Ultimately, Godzilla ended up with three rows of fins and four digits on each paw, just like the original, and Toho finally gave its blessing to Emmerich and Devlin's project. "They said, 'Yes, the character looks different, but we can sense Godzilla within,'" Tatopoulous beams. "Having the chance to rework this character that I saw when I was ten years old for the people who created it was really the most rewarding part of the show."
Soon a talented team of sculptors, fabricators and mechanical wizards were feverishly translating Tatopoulous' original design into flesh, or rather, latex rubber, at the creature creator's shop, Tatopoulous Designs Inc. "At that point, the next step was to get something bigger toward creating the real scale," Tatopoulous explains. "We made a body cast of the actor we planned to have inside the suit, then started to layout the armature and to sculpt our 1/24 scale creature over that, which was a pretty good scale to start seeing everything. In fact, the 1/24 scale had enough detail that I believe we could almost have been able to shoot just that in pieces for the whole movie."
Once the sculpture was completed and molded, Tatopoulous crew cast the three 1/24 scale Godzilla suits out of relatively thin foam latex. The foam latex skins were then laid over an understructure constructed of dense foam rubber and bungee-cords by the film's costume supervisor, Marini Canaga, which created a believable sense of muscles sliding under skin. "That was definitely Marini's concept, and she did an amazing job of foam construction," Tatopoulous says admiringly. "I didn't want to go too thick with the foam latex skin because the thicker it is, the more it shrinks, plus some of my guys had worked with Stan Winston on Jurassic Park and they told me there were some issues with the foam when they cast it thick. So our foam latex skins ranged from 1" to 2" thick, and they slid on top of the foam and bungee-cord understructure so the distortion of the foam underneath translated to the skin outside, which gave us great deformation of the skin."
Because Godzilla's legs have a decidedly non-human shape with three joints instead of two, the creature crew devised leg extensions that enabled the actor to actually walk in the suit while carrying its full weight, including the fully mechanized head, which was mounted on an extension of its own. "The bulk of Godzilla's head was actually sitting on a helmet worn on the actor's head," Tatopoulous reveals. "The actor's head was actually inside the neck of the creature, which meant he didn't have such great vision; we had to make very small eye slits in-between the scales because anything we did would read on film. He also had a monitor inside the suit to help locate himself within the set. But having Godzilla's head perched on top of the actor's skull enabled us to fully articulate the creature's head. It had a very large range of movement - full rotation, up-down, right-left plus tilt - because there was nothing to interfere with it. The only limitations occurred when Godzilla looked down with its mouth open wide, then its lower jaw would hit the helmet inside the neck."
Eight servo motors housed within Godzilla's fiberglass skull controlled the nostrils, the eye, eyelid and translucent membrane movements, plus the articulation of the tongue. "Because it's a lizard, it didn't have lip and eyebrow movement," Tatopoulous explains, "so all of the creature's expressions and character were actually translated by the head movement and the shoulders and the body. Because we didn't have those big usual expressions, we could concentrate on putting much more detail and much more movement into the rest."
Paranoia does not begin to describe Emmerich and Devlin's attitude towards their re-styled star: the big lizard was Top Secret.
Reluctantly, Tatopoulous flew a disassembled casting of the 1/24 scale man-in-suit creature to Utah where it was cyberscanned by Viewpoint Data Labs for use in the digital realm. Rumors spread that the production was so nervous about Godzilla getting out that bits and pieces were scanned by various companies, so no one but the filmmakers would know exactly what it looked like. Not true. "That would have been nice," Tatopoulous admits. But impractical. "Since we scanned the 1/24th scale suit into the computer, we were completely in sync with the CG, there was no difference at all. We knew whatever we showed up with on set would exactly match the CG creature."
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