How Titan X was designed for season 2 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. An excerpt from issue #64 of befores & afters magazine.
Called ‘Co-Cai’ by villagers of Santa Soledad, which worship the creature, Titan X is an aquatic Titan. “There haven’t been a ton of aquatic creatures in the Monsterverse,” notes visual effects supervisor Sean Konrad, “apart from a couple of notable ones, of course, but we felt like we really wanted to do something with that modality. We liked the idea of tentacles being able to come out of the depth and grab a ship and all of these kinds of storytelling beats that could come from that.”
“And so,” adds Konrad, “I pitched to showrunner Chris Black this idea of a Portuguese man o’ war being the basis of the silhouette and shape of the creature. And he was like, ‘You know what? The most pain I’ve ever experienced in my life was from a Portuguese man o’ war sting!’ So he’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s play around with it.’
Initial concepts were handled by Wētā, with further design refinements done by Framestore. “Originally,” says Konrad, “we had this idea of, what if Toho had designed a giant jellyfish monster of a guy in a suit and then we would take that back into something that’s more grounded in the Monsterverse logic. Our original idea was something that walked upright, that had almost a little bit of a bipedal or quadrupedal stance, but tall on its center of gravity. In the end, it didn’t feel like it fit within the Monsterverse’s framework. So we ended up slowly lowering the center of gravity, lowering it until it became more like when you imagine an octopus walking on land. Once we got into that iteration cycle, things came together pretty quickly. Ultimately we wanted it to feel like it’s more suited to the water than it is to the land, but still be able to navigate in an interesting way.”
Another aspect of the Titan X design came from a desire to mirror the relationship between Keiko (Mari Yamamoto) and her son. “One of the early notes from Legendary was, ‘How could you potentially pivot the design of this so that we added a little bit of femininity into it or some sort of indication of motherhood?’ Initially, I bristled at the note, but then I read a PhD dissertation by Gaëlle King on the creative design of the Alien movies and the way that the Xenomorph is a giant phallus and the metaphor of that being a way to talk about patriarchy without being super explicit about that within the text. Then, in Aliens, Jim Cameron conceived of the Queen, reducing the phallicness of the face and then creating these crown-like structures coming off the top of it. I wanted to do something as subtle as that, where you only really understand it once you see Titan X with an egg.”
The result was that the VFX team gave Titan X a crown-like flourish and, somewhat by accident, even eyelash-like appendages coming off the eyes. “That was all we really wanted to do in terms of that note of hearkening towards some aspect of femininity,” says Konrad. “I mean, it’s a monster. It shouldn’t be too personified within human cultural norms, but we were able to lean into some of those things.”
For Titan X’s nest, inspiration came from shooting in Australia. The sandstone monolith Uluru became one source of reference, for example, shares Konrad. “We said, what if this thing lived in a huge termite hill? There are all these really cool termite hills that have similar structures to those wild Australian ancient mountains. That became a lot of that design.”
The Titan X asset was developed at EYELINE. “We were fortunate to get involved with developing the Titan X asset early on,” discusses EYELINE visual effects supervisor Bryan Hirota. “This gave us the opportunity to build out the model and present look development and motion/behavioral studies during production so that by the time the show entered post-production we were able to start putting her into shots straight away.”
“Rigging relied on a sophisticated sculpt/skin setup and the Facial Action Coding System (FACS),” states Hirota. “Fine detail, high-frequency wrinkle and muscle movements were driven by animated displacement and tension maps. For creature effects (CFX), after rigorous motion studies involving walking, swimming, and combat, the default simulation setups were able to perform successfully 90% of the time during the climax battle with Kong.”
EYELINE produced still frame, jump-cam style renders and turntables that showed off specific details of Titan X. “We would create various in context, still-frame action shots of Titan X engaging in imagined scenarios, to help dial in on the presence that she should have on screen,” adds Hirota. “Chris Mulcaster, digital effects supervisor at EYELINE, and his team did a terrific job of continual development on the asset based on the original sculpts and artwork from production. The final sculpted model resulted in a resolution of roughly 700 million polygons across 300 UDIM tiles, ensuring an unprecedented frequency of surface data. The foundational build was led by Rie Ito, with Yeajin Lee specializing in the intricate tentacle systems.”
Eventually, Titan X received a double-iris design, too, which is something the villagers incorporate into their iconography in worshiping the creature. “There’s a lot of different ways you could interpret the multiple irises from an evolutionary point of view,” suggests Konrad. “Why would you have multiple irises as a genetic construct? Does one eye see within a certain band of light above water and one see a certain band of light below water? We never textually answer those things and we don’t really intend to because I think it’s more fun for the audiences to think about that themselves.”
Hirota describes the double iris design as being a layered system where two individual irises dilated independently, creating a specific ‘polycoria’ effect. “This advanced look was developed from 2D concepts by Nick Lloyd and finalized through collaboration with surfacing supervisor Oscar Sheik.”
