As the hordes of Baby ’Zillas move in on their first meal, Godzilla shows up to check on its litter just when our heroes call in an air strike, which levels Madison Square Garden. "You think everything is over, then you hear the famous wail and Godzilla emerges from the bottom of frame," Engle says gleefully. "This is one of the shots I like the most of the ones we did with the 1/24 scale man-in-suit. Godzilla rises out of the remains of the destroyed Madison Square Garden with all this debris on top of him, which he just shakes loose like a dog shaking off water. We shot the 1/24 scale suit against greenscreen and also shot a 1/24 scale Madison Square Garden miniature separately, which worked great. It was easier to do the lighting that way because of how the shot was set up it was a composite anyway. I also like having the freedom to scale up or scale down the creature. A lot of times we used 1/24 scale models and the 24th scale suit, but we'd shrink down the building miniature and enlarge the creature 25 percent because it looked more impressive."
But another situation was brewing over the final showdown between Godzilla and his human antagonists on the Brooklyn Bridge, which of course would be rocking and rolling as the big lizard trampled across. As the enraged monster chases a cab driven by our heroes from the Manhattan side of the bridge to the Brooklyn side, both pursuer and prey are clocking in at 90 mph. The original plan was to shoot the chase using the man-in-suit Godzilla running on a model bridge, but "our early tests didn't look convincing," Engle admits, "so we stopped Cinebar from building the bridge as a whole model."
The new plan was to use the model bridge and a CG Godzilla, but when Goulekas realized just how violently the bridge would be rolling, she knew she could never convincingly lock the digital behemoth to the miniature: "I took one look at that sequence and said, ëWait a minute, if the bridge is just blowing and bending randomly to simulate Godzilla's motion on it, how in the world will we ever get Godzilla's feet to plant on the bridge?' There was no way to track that, unless the bridge and Godzilla were all CG. And so we went with an all CG Bridge and now as Godzilla runs, the bridge rotates and rolls with his feet so there's never a problem."
Apparently self-styled effects auteurs Emmerich and Devlin had never heard of previsualizing a sequence using CG animatics, but Goulekas quickly introduced them to the process. As she had on the Fifth Element, Goulekas created a pipeline whereby the pre-vis animatics could be translated directly into the final animation, as well as a blueprint for the stage shoot.
Despite the fact that the longer, more violent shots of the Brooklyn Bridge were done in CG using a model created by Viewpoint Data Labs and animated with Softimage/3D, Engle and company found plenty of uses for the original 1/24 scale miniature: "We actually used a lot of the bridge model pieces that were built as texture mapping for the CG bridge. Plus we actually rammed a green Godzilla-shape on a track through one of the bridge towers, which looked very odd. That was done completely in model, so you see the real breakup of the model, the stones falling. Then we replaced the ram with our CG Godzilla and did some rotoscoping to add some CG debris on top of it."
Engle also made ample use of 1/6 scale miniatures and the 1/6 scale hydraulic Godzilla, although rarely using them in-camera. There was also a remarkable use of a final full-scale Godzilla setpiece when the big lizard's head erupts through the bridge roadway and our heroes' taxi ends up in Godzilla's mouth. "The full-sized interior mouth with the cab inside was mounted on a gimbal rig in a soundstage," Engle says. "It's a totally crazy sequence, the creature's shaking the cab inside with all our main actors in it, so Roland and [director of photography] Ueli Steiger went really wild with a lot of moving camera and wild crane moves. We had to match that movement when we cut to our wide shots, which were fully animated with our CG Godzilla and a CG taxi."
Like Godzilla, Emmerich and Devlin may have bit off more than they could chew. The project that was supposed to establish motion capture as the preeminent visual effects tool and prove CFX's mettle as a one-stop effects shop ended up abandoning motion capture and farming shots out to half a dozen houses. Besides Sony Pictures Imageworks 100-plus shots, Digiscope took on more than 50 composites and Pixel Liberation Front tackled additional motion tracking. Ironically, VisionArt, who handled many of Godzilla's non-creature effects, defiantly rebounded from the earlier motion capture situation to finish a dozen of the most complex and impressive Baby ’Zilla shots.
CFX later relied on their in-house Celco eXtreme MPX and Nitro film recorders to output the film’s over 400 digital effects shots, which they had extensively tested while creating the two teaser trailers that helped hype the picture’s "Size Does Matter" marketing strategy.
All the scrambling during the production of Godzilla may have taken its toll on everyone concerned, but thanks to designer Patrick Tatopoulos, visual effects supervisor Volker Engle, associate visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas, and their elite effects teams, this summer’s audiences were able to watch the Big Guy do his bit for urban renewal.
