monsTer Wrangler
Visual effects supervisor Guillaume Rocheron on orchestrating the Titan mayhem…
The only creature that goes from one movie to the other is Godzilla himself.
We obviously used what we did in 2014 as a base. Mike [Dougherty] wanted a few subtle design changes on him. We redesigned the dorsal fin to be a bit more in line with the 1954 Godzilla.
So bigger, rounder, a bit more like the kind of starfish shape. And we just did a few adjustments in terms of proportions. The head is slightly smaller. The shoulders are slightly broader.
Where most of our attention went was showcasing the personalities of those creatures.
They don’t talk. They’re not cute. They don’t have any of that appeal. A lot of it goes into the eyes, and how the muscles perform on the face. That’s really the big leap that we took from the previous film, in terms of the creatures.
We use the destruction as an excuse to showcase the monsters’ scale.
If you see debris falling very slowly against a creature – the human brain knows how fast something falls. So right away you get a sense of scale. you get a sense of: “OK, what
I’m watching is really, really big.”
for every creature, we always try to base a visual foundation in reality.
For Godzilla, we used a lot of Komodo dragons and lizards. For Mothra, we looked at moths and wasps. We looked at praying mantis as well, because the design was all about: how do you keep her looking feminine? For Rodan, we looked at all sorts of birds, and dinosaur skeletons. We looked at vultures a lot, for his face. Obviously, none of these are coated in magma and dry lava. But it gives you a starting point, right?
Ghidorah was a very interesting design because obviously he has three heads, two tails – a very unusual anatomy.
Again, we looked a lot at certain types of lizards, but also snakes. Our biggest influence on him were cobras. Because we didn’t want him to be a big, lumbering creature, so in the way we made him move, he’s always snake-like. When you look at the scales on Ghidorah’s neck, they’re visually sampled from yellow cobras. We looked at wolf packs because it was a very interesting thing to see how three wolves would move as a pack, and we used that as an inspiration for how the three heads would move together. MM