Plus, crafting Wart-Dogs, Kong’s arm brace and that Rio fight.
Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire contains a wealth of stunning sequences.
All this week at befores & afters, we’ll be diving into different shots and scenes crafted by several of the vendors on the film.
We start with Scanline VFX, which took on many huge moments, including the introduction cold open scene with Kong and the Wart-Dogs, Kong’s confrontation with Godzilla in Cairo and the final huge Rio battle.
Here, visual effects supervisor Nick Crew and animation supervisor Eric Petey break those particular scenes down for befores & afters.
b&a: For the Wart-Dogs, can you talk about the kinds of references and influences you had in building those and doing movement tests with them? What helped you stage the fight scene?
Nick Crew: The intro sequence turnover included previs that overall VFX supervisor Alessandro Ongaro (Ale) and director Adam Wingard were already relatively happy with, which is always a great starting point. Additionally, the Wart-Dog creatures themselves had some initial Art Department sketches which were used as a jumping off point for us to refine and flesh out to fit tonally into the scene. This process saw the creatures evolve into the more diseased, gnarly, and repulsive creatures seen in the film. Our internal art director / concept artist Nick Lloyd was critical in this process, drawing off of features from hyenas with cataracts, eagle talons for their claws, diseased water buffalo hides for their coats, and sickly wild dogs for some of the scaring. Eric, Bill and their animation team did a fantastic job at taking this design to the next level with their animation design.
Eric Petey: In order to bring the right quality of motion, and level of menace to the Wart-Dogs, our animation supervisor Bill Bridges and I focused first on the Wart-Dog running style which would be used in the pursuit of Kong. References of wolves and African wild dogs, and to some degree Hyenas, gave us a great starting point to pull from. The Wart-Dogs have very powerful and pronounced shoulders and heavy collar areas which allowed us to dial in a touch of the bounding, powerful style of the large cats. Once they had cornered Kong, and we are able to get a better look at the Wart-Dogs – nasty, gnarly and frankly a little disgusting – it was an opportunity to give them more of the twitchy, unpredictable energy of a hyena. That stylistic influence also worked quite well for when they are finally frightened off by Kong.
b&a: What did you find were the toughest things to solve in that Kong v Wart Dogs fight, or other things that were tricky to pull off?
Nick Crew: There were numerous creative and technical hurdles with the intro sequence, especially as it was the first sequence to be turned over and explored by Scanline on the project. From an environmental perspective, there were always several contributing factors to balance as we designed the world. These included balancing story beats and tone, grounding the design with real world Icelandic reference, justifying the lighting of the scene without the use of sunlight, and trying to consistently respect the mammoth scale. Balancing these was a huge creative endeavor that was both challenging and really rewarding to execute.
From a technical standpoint, I would say the biggest requirements were in creature design, creature FX, and the FX interaction with our creatures. Since everything in this cold open was computer generated, it was a huge team effort to make each shot as photo realistic as possible. One of the most demanding shots in the sequence was where one of our Wart-Dogs is torn apart by Kong. This specific gag, even though it isn’t a lot of screen time, required quite a bit of back and forth between assets, rigging, animation, and FX. To Achieve that extra level of realism, our existing muscle system and fat layer was further developed with internal organs, allowing us to simulate a more realistic event.
b&a: Can you take me through the design of Kong’s Arm Brace— what kinds of considerations were there in how it would fit on him and operate?
Nick Crew: The Arm Brace build came with a few major challenges, mostly related to technical functionality and character performance. Attaching such a large metal plate structure to something that moves as independently and multi-directionally as a hand and forearm created multiple rigging and asset design obstacles that had to be diagnosed and addressed. To help find solutions, we again turned to our art director/concept artist Nick Lloyd to do some initial sculpt and articulation explorations, helping us to create an initial workable design.
In addition to baseline functionality, we needed to explore how the brace could augment Kong’s power, not just brace an injured arm. The asset team in partnership with rigging and animation took Nick’s initial concept model, and did a fantastic job of further detailing the brace out, designing additional interlocking mechanisms as Kong would go into attack mode, in the Pyramid FIght and Rio Battle. The icing on the cake were the additional FX components that were added along the way during shot production, including electrical discharges as well as hydraulic steam events that further amped up the power of the brace.
b&a: For the pyramid fight, there’s such a great shot of Godzilla rugby tackling Kong against a pyramid – can you go into that shot a little and talk about the creature work, animation and ultimate environment build and destruction work?
Eric Petey: As much fun as it would have been to slam into each other, and makeshift pyramids with mocap suits on – this shot definitely needed to be keyframe animated. There is, of course, plenty of references of big athletes crashing into each other to be found – and this was very helpful. There was an additional interesting challenge due to the fact that animation work started on this shot before the pyramid assets were fully complete. As a result we were animating without being able to simulate and see the result of the Titans impacting. Extra care and attention was needed to take into account the speed, trajectory, and pose changes which would result from the pyramid being there, but giving way to the Titans’ force.
