Plus, how that iconic shot of Kong and Godzilla running side by side was made for the film.
Among the many characters and environments Wētā FX was responsible for on Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire were Suko (the titan sized ape who almost convinces Kong he is too cute to be bad), Skar King (a new foe and tyrannical ruler amidst the creatures of Hollow Earth) and Shimo (a Godzilla-like ice-breathing titan controlled by Skar King with a special crystal).
befores & afters asked a team of artists from Wētā FX–visual effects supervisor Kevin Smith, animation supervisor Ludovic Chailloleau, additional visual effects supervisor Nick Epstein and visual effects sequence supervisor Stephen Tong–how these new creatures and their environments were created.
Here they touch on several fun key aspects of the film, like the moment Kong uses Suko as a weapon to bludgeon two other great apes, the giant titans engaged in battle in zero gravity, and another heavily meme’d moment of Kong and Godzilla running side-by-side.
Suko the punk ape almost had a mullet
Kevin Smith (visual effects supervisor): From the very beginning as we were working on the lookdev, the whole idea from the client was that Suko was kind of a punk. He’s not a baby, so much as he’s a punk teenager. It didn’t really make it in the movie, but he had a bit of a mullet for a while there to show how he was this punk kid.
Ludovic Chailloleau (animation supervisor): Suko was pretty much the youngster. He wants to yell very loud, and he’s overdoing it. We had two amazing performers for that on stage. We were working with Allan Henry and Luke Hawker. We portrayed him the way a youngster will act with his relatives when he has to do something that he’s not very happy to do, but he’s forced to do. He’s a small guy, he doesn’t have the strength of Kong. He’s smaller than everyone. He’s under constraints.
Kevin Smith: I knew we were on the right track because every time we showed shots of Suko to anyone outside of our show, their first reaction was always, ‘Awwwww.’ I was like, ‘Yes! It’s perfect because that’s what the clients wanted. They wanted him to be adorable, basically. A little bit of a punk, but, ‘Awwwww.’
Kong meets Suko in a ginormous Wētā environment
Nick Epstein (additional visual effects supervisor): When Kong first discovers Suko, it’s in a huge cave and there’s all these clouds in there. It’s very, very mysterious and it’s a huge environment.. We had to sort of come up with a procedural dressing solution to work for wherever the cameras were placed. But we ended up with astronomical amounts of geometry. I think at one point our in-house renderer had some arbitrary limits on it that had to be increased because we just had so many instances and no one had ever tried putting that many through. It was something like 400 million instances in that ape fight.
We also had a procedural ground interaction system that would basically figure out what needed to be activated. All of those things would then get carved off into the FX package, simulated and then come back into the lighting scene and removed from the layout proper so you didn’t have to worry about it. It was all nicely automated by Murali Ramachari, my FX supervisor.
[Client-side VFX supervisor] Alessandro Ongaro did a recce/reference shoot in Iceland where he shot loads of plates from a helicopter and they ended up being really, really useful here. We used them for texture projections and because they were shot from an aerial helicopter, they worked scale-wise for us. It gave us a real-world break up without looking too procedural or too repetitive and it would be at the right scale. Then the comp team did a great job of dealing with all of that. We always wanted the frame to feel like something was moving, even if it was just a very slow drift of atmosphere.
Suko as a…weapon
Kevin Smith: It was Alessandro, it was his idea [for Kong to use Suko as a weapon against the other apes]. We were all like, ‘Yes, that’s an amazing idea.’ The animation team fleshed it out and we’re just like, ‘Oh, I hope they buy it.’ None of us thought that that was going to stay in the movie.
Nick Epstein: When I saw the previs, I think all of us were like, oh my god, that’s hilarious. That’s one of the greatest moments I think I’ve ever seen and I really hoped that that was going to stay in the movie and for that reason I wanted to work on that sequence.
Ludovic Chailloleau: It was a very keystone into the relationship between Kong and Suko. It’s the first time that he meets someone else who is also a titan. Obviously, the whole point of the movie is that Kong is alone until he meet this character, and then little trust he gives to him is a mistake because Suko’s a traitor. So, that’s a bit of a fun moment for him to take a bit of revenge and use Suko as a weapon.
Suko tries to get Kong killed at the lake
Stephen Tong (visual effects sequence supervisor): That environment is quite huge. You’ve got inside the forest and then through the forest you’ve got a huge lake and then you’ve got all those mountains and the ceiling in the back. This time around we wanted to do the environments with more colorful mountains where you’ve got all that mineral oxidation happening on the slope. On top of that, we had all the actual water simulation with the huge creatures.
One of the conscious artistic choices that we went for with giant creatures was to make them go a little bit faster than what you would be expecting from a 100-meter tall creature, but at the same time it’s a bit more exciting to see as they fight. That, though, leads to challenges with the physical simulations like the water and interacting with trees. Those are quite difficult to dial in.
