When it came to the kaiju quotient, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters leveled up big-time for its sophomore season.
While Godzilla is back, much of Season 2 is set on Kong’s home turf of Skull Island, teeming with all sorts of familiar creatures from the MonsterVerse films as well as some brand-new beasties, from the smaller scarabs to the towering Titan X.
Three members of Monarch‘s Emmy-nominated visual effects team — VFX producer Elizabeth Williaman, VFX supervisor Bryan Hirota, and additional VFX supervisor Jeremy Burns — joined Gold Derby to break down the Season 2 bestiary. Watch the full interview above and see the VFX reel they submitted to the Television Academy below.
Gold Derby: Let’s talk about Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. It’s really wild how you put all of these cinema-quality effects into a television show. How do you take what was established on screen in the MonsterVerse films and bring it to the show.
Bryan Hirota: I’ll start. As far as bridging from what’s done in the features into the show — our company had worked on Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. So part of getting onto the show was what to do about Kong, because Kong plays a big part in this show. We’ve done a couple of features with Kong, and given the specific timeline this show takes place in, you kind of track Kong’s evolution throughout the show — because this show takes place before Godzilla vs. Kong, but after Kong: Skull Island. As a company, you develop new technology for how to deal with the creatures, and the assets change over time.
So one of the challenges we ran into at the beginning was that we wanted to use all of the advances we’d made in the muscle systems and the character rigging for the animators on Kong, but give the appearance of a younger Kong. And every director tweaks things. By The New Empire, Kong’s skull shape was different — his proportions were slightly different. So we went through a series of versions: full New Empire Kong, but at the appropriate scale for the show, versus reverting all of the physical changes. That’s where we ended up, because the desire was a specific look, a specific aging in the groom, and the lack of grayness in Kong’s beard. We found a way to retrofit the modern animation and muscle systems of Kong but give the retro look.
It was a similar process, but less involved, for Godzilla, because Godzilla plays a smaller role in this. We were talking about Legendary’s curation of the lore, and Godzilla is very different — I mean, it really depends on who you’re talking to. Talk to a guy on Twitter, and it’s a huge difference. So again, it’s slotting in where in the Legendary MonsterVerse timeline this Godzilla exists — finding that Godzilla and appropriately using the one that people want.
Elizabeth Willaman: It was really important for [everyone] to keep the lore as authentic as possible in the timeline of the show, being that it was in a little bit of a weird spot. But since we were introducing another creature — another titan, in fact, in addition to other individual creatures — keeping those creatures intact with the same vibe, shall we say, of the lore was also really important.
Hirota: As far as the streaming show versus the features, the standard we set out to do was the same. We set out to make, I don’t know, a four- or five-hour-long movie —
Willaman: Essentially a 10-hour-long movie — about an hour each.
Gold Derby: You have these two headliners in Godzilla and Kong — but they don’t meet until a different time, in a different movie. There are a lot of other monsters in the show. Do you each have favorites?
Willaman: I loved the scarabs.
Jeremy Burns: The scarabs are very fun. Especially en masse. They’re cute when they’re by themselves, but then a whole herd of them, and you’re terrified.
Hirota: That’s why they kind of serve two purposes, right? You have the cute singular one, and then you have the hive version of them.
Willaman: I really like the vine strangler, which I don’t think we had a chance to give quite as much time. So I’m hopeful that in the future, whatever may happen, there will be a vine strangler involved in a more detailed kind of situation.
Hirota: The stuff on Skull Island — I was primarily dealing with Titan X and its interaction with Kong. I was unaware of a lot of these smaller creatures that showed up on Skull Island. So when I was watching the show, I liked seeing the flora and the fauna of Skull Island fleshed out. It was fun for me as a viewer, because I wasn’t involved in that.
Gold Derby: There’s a new big bad, Titan X. How did you go about creating that character?
Hirota: When [the producers] came to us for Titan X, there was artwork and there was a sculpt that broadly people were happy with. They said, “We think this is more or less the creature we like,” but the specifics weren’t fleshed out. No one knew how she would move. There were a lot of concerns that it would be too much like an octopus. So straight away, when we got the sculpt, we started doing motion tests and sending them back of Titan X moving on land and moving in water, so that [the produers] could look at them and give us feedback, and run it up the chain to see what people thought.
We got pretty in depth in the motion studies and the look dev — how do the tentacles look, how does this Portuguese man o’ war sac on the back react to light? And we were able to do all this while you guys were in production. One thing I think we were able to achieve, which is kind of hard to do — we got some shots approved before you wrapped. We got one or two Titan X shots done, because it was such a focus. We knew she had to carry such a heavy burden of the show and stand up to these iconic, established Titans that were already out there. Because that was so important, we really poured a lot of effort into it early on.
Willaman: We started concept art in pre-production with Wētā, way before we even started shooting. So we were getting that character idea, and it went through a bunch of different iterations. Some were pretty funny — trying to focus on the fact that it should honor the man in a suit, kind of thing — and then obviously moving away from that, because it didn’t feel right or work right, and finally ending up with the titan that we got.
Gold Derby: Now that you can step back and watch as a fan, what’s the one scene that really made you think, “Wow, I did that”?
Burns: For me, it’s Episode 10, Keiko’s car chase — trying to get Kate through Titan X, through two titans.
Willaman: That was a huge accomplishment, because the practical versus what you guys actually had to deal with when you were trying to put it all together — it was truly a collaborative effort.
Hirota: And to animate this long fight sequence, and have all the continuity of all the hits and reactions — when we first got the turnover and were talking about it with you guys on the phone, it was like, “This is really long. It’s a lot of driving.” But by the time I’m in it, I’m like, “Oh, this is fun.” At first it just seemed daunting and eternal.
Willaman: It’s different when you have the plates they shot in Thailand of Keiko driving, with the special effects exploding next to her, and nothing else. Because the titans are so big, it’s such a wide shot — it’s this tiny little car, and it doesn’t really help until Bryan gets involved and starts to come up with the actual effect. Because you watch that version and you’re like, “Are we sure this is what we’re doing with the show?”
Hirota: Yeah, exactly.
This interview was edited for clarity. This article and video are presented by Apple TV.