Nick Crew: From the outset, we tried to be as accurate to our real-world locations as possible. Early on, our DFX supervisor Jono Friesler and CG supervisor Amir Eleswy took special care to make sure our teams constrained our layouts, and asset builds to real world scale and distances. We also double checked this by creating jump-cameras from real world reference that we lined up with digital cameras to our own digital world. This afforded us the ability to really cross compare our builds to the real thing, and add in all those fine details that helped us sell the photorealism of the environment.
From an FX standpoint, this scene was both challenging, and a lot of fun to execute. From the start of the sequence of Kong emerging from underground, Godzilla swimming up the Nile and crashing through the bridges, all the way through to the massive destruction events around the pyramids, there was a ton for the team to sink their teeth into. One of the major challenges had to do with scale and dynamics, as the desire from Adam was for the titans to move quite fast, keeping the action beats lively during the sequence. Since this was kind of a cheat (laws of physics would force the titans to move slower to a human eye), it was a constant back and forth of keeping the editorial beats quick and action-packed, while still trying to convey a believable sense of scale in our simulations.
b&a: Tell me about the Rio build. What kind of live action could be filmed for that fight? What kind of VFX reference/assets did you receive or capture yourselves? What was involved in building up an area of the city, and rigging it for destruction?
Nick Crew: Initial planning for Rio also began with previz, but really took shape during the production’s visit to Rio. I joined the shoot to help with VFX Supervision, as Ale stepped in as Unit Director for this shoot and had lots of items to attend to. In addition to the plate shoot, we in parallel had a still unit gathering additional vantage points of Rio as well as a scanning company named NV5 capturing some amazing aerial LiDAR and incredibly high-resolution stills. These materials, along with some amazing aerial photography that Ale shot, gave us some great building blocks for our digital environment build.
In addition to the copious set data, the environment team prepared tons of reference pages, studying available photography and other online material. With all of this reference, we then began building a catalog of assets to help in the build including commonly seen vegetation, Rio specific street props, beach tents and furniture, traffic lights, and so much more. This material was then ready to be scattered carefully into the city builds to help give the real feeling of the streets of Rio on top of our larger city block build.
On the Scanline side, CG supervisor Amir Eleswy was critical to this environment build. In addition to the sheer scale of the build, one of the most difficult requirements had to do with the destructibility AND destruction history of the city. Amir kept a very organized map and written plan to where each shot took place, and the level of destruction needed – this then informed the detail level and asset variations that needed to be built. Since virtually everything had to be rigged for dynamics in the FG and MG, it really ended up being one of the most intricate builds I’ve ever taken part in.
b&a: For the character battles through Rio buildings, what kind of approach to animation did Scanline undertake here? Was there any particular previs/stuntvis/mocap you looked to and used? How did you determine key fighting moments/poses for different Titans?
Eric Petey: The Rio de Janeiro final battle sequence wasn’t just the film’s climax – it also represented the culmination of everything we’d been doing animation wise on the film leading up until then. We started, as most sequences do, with a previs edit – In this case it gave us excellent direction to evolve the shots from, and explore new ideas from Alessandro. It was quite easy to identify which shots we’d be able to shoot performance capture for – nobody wants to have their face dragged across the ground, or be thrown through a wall. With that sorted we began working on the non-capturable shots using everything we’d learned about the posing style, and personalities of Kong, Zilla, Shimo, Suko, and the Skar King from previous sequences. It was the first time we were seeing Shimo, and the Skar Kong outside of Hollow Earth, so we needed to be especially aware of their scale vs the buildings and people, making sure they felt large without being too slow.
The performance capture process presented a few challenges, one being that it takes place in a city with many skyscrapers which we wouldn’t be able to replicate perfectly in the capture process. Much of the building interaction in motion captured shots needed to be added by the animators at a later stage. For some shots it was possible to set up padded rigs to throw ourselves against, rewarding when you see the result – but punishing after the shoot. Apes always present a challenge to capture because their proportions are different from ours, particularly their long arms. The Skar King’s almost spider-like arms presented an even bigger complication as we needed to shoot the Skar King choking and wrestling with Kong with two actors. Our solution was to perform to the real-time output of the motion capture rigs – doing what “looked correct” rather than attempting to fix everything later in the process.
b&a: What were some of the big challenges here of selling scale in the Rio battle? In terms of character movement, but also including for destruction work?
Nick Crew: As we did in the Pyramid Fight, our primary scale issue was maintaining the fast-paced action that was desired by the editorial beats, while still trying to respect the scale of our titans using the physics of our simulations. Things ended up getting designed based off of shot type, angle, and editorial beat to create the most satisfying shots while still conveying the scale of the battle unfolding.
Eric Petey: For animation the biggest challenges in selling the Titan scale in Rio mostly involved speed. The speed at which the Titans were moving, and fighting, in hollow earth is technically quite fast for their enormous size – but since everything in hollow earth is so large, and surreal, the thinking was that the audience is experiencing things at something closer to their scale. Once the battle moved to the surface, and the Titans were battling alongside skyscrapers, beaches, and other things which the audience would be familiar with – we needed to be careful to slow them down enough in key moments. That approach also applied to the camera animation, which was calmed down, and tended to favor lower angles to help sell their size.
