By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Apple TV.
By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Apple TV.
The sheer scale of the kaiju makes dinosaurs seem tiny in comparison, and Season 2 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ups the ante on creature mayhem. Every frame emphasizes the creatures’ immense size, especially when human characters interact with CG monsters as towering as skyscrapers.
These human-kaiju interactions pose a unique challenge for the VFX team. Sean Konrad, Visual Effects Supervisor on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2, explains, “Sometimes the writers will put something in the script that we’ll look at and say, ‘That point of contact doesn’t work.’ Placing someone inside of Kong’s hand, for example, has been scripted at various points, but they would be tiny. We did a scene in the first season where we placed the cast in Godzilla’s footprint, which is massive.”
Augmented reality apps have become useful on-set tools for framing and shot composition. Konrad notes, “The Third Floor has an augmented reality app called Cyclops. With an iPad and LiDAR scanner, you can scan the environment and then go, ‘Here’s Kong and your monsters.’ This is useful and incredibly annoying for our production designer because we would be scouting a location that we love, and you have tiny Anna Sawai and this giant monster – how are you going to fit them both in these spaces? We’re finding ways to leverage tools to do that. We’re working with storyboard artists in 3D spaces. We’re doing lineups with previs and techvis to help with this. Then, invariably, something doesn’t work, so you make it up. You push the monster 50 feet away in one shot to maintain that perspective.”
“The Third Floor has an augmented reality app called Cyclops. With an iPad and LiDAR scanner, you can scan the environment and then go, ‘Here’s Kong and your monsters.’ This is useful and incredibly annoying for our production designer because we would be scouting a location we love, and you have tiny Anna Sawai and this giant monster – how are you going to fit them both in these spaces? We’re finding ways to leverage tools to do that.”
—Sean Konrad, Visual Effects Supervisor, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters S2
This season, Titan X shares the creature spotlight along with Kong and Godzilla. “Our base inspiration was Portuguese man o’ war, which is emblematic of the sac in the back of it and the translucency,” Konrad states. “But those creatures are jellyfish, so they don’t have faces. We played around with a lot of different ideas. Ultimately, we started to look at eels and crocodiles, and we created a mash-up of those two.”
The tentacle is the creature’s most significant physical trait. “We conducted early tests where she would throw her body, and the tentacles would follow it. That started to feel bulky and not in a good way. We looked at the way Doc Ock’s tentacles worked in Spider-Man 2 and how they have fluidity and more independent motion, like an inverse kinematic driven by the tip of the appendage.”
To some extent, all the fights in the Monster-Verse are big wrestling matches. “What was cool about having a tentacle is that it turns into an MMA grapple versus a [boxing match] with Kong.”
Moving beyond the physicality, the team used color to reveal the emotional state of Titan X. Konrad says, “We wanted to use the bioluminescence to communicate anger and aggressiveness. Without lights, she shifts to neutral. She doesn’t have a specific reaction to red when she’s angry, and blue or whitish-blue signals calm. There are also variations across the whole season, where it’s different intensities depending on the scene.”
In Episode 201, the original plan for the creatures differed from the finished product. “We had the Psychovulture, a bird-like creature that can fire electricity out of its mouth,” Konrad explains. “During the scripting process, the team felt that Skull Island wasn’t dangerous enough, so we brought in this scene where they would be attacked by a Leafwing. We didn’t have a ton of time to shoot it, so the complexity that we could achieve through blocking and coverage wasn’t quite there. Then we put the scene together, and it felt inert. We ended up adding the Psychovulture creature that grabs the Leafwing, snaps its neck and pulls it out of the ground. We tried to lean into a more visceral quality. We had another creature that started off as a rat but turned into more of a weird panther thing in the basement. It was similar to Season 1 where we had ideas that we thought would work. Then you get them on the screen and realize it doesn’t work. And then you change it. With Titan X, we didn’t have to do that.”
