That wasn't necessarily true for the paint job, however, which was nowhere near the cliché green color audiences associate - however wrongly - with Godzilla. "The original Godzilla [suits] were completely black," Tatopoulous insists, and he ought to know. "When I went to Toho, I saw them live, and they were black, period, no highlights, nothing. Mine feels extremely dark in the movie, that was the idea, but I wanted to give it a richer tone so when we got closer you could see something more. Gino Acevedo, an amazing painter I worked with on ID4, did a terrific job developing the skin of the creature, which is much more natural colored and very detailed: it's dark brown with this pearlescent blue mixed in and some aqua tones, which made it look iridescent and reflective. The tough thing was, when the animators moved the three-dimensional creature around in CG, the blue highlight would appear, disappear, then re-appear, so they had add the blue in later when they were doing compositing."
Tatopoulous Designs Inc. also built a massive 1/6 scale portion of Godzilla from its waist up to the top of its head, which measured a staggering 20' tall when mounted on its hydraulic motion base. The scale was determined by the minimum size necessary to believably crush vehicles. "The creature had to interact specifically with car models and truck models, which he was supposed to bite and crush with his paws," Tatopoulous says. "If they went any smaller on the models, they just wouldn't work, the glass wouldn't read properly and so on. We also used the 1/6 scale Godzilla for shots where the scale of the models would hold well, like breaking through bridges, and for close-ups of the head as it's dying."
Taking another cue from Jurassic Park, Tatopoulous originally planned to cyberscan every part of the 1/24 scale man-in-suit Godzilla, then blow that data up, have the pieces milled out of hard foam and thus reconstruct a highly accurate 1/6 scale creature. Unfortunately, scheduling delays and machine malfunctions forced Tatopoulous to abandon that approach, but not before Godzilla's head was scanned and blown up to 1/6 scale. The rest of the upper torso and arms was recreated by laying a series of photos of the 1/24 scale creature end to end and accurately sculpting the 1/6 scale version in hard yellow four-pound foam, which was then coated and molded. "I thought we would sculpt the foam body minus ", then lay clay over it and sculpt the final detail in that, but my guys got such an incredible texture in the foam that there was no point in trying to lay clay over it," Tatopoulous says. "We even re-textured everything on the cyberscanned cast of the head in foam, because having been blown up from the 1/24 scale model, it wasn't that detailed, but the shapes were all there. Mark Maitre and Dave Grasso, who had great expertise in that type of sculpting on Jurassic Park, did 80 percent of the detail work on the head. We also scanned the teeth and claws, then cast them separately in urethane."
As the sculpture was progressing, Tatopoulous brought in Bob Gurr, an engineer who designed the oversized understructure for the full-sized King Kong attraction at Universal Studios, to create the actual armature for the gigantic hydraulic motion base that would animate the 1/6 scale Godzilla. Gurr worked alongside Tatopoulous' mechanical designer, Dave Kindlon, to ensure everything would go together as planned. Once the design of the understructure/frame was complete, Tatopoulous hired Don Anderson to build the huge armature. When Anderson's task was finished, he met Tatopoulous' crew at the Hughes Aircraft hanger near Marina Del Rey where ID4's effects were shot, and together they applied pre-painted sections of Godzilla skin and mounted the entire creature on the same motion base used to fly the Harrier jet in True Lies. "The motion base gave us Godzilla's bulk forward, backward and sideways movement, and could raise the creature 4' up and down," Tatopoulous reports. "The neck, which was quite long, could raise all the way as well so the creature almost touched the ceiling of the old hanger. The arms were mechanized, it had shoulder movement, rotation on the elbows up to the forearms and wrist motion. The only things we didn't make move were the fingers because we started hitting the limitations of budget. Everything was completely hydraulically operated except for the fine stuff like the eyes, which were controlled by servo motors."
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