A split shot of Skar King before and after VFX in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
The Big Picture Movies have a long history of transporting the viewer to new worlds and fantastical settings, and as filmmaking evolves, the art of VFX has a massive role to play in our favorite form of escapism. From Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire to Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, one of the effects teams behind the biggest VFX-heavy movies dominating the box office right now are the folks at Wētā FX.
SMITH: For us, mostly it starts with the clients. The clients generally have done a lot of work with pre-vis and storyboards and art and ideas before it gets to us. These are clients that I've worked with before, as far as the director, because we worked on Godzilla vs. Kong, the first one.
Creating New Characters for 'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire' From Scratch Close So with this process, you created a lot of these characters from scratch, and we'll dive into those characters more in a minute, but I do want to hear about the process of aging up Kong, because he really does feel like the main character in this one. So, how did that process go about?
When we were into the facial land, we started to think about a distinction to have for each of the characters, so they have different ways to act with the face. One of the things which is very key for Kong is Kong is a brute force, very central, when he's doing things, there is no asymmetry in his face. There is no motion in the mouth. He's not giving some gimmick. He's a solitary dude. He doesn't have to make people laugh.
SMITH: I'm glad you said that because that's my favorite. That's one of the things I'm most proud of because it was very difficult. When the clients first turned over the art for that, they had actually done a digital maquette, so they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted the shape to be. Generally, with something like that, the first thing we have to do is do the first pass at redoing it so that the creature can work biomechanically.
Nice. Another favorite new character that I think everybody is gonna love is the little mini Kong, Suko. He's just so cute. Can you talk about the design for that character, and did you pull any inspiration from other adorable little creatures in pop culture or anything like that? How Wētā Got Away With That Crazy Kong vs. Suko Fight Sequence With that one, did you work on that initial fight sequence when Kong first meets that character?And he swings him around. I was wondering about the process of swinging another character with that character. That was very impressive.
So with Skar King, with that character in particular I felt like I could see an actor in that role because it's got so much menace and gravitas and intention to it, more than just instinct for the other characters. What was it like to animate that character, and were you inspired by any particular acting performances for creating that?
Related Adam Wingard's MonsterVerse Movies Pay Homage to a Specific Kaiju Era 'Godzilla vs Kong' and 'Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire' were both clearly inspired by one of the most iconic periods of Godzilla films. Making Hollow Earth Look Both Familiar and Otherworldly Close So a lot of this movie takes place in Hollow Earth, which is obviously not a real place.
With that lake environment that you mentioned, I noticed in the brief that you guys were able to use some of the water technology from Avatar. Can you talk about that tech and like how you applied it in this movie? So one of the first things we did was on all those scenes with the water, had to crank gravity down and try to wrangle the new SIM technology to get the water to kind of do an interesting controllable thing, even though the forces and the speeds of all the things that were happening were crazy. So there's a lot of a little – it ended up being a very…more artistic than technical for them to get all the SIMS right.
Plus we have the weapons, you know, Skar King uses a whip in the Zero-G to bring the arms, you know, come closer. So there are a lot of physics things which has to be artistically driven because we could not make them right with the real numbers, real things.
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