘This is what the characters do, now go throw six or seven cameras on that scene, and send them all back as camera coverage. Adam and [editor] Josh Schaeffer could look at it as if we had shot this footage for real, cut the scene together and tell us if we need to modify anything from there.”
Settings range from the icy landscape of Antarctica, jungles of Hollow Earth to the urban streets of Hong Kong. “The ocean battle had a particular look to it as Adam wanted the water to look dark compared to the sky at times,” notes DJ. “We were shooting in Hawaii so there were a lot of good references for how we were going to make that look. Adam had a lot of concept art made that showed Hong Kong as having this neon, of look to it. We wanted to get the creatures lit almost in a surreal fashion, so you can see all of the detail but it would look like a sci-fi city. There was a huge amount of world building for Hollow Earth, which was anchored by a real environment; that became different spots in Oahu and a lot of helicopter work that I did on Kauai going through the lush canyons. We then added alien-looking vegetation and the inverted ground.”
Not everything is about bombastic action, as quiet moments occur between former Skull Island residents Kong and Jia [Kaylee Hottle]. “Any scene with a human is easier than you think because the human is there for scale,” remarks DJ. “The funniest thing is not even the producers sometimes realized how big Kong really is compared to Jia. I love the scene where he pushes his finger against her hand because his scale is so massive compared to her. All we did was have somebody come up to Kaylee with a big piece of green foam, stand on a platform and push that down so her hand would be at the right angle. But it is to the credit of how Adam instructed her. We had previs for the scene so we could show Kaylee what is supposed to happen, and her mother was there as an interpreter too because she is deaf. Adam knew some sign language but it
Director Adam Wingard, Julian Dennison and Millie Bobby Brown on set
Wrestling matches and MMA fights served as inspiration for MPC when choreographing the nighttime showdown in Hong Kong
The model for Godzilla was taken from
John ‘DJ’ Des Jardin, visual effects supervisor, Godzilla vs. Kong
was good to have somebody from her family around to be able to translate what needed to happen. It is a beautiful moment.”
Atmospherics such as dust and debris as well as birds serve as visual cues for size and scale. “It is always difficult to give the filmmakers the intensity and speed that they want the characters to move at, but it is part of our job not to make them look small when they do that,” remarks DJ. “Most of the large size came from all of the effects work that they built around them in the environment. We found as long as the snow or the trees that he is knocking around or the smoke he is coming out of tended to move close to real time, that would give the shot the scale it needed. We always had indicators in the early animation stages so we could see what gravity would really be. There would be a cube or sphere that would fall according to real gravity and we would clock how fast the creature needed to fall to go from 800 feet in the air all the way down to the ground. Even though the punch to hit him is 1,000 miles per hour at least he is going to fall as close to the real speed.”
Everything from water to debris needed to be simulated using tools such as Flowline, Thinking Particles and Houdini. “There is a lot of water interaction and big buildings getting destroyed; it’s heavy but we have all gone through the development process of doing these destruction kits so we have an idea of what is possible,” observes DJ. “Nothing was off the table for this one and it’s all up there on the screen. Only a few shots did we get to the end and Adam would go, ‘It doesn’t quite work right. We probably need to do this.’ Even something like Kong eating fish, there are some simulations involved with that. That’s the other reason why the long schedule for post was so good, because they gave us time to get a high level of detail into the film; that’s always satisfying from our visual effects end to be able to get all of that in.”
A different camera style was adopted for Godzilla vs. Kong. “The other films were definitely done more from a human perspective,” notes DJ. “For this one, Adam wanted to get into their heads more and understand them more emotionally, even though Godzilla is hard to do because he’s a big lizard as opposed to Kong who is more humanoid. Despite doing it that way, we still wanted to have some realistic cameras. We would ask ourselves, ‘How are we photographing this? Is it from a helicopter or a ship on the ocean? Where are we?’ But at some point, we break that because you want to see these guys photographed as you would a brawl; that’s why you have the Mexican standoff between Godzilla and Kong in Hong Kong, because that’s how you would shoot two guys standing off about to punch each other. We anchor it quite a bit with real camera ideas if not real cameras. Every five or six shots down the line there is a real plate we shot on a helicopter or drone in Hong Kong that we could build upon before we go all CG again, just to get your eye fixated on something real.”
“THERE WAS A HUGE AMOUNT OF WORLD BUILDING FOR HOLLOW EARTH, ANCHORED BY REAL ENVIRONMENTS IN HAWAII”