[Los Angeles Times] How VFX updates take Godzilla back to its nuclear roots

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2024-02-06/creative-vfx-sees-godzilla-get-even-scarier-in-minus-one

How VFX updates take Godzilla back to its nuclear roots

By Bob Strauss
Feb. 6, 2024 4:30 AM PT


“Godzilla: Minus One’s” Takashi Yamazaki is the first feature director 
to be nominated for a visual effects Academy Award since Stanley Kubrick 
in 1969. That was for the medium-changing “2001: A Space Odyssey,” 
something the 59-year-old Japanese filmmaker is abashedly aware of.

“Thank you so much for even mentioning it,” a blushing Yamazaki says 
through an interpreter on a Zoom interview from his single-floor Tokyo 
CG studio, where a 35-person crew made Japan’s 70-year-old king of kaiju 
monsters look better than ever. “I don’t think I can really process that 
right now. I definitely can’t get carried away!”

Yamazaki definitely has a knack for self-control. “Minus One’s” rich, 
gorgeous visual effects, seen in two-thirds of the unusually emotional, 
38th Godzilla movie, cost between a quarter and a third of the film’s 
bargain-basement budget (less than $15 million). There were no limits to 
his formal ambitions, though. Set primarily two years after World War II 
in devastated Tokyo and the nearby Pacific, “Minus One” indulges lavish 
recreations of 1940s cityscapes in various stages of repair (which are 
again, of course, soon demolished), spectacles at and under the sea of 
the giant, radioactive lizard battling flotillas of warships, and the 
most persuasively beastial Godzilla ever filmed.

“We wanted to make Godzilla very, very cool for this film,” says 
Yamazaki, who after much trial and error utilized aesthetics his team 
employed for the “Godzilla: The Ride” attraction at Japan’s Seibuen 
Amusement Park. “The head is on the smaller side, the legs are very 
thick. When the feet are stomping on the ground, you can almost see the 
toes being raised, like a wild animal’s. And we wanted impact for the 
audience, so there’s an intense level of getting up close, personal and 
detailed, that you can’t really do with a man in a suit.”

Yamazaki refers to Toho Studios’ original method of filming Godzilla 
rampages in 1954. But his movie’s creaturific particulars surpass those 
of Legendary Entertainment’s nine-figure Monsterverse adaptations as well.

“In terms of polygon counts, we’re talking millions that went into 
creating Godzilla this time,” says Yamazaki, who did initial drawings 
and sculpture software models that were then refined by artist Kosuke 
Taguchi with optimized computer graphics data. “In terms of the skin 
texture, there was a dinosaur origin, but when it’s wounded, a 
regeneration happens and there’s a different texture, like you would see 
on any wound. We wanted a mix, brought in new layers that would make the 
look very unique.”

Also distinctive is how the monster’s super-spikey dorsal fins realign 
and emit blue radiation light as he fires up his devastating heat ray.

“We wanted to go back to the original reason for Godzilla’s existence,” 
Yamazaki explains. “The creature is a metaphor for nuclear weapons, so 
we mimicked the way a weapon would work inside of his body. Each element 
would come together and create an implosion, and that’s when the blue 
rays would come out.”

Since Godzilla grew out of Japan’s atomic bombing trauma, his 
destruction of Tokyo’s Ginza district and assorted ships culminate in 
terrible — but gorgeous — mushroom clouds. Trouble was, the look 
Yamazaki craved was too big to simulate in CG. An old-fashioned 
technique saved the day for the otherwise computer-generated spectacle.

“We had a matte artist who did 2-D that had a little bit of movement,” 
the director says. “Once we found that that switch was actually working, 
we were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, we spent so much time with CG that couldn’t 
get it, but now we have this really cool trick to get the mushroom 
clouds in there!’”