Kong and Godzilla received upgrades for the sophomore season. “We see Kong in Episode 201 substantially,” Konrad notes. “He’s in Episodes 206 and 209. We created environmental versions of their look development to make them feel they fit into the place. In Episode 201, when we see Kong sleeping in the forest, we added dirt and chunks of debris matted into his fur. In the fight with Titan X, we splatter blood on his face. This is where we focused on adding bits of variation. With Godzilla, we didn’t have a ton of opportunity to change that up. We dialed in his wetness, depending on how recently he emerged from the water. Otherwise, a lot of that is close to what we kept in the features. I don’t know if you have ever seen the illustration of what Godzilla would look like in San Francisco Bay. For him to stand upright, he would have to have 700-foot-long legs! But we wanted to play with his center of mass when he’s more upright so the buoyancy felt more plausible. It would undulate up and down and have his bodyweight shift like he was treading water. We tried to at least gesture to that meme a little bit!”
Emmy-nominated actor Kurt Russell provided ideas for the choreography, particularly for the scene where he battles a scarab inside a transport pod about to exit Axis Mundi. We had all these fossilized versions of the scarab creatures that we were building for on-set stuff,” Konrad remarks. With plenty of materials available, the team decided to innovate on the spot. “We had molds to use to make foam stuffies for our actors to interact with. For the scene with Kurt wrestling the creature, he pitched a lot of those specific choreography ideas. We approached that scene from the point of view that we’re going to cut back and forth and use that to build up tension through that moment. I don’t want to say that we under-scooped it, but we had planned to weave into the darkness and have less interaction. But the moment Kurt got the stuffie, he said, ‘Let’s do this, and I want to get it tangled up in my hair.’ We had to rein in other things, but ultimately, the whole sequence worked a lot better because we could lean into it. There are limitations with that kind of stuffie. It’s a tentacle creature, so when it grabs your arm, you’re going to see the displacement of the fabric on the clothing. You need to figure out if it’s something you do in a 2D or 3D cheat.”
“We conducted early tests, where [Titan X] would throw her body, and the tentacle would follow it. That started to feel bulky and not in a good way. We looked at the way Doc Ock’s tentacles worked in Spider-Man 2 and how they have fluidity and more independent motion, like an inverse kinematic driven by the tip of the appendage. What was cool about having a tentacle is that it turns into an MMA grapple versus a [boxing match] with Kong.”
—Sean Konrad, Visual Effects Supervisor, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters S2
Contributing to the digital augmentation were Eyeline, Rising Sun Pictures, Rodeo FX, Trixter, Distillery VFX, Vitality VFX, Crafty Apes, Mist VFX and Outpost VFX. “Around 3,000 visual effects shots are similar to last season, but the volume of creature work is a lot bigger this time around,” Konrad says. “We found a lot of nice environments, especially with the jungle component and shooting in Australia and Thailand, so we didn’t have as much set extension work this time around, although there are heavier set extensions, especially on Outpost 18, the ship. But we tried to focus the financial footprint on creatures this time around.”
To sell the scale and motion of Kong on screen, the team pushed beyond traditional camera setups. Konrad says, “One of the things I enjoyed this season is our directors. Everybody was on board with trying to capture a lot of objective visual effects shots with drones and helicopters. We had access to cutting-edge drone tech from Australian company, Heliguy. On top of that, we did this amazing two-day helicopter shoot while we were in Thailand. For example, in the opener for Episode 202, it’s the end shots of Episode 201 but seen from a different perspective. We follow Kong going into a valley, we pass him and wrap around as he yells at a helicopter. We found a location that we loved and had the helicopter fly through it. Getting that helicopter move was hard as hell. To get a 180-degree wrap, it’s not as simple as turning the camera – you actually have to turn the helicopter itself as you’re going. There’s all that gravitational force on you as well, and your camera operator is getting nauseous, but we had an experienced pilot, so fortunately it was all good.”