Early movement tests of Titan X focused on underwater locomotion (something that was more easily understood) and on land (something that needed further exploration). “EYELINE came up with the notion of using the shoulders as leverages to propel the tentacles forward,” explains Konrad. “As we started seeing this in shot context, we leaned into that a little bit less because it created this adjective response in our executives of feeling too lumbering, too clumsy, and we never wanted her to feel clumsy. We always wanted her to have a little bit of elegance.”
That led the team to treat the tentacles more like a human muscle, that is, outlines Konrad, “where the deltoid raises the bicep and the elbow and then the tricep pushes the forearm that direction. So instead of leading with shoulder and then pushing the arm forward, we imagined it almost like you’re in a fully forward kinematic rig where the hand is actually leading the rest of the musculature and then you start ending up with a process that’s a little bit like Doc Ock’s tentacles where they have an independence to them that any point along the length of the tentacle, there’s a muscle that could be firing that could then control the entire length of it. That was a really fun thing to experiment with and explore.”
EYELINE visual effects supervisor Eric Petey further notes that it was important to make Titan X look dangerous on land. “We didn’t want her to feel like a lumbering blob. The earliest test explored how an eight-tentacled creature might ‘walk’. We landed on somewhat of a hybrid of a quadruped’s walk, and reference of octopuses on land. By treating pairs of tentacles almost like legs with offsets, we were able to give a clear structure, and menacing power to her locomotion. At the same time, by incorporating octopus reference—the way they throw their tentacles forward to pull themselves, while also pushing from behind—we were able to bring a familiar and natural feel to the individual tentacles.”
“Some of the most important early motion tests involved how she would fight,” continues Petey. “Kong had not done battle with a creature like Titan X before, apart from a brief and one-sided encounter with a squid in Kong: Skull Island. We needed to explore how she could provide a new challenge to Kong. The filmmakers were very keen on developing ideas to overwhelm Kong with her tentacles in ways his typical adversaries couldn’t. Early tests consisted of choreographing mini battle vignettes between Kong and Titan X. This helped us find the sweet spot between pedestrian and over the top.”
Rising Sun Pictures was also involved in crafting Titan X shots, including on land and in the ocean. “From early discussions about Titan X with Sean Konrad, while we were shooting, he was centered around maintaining her enormous mass throughout the performances while sustaining agility and explosive movements when required,” details Rising Sun Pictures visual effects supervisor Marc Varisco. “We had a large sequence involving her traversing a Skull Island terrain with full jungle interactions, being led by a CG Chinook with our cast aboard—a mammoth task for the animators when dealing with so many appendages that needed to work in unison, navigating through an uneven environment while going through a range of varying performances. CFX did the final passes giving some gelatinous quality to her overall body mass and tentacles, some subtle jiggle and shake, as well as the complex beard of curly strands coming off her lower jaw.”
For a moment in which Titan X is lured to an old Monarch base using her egg as bait, Rising Sun Pictures was tasked with gassing and immobilizing the creature (here she is fitted with neural transmitters for testing the effectiveness of how they may control her). “The gas sprayers and surrounding environment was replaced with a full CG interactive location using complex FX volume sims all reacting to her thrashing around, until the gas takes effect grounding the massive creature,” says Varisco. “After the transmitters were fitted and were tested, we needed to convey how they react through her body with subdermal pulsing and light FX, adding some subtle distortions in the immediate area, complementing it with CFX high frequency spasms and animated reactions.”
Part of Titan X’s design were the Scarabs, which act as drones to the creature. “They’re related, but they’re not the same subspecies,” points out Konrad. “She probably still gives birth to them through her lifecycle, but what they are physically is different. They have a little bit of a shell, a harder body. They have tentacles and serrated, toothy mouths.”
Formation Effects delivered a practical Scarab build, with Rising Sun Pictures primarily responsible for the digital Scarab visual effects. RSP’s Varisco mentioned this work was a highlight for the studio. “The team embraced the creature and all the complexities that came along with it. We received a concept sculpt with very retracted limbs that needed development on how they would appear at full reach, as well as fit into a run cycle with all the surrounding appendages. Initial crawl and run cycles over varying obstacles were based off cephalopods, but Sean Konrad felt they were a bit too grounded under its weight and we needed them to reach a human jogging pace, so we developed a higher centre of gravity run cycle with the Scarab still using a push/pull method of locomotion.
“Slower moments gave the animators a bit more freedom on how the Scarab navigates its environment and drawing off how a real octopus moves and investigates its surroundings,” adds Varisco. “For our large swarms, the FX team was supplied with various run cycles from animation and they developed a crowd system that made it easy to choreograph a large amount of scarabs shot to shot. They were physically able to traverse terrain and set pieces with correct accelerations and decelerations, combined with some featured foreground performances from the animation team.”
At one point, the character Cate (Anna Sawai) spots a Scarab in the interior hallway of Monarch’s ship, Outpost 18. Says Varisco: “During this lengthy moment we had to have the Scarab approaching upside down crawling along utility pipes. The animation team carefully choreographed the approaching performances using the various pipes to advance along the roof, as well as animating the pipes where they weren’t as strongly supported, flexing the various pipes as certain tentacles grabbed, with weight transferring with every iteration.”
