Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ second season wrapped with a clash of the Titans of epic proportions as Kong and Titan X battled each other on Skull Island. The two thrashed about as Keiko manoeuvred her speeding jeep around the behemoths. Spoiler alert: No creatures were hurt in the making of the TV series since they don’t actually exist. Instead, it’s up to VFX Supervisor Sean Konrad and his team to bring these larger- than-life kaijus to the screen. And Konrad is more than qualified for the job. He previously served as a VFX artist on the 2014 Godzilla feature film and a VFX Supervisor for its sequel, 2019’s King of the Monsters. His other notable credits include Loki, The Witches, Deadpool 2, Justice League and many more. Furthermore, in the remaining moments of Monarch’s season-two finale, Where We Belong, Konrad introduced the iconic winged Titan, Rodan.
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Konrad recently spoke to ComicBook about unpacking a script, crafting an enthralling battle sequence, Rodan’s return and his kaiju bucket list.
Monarch pulls off a feature-film vibe week after week. Looking at the season finale, how many VFX shots went into that episode?
Sean Konrad: I don’t know. I think probably 450, but I would have to look it up a little bit more in depth. Obviously, there’s a lot of big creature action in that episode, but there’s always little bits of paint outs and little more supporting things that go in there, too, that’s part of the work that we are doing.
That’s considered a lot for a television show. If you flashback to your 2014 Godzilla film, how many shots went into that one?
I was at NBC, which did a bulk of the creature work in that. I think we had about 350 or 400 shots. Then across the other companies, there’s probably another 300 shots and then some cleanup. It’s a lot. We had about 3000 across the season. In episodic terms, that’s not necessarily the biggest these days because we really want to focus our attention on monsters. We want to give as much money as we can to our monster sequences, which means really thinking about, “Do we need a set extension to tell the story or can we find ways to bring the scope in so that we can maximize it with creatures?”
The big centrepiece this episode involves the brawl between Kong and Titan X. How much of that is storyboarded and how much freedom are you given? A script can be vague. It could read, “Fight sequence. Kong versus Titan X.” How much of that is spelled out for you?
It’s an interesting mix. A sequence like that, no matter how much you storyboard or previz or plan, you are always going to have some kind of change that happens once the rubber meets the road or the rubber meets the dirt, literally in this case. Once you are actually there on location, the topography of that place is going to limit what you can do. Or, suddenly the possibilities become much more expansive because you find an amazing stunt driver, who can pop the car on to two wheels and give you a really cool arc.
A lot of that comes down to a tight marriage between SFX and VFX and our stunt teams, just coming up with ways to thread this action. Then, we take a lot of what we shoot and bring it into post. So, we had these beats we wanted to tell. We know we wanted to start Keiko off here. We wanted to give her a lot of chaotic driving. We wanted to have a stop, a reverse, a pull background and then get to Cate. Then the truck gets destroyed and then they are off.
The way that that we get between those was completely… I don’t want to say improvised because it wasn’t improvised. The stunt team rehearsed it like crazy. That would never have been something we would have prevized. It’s just not necessarily something we would have been capable of doing.
A lot of what we were doing was giving them parameters to work with like, “Hey, here’s the arc of her tentacle. This is how wide it is. That’s what that circumference would be, so when you are driving it, you need to be this wide on your arcs and all that kind of stuff.”
Then you get all that material and look at it and you’re like, “Well, that costs twice what the budget is of the whole episode.” Then you start trying to figure out how to make that scope fit within the world. “Can we extend this sequence a little bit by popping into Keiko and just seeing some dust flying by her and still having these really big moments?”
One of the things that we felt like after we shot it and we were putting things through the wringer was just we were laughing for some bigger Kong and Titan X moments, where there’s like a big punch or a bite… A little bit more viscerality to it. Those were things that we kind of figured out in post, when we were like, “We really need a punctuation mark here.” Then it’s a lot about feeling out the scene and dynamically making it as you are moving through the post process.
Did they give you a time limit for the fight? Do they say, “It should be around four minutes?”
No, a lot of it is driven by, “What can we actually get done in time?” There’s a volume of work that we can do, both financially and from a logistic point of view. We knew that this thing was going to be bi. It was going to be the biggest thing that we have done in the TV series, so far.
We wanted to do something unique that hadn’t really been seen, which was somebody driving through the legs of a Titan in this way, especially not in the Monsterverse that hasn’t been done to the same extent. We wanted that to be our set piece. All the mandate was, “As long as it needs to be to make it cool as heck.”
In the very last moments, this huge creature makes emerges from a volcano. As somebody who has been associated with the Monsterverse for so long, what was it like to introduce Rodan into the Monarch world?
It’s fun. I love that sequence in King of the Monsters. It’s such a cool sequence. It’s such a good sequence, but it is also a sequence where we unfortunately see Rodan get knocked out pretty quick. I thought it was exciting to be threading this story. There’s a lot of interesting things in the original Rodan spinoff movie from the Toho era. I think it’s a mythologically rich creature. It was quite exciting to do and pick up. I love that design. I was fortunate enough to work with Pier Lefebvre, who is the VFX Supervisor at Radio FX. He had also worked as the CG Supervisor on King of the Monsters on that sequence, so it was a really nice way to bring the legacy of monsters to screen.
Can you talk about your vision for Rodan’s design and what you wanted to achieve?
We didn’t really change the design. With anything that we do, often we will put the asset into the environment and look at it and say, “Hey, this isn’t quite working.” So, Pier drove a lot of those changes that could make it feel like it was more innovative to the scene.
That’s really the sum of it. The geometry that we do is relatively the same. One thing that we got to do is a little bit of performance. We wanted Rodan to feel a little cocky. It’s not actively aggressive in this like it is King of the Monsters, so what does it do in the moments in between? We had to fill this time while it’s wrapping around, so these characterizations, these antics that it does, was something we got to play around with. We came up with this mouth movement.
Although it was a lot of fun, it’s a single shot, but there’s a lot of work that goes into it. We changed the camera move on that half-a-dozen times. We definitely made people lose some sleep, so thank you to all the artists who worked on that very hard.
Assuming there is a third season, is there a monster you still want to tackle?
I keep waffling on it. I haven’t actually personally got to mess around with full Mothra. I worked on the Mothra scene on King of the Monsters, but didn’t get to mess around with her too much, so that could be really fun to play around with. I’m always curious about the ones that are a little less fan beloved and ways you could update them. But a lot of that is not my decision. It’s always the writers’ decisions and the owners of the franchise that will drive those.
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