Skar King the gangster was almost bald
Kevin Smith: With Skar King, they actually had a Mudbox sculpt already when they turned over the art. He’s very orangutan-like. Being long and skinny, they actually wanted him to be the opposite. So, Kong is Mike Tyson, but Scar King is a little shifty and more graceful. They initially wanted him to be a little bald and it was really hard to get him to not look like an old man. The other thing we had to do was take the design and adjust everything biomechanically. Because the arms are so long that animation wasn’t going to be able to do anything that made sense with him. So we adjusted some joints and adjusted him proportionally, so that he could fight and move correctly.
Ludovic Chailloleau: I had a very appealing reaction when I saw Skar King’s design for the first time with the long arms. I was like, ‘Wow, this is great.’ Because this guy is basically the opposite of Kong. Kong is very square. He’s all about strength. The way he tackles problems is just smashing, breaking and going through. Skar King is more of a sneaky guy. He is a manipulator. We started approaching him with these ‘slacking’ movements. He’s always very sneaky. He’s not frontal like Kong. He’s more asymmetrical in the way he moves. And because he has long arms, it becomes part of his body language. He can have super long reach very easily and he can use this like a spider monkey will do to swing. And that creates this very weird feeling of him being so fast because he has such a long range which means he doesn’t need to move that much.
We did motion capture for him and the idea was to perform his moves on stage with extensions and prosthesis on the arms, so the performers could have the reach necessary to plant very, very far away the tip of the arms, and to propel the whole body to arrive at the camera very quickly, and then to go with this movement with the arms going on the ground, very, very relaxed and slaggery. It’s like a gangster.
Kong and Skar King fight
Kevin Smith: That sequence ended up being about twice as long as it did when the clients first turned it over because they kept adding story points, which was great because we got to be involved in helping them tell that story. Things like the ape that gets kicked into the lava that makes Suko so upset–that was an add-on. Then some of the stuff that Skar King did before they actually get going in the fight was about trying to tell who these monkeys all are as characters. We previs’d this ourselves to flesh that sequence out.
Ludovic Chailloleau: In that fight, they’re swinging around a lot, so there was a ton of motion that we couldn’t really capture. There’s always a lot of keyframe after the capture anyway because these are heavy dudes with crazy stunts that we can’t really do on stage.
Nick Epstein: Originally we had planned for 100 apes in Skar King’s lair, but I think we ended up with something like 130 in the wide shots. We built them in a modular way. We needed the same facial rig to be able to transfer to all of them even though they had different faces. They were all built from the same base mesh. We did shading variants for the different paint patterns. We did different grooms. They were scaled differently and they had different colors as well. We had a very loose sort of hierarchical system. If you had one stripe, you’d made it up to one tier in Skar King’s eyes and the more stripes you had, the closer you may have got to Skar King’s lair.
We affectionately called one of the apes ‘Boots’. He’s the one that gets kicked by one of the guard apes that then Kong lays out because he got kicked in the face. So we called him Boots. We were playing with making him look a little bit more sympathetic. We didn’t want them to just look like these great big brutes. So there was definitely a design phase there and consideration paid to what are people going to connect with. We may have dialed in a little bit of Suko to some of those apes as well.
Skar King’s weapon: ‘One of the hardest things we had to do’
Kevin Smith: As soon as we saw that spine skeleton weapon, we were like, ‘Oh man.’ It’s super challenging to get it to do anything you wanted, any kind of programmatically or automated way and not have it be a constant tweaking by hand. Luckily, it’s either curled up around him where we can hide the parts we don’t want you to see or it’s in some kind of fight where it’s in chaotic motion enough that you don’t really notice that it’s not perfect.
I think it was 108 or 110 vertebrae, plus the jaw handle and the thing at the end. It was hard. 99% of people will go see this movie and watch it and not realize that that is one of the hardest things we had to do. Not even to mention being able to give Ludo and animators controls for when you want to drive the motion in an animated way.
The cat-like Shimo
Nick Epstein: Shimo had a huge amount of geometry. We didn’t want to do all of that purely as displacements, so she was pretty heavy. All of the look of the crystals and the refractive nature of those, those were getting expensive. She’s very bright and white as well. She was quite unique because she’s even bigger than Godzilla, even bigger than Kong, she’s a true titan. Maintaining a sense of scale with her, too, was a challenge and also knowing that she needed to be packaged up, that is, handed to other vendors as well. She was really beautiful and it was a fine balance between creating something beautiful but also menacing at the same time.
