Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Visual Effects Supervisor Talks Bringing The Kaiju to Life

It would be hard to argue that you wouldn’t need some serious special effects when bringing the world of Godzilla and his fellow kaiju to life in any project. With Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the Apple TV+ series didn’t miss a beat when it came to creating the Titans from their prior appearances on the big screen. In an exclusive interview, we here at ComicBook.com had the opportunity to chat with visual effects supervisor Sean Konrad when it came to how they brought the MonsterVerse to the small screen.

Monarch isn’t Sean Konrad’s first foray into the MonsterVerse, as the visual effects master previously had worked on Godzilla’s 2014 film, along with having a hand in the creation of its sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Konrad has also worked on quite a few superhero projects over the years, helping with the special effects for projects such as Ms. Marvel, Loki, Justice League, Deadpool 2, and Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2. When looking at the monsters of Monarch, it’s clear that the special effects creators were able to live up to the high standards set by the kaijus’ theatrical debuts and then some.

Sean Konrad Talks Bringing Monsters To Life

Konrad began by discussing the approach in taking the Titans of the MonsterVerse from the silver screen to the small screen, “I’m fortunate in that I got to work on Godzilla 2014 as an artist and work on Godzilla: King of the Monsters. When I was working on these things, it helped me to develop the scale of these things. This definitely helped when it came to bringing them to the small screen. My supervisor at the time told me, ‘Even if you shrink things down, you want to still be able to see the action,’ We actually called it the ‘iPhone test’. If it works on an iPhone, it’ll work anywhere.”

Sean then discussed how the Godzilla of Monarch was different from the previous iterations that Legendary Pictures had produced, “It’s hard to talk about without spoiling things but one of the easy examples is that there are two versions of Godzilla in our show. We specifically had his dorsal fins change from the past to his 2014 appearance. We had never gotten that close to his fins before, so what we did is that we added little bits of dirt and damage to show wear and tear.” 

Konrad also took the opportunity to discuss the new monsters that were a part of Monarch, “We really started from the natural world. We would take something that’s a real-world creature and take little aspects in a science fiction direction. Then we would go back to the real world for textures and what real-world things could we add to its design. Chris Black and Matt Fraction, the co-creators, might have something in the script and then we’ll have a really clear direction when it comes to concept work. It’s a lot of back and forth. Then you have to go through a lot more processes, find things to make it scarier, find things to make it look more real. The final thing is to drop them into these environments and see how the creatures react to these environments to make them more real.”