How The Third Floor helped craft the film’s craziest sequences.
These days, visualization studio The Third Floor brings a wealth of experience and a range of tools to the table to help filmmakers previs their projects.
On director Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, The Third Floor relied on such tools as Unreal Engine, motion capture and its Cyclops AR simulcam tool to help imagine large creatures–and sometimes massive fights between them–within Hollow Earth and on the surface.
Working directly with Wingard and with visual effects supervisor Alessandro Ongaro (Ale) was visualization supervisor Jeremy Munro.
Here, Munro runs down some of the big scenes previs’d by The Third Floor for the film, plus the overall philosophy in terms of camera placement and emotion of the scenes and characters.
b&a: When you’ve got such a big project ahead of you, like Godzilla x Kong, I’m really curious about where you start as a previs company. How do you start that process of building environments but also characters at previs level?
Jeremy Munro: We’re fortunate on this one because The Third Floor has worked on all of the Monsterverse movies, which means we were actually able to inherit some assets. The client was kind enough to share final assets from other previous movies, too.
Within a matter of weeks we were really up and running. The first sequence we really jumped on was the opening sequence. Joshua Wassung, who is one of the founders here at Third Floor, he always talks about: what sequence in a movie might be the director’s calling card? For Adam, that opening was the calling card. It was to show executives and everyone on board, here’s the tone of the film. Here’s how we can do a five to six minute sequence with no dialogue and no people.
We started by reviewing storyboards by Richard Bennett, with Adam. That was the jumping off point for most of the sequences. We’d cut an animatic or work off of one Adam had made. We’d discuss the most important story beats or angles that Adam really loved. Then we would move onto previs where we’d discover with Ale and Adam where moments needed to be bigger or removed for clarity.
Adam and Ale were great about working with Gamis to start. Gamis are rudimentary geometric versions of characters with no detail. This let us focus on movement of characters and cameras without getting lost in animation notes. It really helps force us to find the right sequence of camera angles to best tell the story. Once things are moving, that perfect framing doesn’t always work when this pack of Wart-dogs are running past camera. Also, scale’s been a big thing people talk about with this movie. We really tried to work on scale as best as possible and get the cameras lower than we normally would in other films.
b&a: You mention camera placement. These characters are so tall. How do you translate what a normal cinematographer would do or where a normal camera would be to something where there’s titans? How did you talk about that with Adam and Alessandro about where your virtual camera would be placed?
Jeremy Munro: Adam said, when we’re on the surface level, we want it to be a lot more like the classic Godzilla stuff. For Hollow Earth, it’s Kong and Godzilla’s story. It’s with their perspective. When we’re in a sequence like the arena against Skar King, they can move as fast as regular monkeys. We’re from Kong’s perspective, so Kong should be able to move the way he feels he’s moving, not the way we feel he’s moving.
But then we were also working in one-tenth scale. We shrunk some of our six-foot generic people down to one-tenth scale. We shrunk some tree assets down. There are some trees in the world that are 300 feet tall, but most trees are 30 to 50 feet tall so we’d get some of those in there. That would help us frame things, at least in the early stages.
b&a: One of the scenes is where Kong fights Suko in amongst the cloudy, misty area when they first encounter each other. Alessando was mentioning to me there wasn’t necessarily much in the script about that, and you really had to find a lot of the beats yourselves as you were working through that in previs. Tell me about that sequence and building it up. Of course, one of the coolest moments in that is when Kong uses Suko as a bit of a weapon.
Jeremy Munro: Yeah, monkey nunchucks [laughs]. This is a part of the iterative process of previs that’s so important. We did a whole pass of that fight sequence. The first part where Kong meets Suko, that’s all in boards. Adam really had a lot of vision for that.
We blocked this fight out and I think Adam said, ‘It’s just not the intense feel.’ Alessandro went back to the drawing board and we found some examples of fights. We then used some of that film language and intensity of references to help us get there. We’re always cutting out frames or speeding things up after we do a pass to find the right pacing.
b&a: The other scene that stood out was the zero-G battle because that’s an opportunity to do something crazy with Titans in weightlessness, which is an unusual thing to begin with. From a previs point of view, what were the challenges there for you guys to stage that one?
Jeremy Munro: As the previs team, we’re always concerned with maintaining consistency and screen direction. It’s not fun when people watch a movie and then they go, ‘I didn’t know what was happening during the fight scene. I just got totally lost.’
The cameras were really fun to explore. We’ll do camera rigs sometimes, and we have a classic one we used here where you can just avoid gimbal lock, but get a spinning feel.
Godzilla was also a big question because there’s really specific ways in which he moves. This idea of him swimming in zero-G is so cool, but I know it took a number of iterations to really find what that feels like–to have weight, but swim through air and also wreck some apes along the way.
b&a: The other one that I wanted to ask you about is the Rio fight, because I guess that brings us back a bit more to the real world and dealing with destruction and buildings. What were the challenges in staging and choreographing that fight, especially to include destruction work?
Jeremy Munro: For the destruction, we looked at Rio, we built out some models. Rio’s just huge. It’s flatter than you would normally pick for a Godzilla film, but the hills make it great and it’s beautiful. We looked for areas and we discussed with Alessandro where they were going to go on shoots, and we looked at Google Earth to find the locations that they were going to want to film. We built out destruction areas, so we were able to knock down an area of town, but leave other buildings nearby up just for scale reference and then vice versa if needed.
Ale used Cyclops on location to help explore possible camera angles for dynamic shots on the ground. Cyclops is our in-house AR tool that allows clients to place their models in the real world to the correct scale in whatever location they are in.
b&a: Did you use some mocap tools to capture some action?
Jeremy Munro: We used mocap more for some of the subtler moments, like Kong’s shower in the first sequence. That was really helpful, because it’s a short shot. For a lot of the apes working in the arena, we used mocap on our end for that. We have a mocap stage here where we use an Xsens MVN suit. For the fights, to really sell the ideas and get the cameras just right, that requires a lot of keyframe animation.
b&a: What was one sequence that was particularly challenging that you were really happy with, or one that you didn’t think would be really tricky but ended up being?
Jeremy Munro: The dinner sequence between Kong and Suko, even though it doesn’t look like we did a lot, it was a challenge. It’s locked-off cameras, but we did so many passes to help find that emotion. We would talk so much about how Kong doesn’t overly show emotion. He doesn’t smile at Suko or tell him it’s okay. It was important for Adam to find just the right amount to show him beginning to trust Suko and beginning to bond. But you don’t want to overdo it. I really feel like the cameras tell half the story.