Ludovic Chailloleau: One of the things we had to tackle when we started to work on this big sequence with the fight between Kong and Skar King was to handle the relationship that Shimo has with Skar King. Shimo would be mainly keyframe, because you can’t really motion capture a dragon. While Godzilla is more like a lizard or dog, Shimo is not like a dog, she’s more like a cat. She’s more feline in the way she moves. And that was important to drive what she would do. It’s not super brutal like Godzilla would be.
Kevin Smith: Shimo was probably one of my most favorite things on this whole movie. I was pretty worried for a while because there were so many spinning plates and so much of it was actually very difficult to get right. The skin especially, and her scales and the crystals on her back, and the ice-breath–all those things were technically and artistically challenging. I’m not the ‘toy guy’. If I showed you my office, it’s not full of maquettes, but I might actually get one of Shimo because I’m quite proud of how she turned out. It’s a cool character.
Ludovic Chailloleau: We had to build up the whole part where Skar King starts to control Shimo with the whip and the crystal. Shimo is like Godzilla. She’s a very old creature. She’s beaming energy out. She’s doing pretty much the same thing that Godzilla does, but she’s not a bad creature. It’s just a creature under pain and stress. She’s doing it because she doesn’t have a choice.
Nick Epstein: My favorite thing is where Shimo unleashes her beam the first time and Kong blocks it with his axe–it was used in the promotional material for the movie. The beam is so strong that it knocks Kong’s axe away. But that one shot, that was our lookdev shot for Shimo’s beam effects. One of our compositors, Euna Kho, did a really great job of helping to massage all of the FX elements. Shimo’s beam ended up being quite a complex operation, quite nuanced, with elements of frozen vapor in the air, and ice shards which reflect the beam. There were something like 30-plus FX layers involved. And then you get that shot where Kong’s looking up going, ‘Oh shit.’ Kong’s usually quite confident but in that moment you see that veneer disappear where he realizes he’s up against something huge.
Titans in zero-G
Stephen Tong: I’m quite proud of the work that the team has done with the zero-g sequence. It’s quite a special sequence. It’s not often that you get to do a sequence set in a large tunnel-shaped cave and then there’s giant creatures floating around fighting each other.
Ludovic Chailloleau: The zero gravity fight was a great challenge. I have had some experience in the past with zero gravity in animation, but here we had to imagine titans–big creatures–doing that. One of the challenges was the size of the environment we had to work with, from the ceiling to the ground. We didn’t have that much room. It feels huge when you watch it, but considering their size and the action that we had to do, we always had to stay far away from one side, but not too close to the other. And another thing I was very into was to always create parallax in the camera in whatever we did. Even if it’s a small shot, which looks static, the camera has to be moving a little bit just to show the scale.
Kevin Smith: I love the shot where in the zero gravity fight where you’re about to have that moment with all four jumping each other and you’ve just got a three-quarter shot of Skar King riding on Shimo coming at camera. I love that animation. It’s so panther-like, feline, graceful. It’s very cool.
Ludovic Chailloleau: We also had those rocks that were floating around, which were part of the basic fight vocabulary for this sequence. It was about how to use these rocks, how to bounce out of it, how to throw them, how to break them. We used these rocks a lot to try to establish connection between the shots and to keep the flow going on between all the shots across the whole sequence in the blocking stage, because everything was really keyframed.
Stephen Tong: I think Ludo and his team did a great job. It’s not only the character animation but also how the camera drifts and moves in space while in zero-g as well. On top of that we tried to get a lot more dressing in the air, and then we have also the fur having a bit of drift on it as well to sell the zero-g effects.
That killer shot of Godzilla and Kong running together
Kevin Smith: I love that shot. Even after the show was delivered, we did so many versions of that shot for marketing. The shot was ZG-1600 and the clients would say, ‘Can we get this? Can we get that?’ Marketing would say, ‘We want just the monsters, but we want the background for here, and we need this for this ad, and this for this billboard etc.’
Ludovic Chailloleau: This was a very challenging one in several ways. Godzilla is a swimming creature, so we tried to play with the arms to really give the feeling that whatever he was doing, it takes time for him and he’s using the momentum of what he’s doing to keep it moving and he has the tail behind to balance out. This run was basically a lizard going from the profile with head forward, using his arms to pull his weight first, compensating with the tail. It was not like a T-Rex which is always horizontal. Considering the big thick legs that he has in his design, that was a challenge.
Kevin Smith: We dropped the camera because while we usually treated the creatures like actors, here we use a more human scale camera to sell the crazy size of the titans and give that shot some extra oomph.
Ludovic Chailloleau: I was really pleased with the team to see the reaction of people once the trailer went out because it was hilarious to see all those different schools of thought. People would say, ‘No, not running like this, it should be like this.’ The fact is, we’ve never seen Godzilla running before and that was a challenge to find out.
