‘Godzilla’s point of view is unknowable’: How VFX artists gave the King of Monsters new kaiju friends

polygon.com:

This week on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Godzilla woke up.

You might not have known he was napping — the humans gathered on top of him in the desert certainly didn’t. And the show hasn’t been lacking in kaiju in his absence; the Apple TV Plus show, set in the Monsterverse of Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla vs. Kong (and soon Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire), has plenty of big monsters to live up to the name. Already, the human main characters of Monarch have traversed the world and run into everything from Trapdoor Crab on Skull Island to a sick-looking Frost Vark in the Arctic.

Bringing these monsters to life is a crucial part of the job for Sean Konrad, VFX supervisor for the series, who’s worked on Ms. Marvel, For All Mankind, and 2014’s Godzilla. A typical process might involve a few rounds of building a design, modeling it from a 2D illustration, waiting for storyboards to come back, roughly animating it, shooting the scene, then working in post-production to make sure it’s looking as it should. “Then you look at it and you’re like, Well, it doesn’t work yet; it’s not scary enough, [or] the personality isn’t developed,” Konrad says. Then you give that back to the concept team, with some feedback — like ‘we really want to get some big scary teeth’ or ‘we want to get an expressive face out of it’ — and voila!”

Then again, that’s just for one monster. And the stakes get even higher when you’re dealing with the king. Konrad spoke to Polygon (in fairly spoiler-free terms) about how he and his team go about shaping the world of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

Polygon: One of the things we at Polygon talk about a lot is how well Monarch balances the human side with the monster side. And I’m curious how your role with all