Godzilla

[Keth]

Kong better start juicing.

[Keth]

New Godzilla looks pretty insane. Plot spoilers in link

http://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3375277/godzilla-resurgence-plot-details-unveil-major-spoilers/

[The NZA]

 

belated, but RIP

 

[The NZA]

First looks at Godzilla: King of the Monsters

 

The 2019 film’s human characters include Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), a scientist working for the beastie-hunting organization Monarch, and her daughter Madison, who is portrayed by Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown. The pair are kidnapped by what Dougherty describes as “a mysterious organization, with their own plans for the creatures.”

[Keth]

Can't fucking wait.

 

[Donatella]

I’m in. 

[Newtype]

Mothra, Rodan and king ghidorah.

 

 

[Newtype]

[Mr. Hakujin]

Eleven & Tywin Lannister in a movie with Godzilla and basically every major franchise kaiju?

Yes please.

[The NZA]

 

[Donatella]

Happy to see Zilly hasn't slimmed down at all. I can't wait to watch that chubby bastard tear some shit up!

[Keth]

 

 

[Keth]

 

[Newtype]

1/10

 

Little focus on on the Monsters and too much focus on the humans.

 

 

[The NZA]

the people were way boring but the kaiju fights were dope - this was a lotta fun 

[Keth]

Id say they focused on the WRONG people. I like the science folks just trying to give Zilla powerup juice. 

[Donatella]

1 hour ago, Axels said:

Id say they focused on the WRONG people. I like the science folks just trying to give Zilla powerup juice. 

 

This is exactly what I said to Nick!!

 

Spoiler

When that Japanese woman was talking about her family’s three generations of work and kaiju study I was like WHY ARENT WE SEEING MORE OF THIS?! I’d watch a whole movie on just her family.

  

But yeah, didn’t care about the weird American family. They were just filler but the scenes with the monsters were more than worth the price of admission for me. I loved the fights!

[Keth]

I loved how much personality the monsters had too. You had the sense that Ghidorah was really this evil being, intent on just fucking everything up. Or when Godzilla was in a fight there was a moment where Ghidorah went to get charged up with that power generator. It does a closeup of Godzilla's face where he looks down and gave a very real "oh shit" look. Like they aren't jist big dumb animals, they were smart creatures working shit out with their own quirks.

 

Also this was the LOUDEST movie I have ever seen. My ears were seriously hurting after the movie. I blame the theater for that one. But, it certainly made it immersive.

[Mr. Hakujin]

Monster fights were what I went for and they're what I got. One moment in particular made a priest scream out the eff-bomb. Seriously. I'm not sure if I can give a monster movie higher praise than that.

 

 

Mothra is a true ride or die lepidoptera.

This film has probably the Worst.Mom.Ever.

One of the really frustratingly dumb parts of the film was how they tried SO hard to give her a hero's death. I was with six people watching this film and we all agreed on that point.

Edited June 2, 2019 by Mr. Hakujin

[The NZA]

 

happy 65th birthday, zilly!

[The NZA]

 

[The NZA]

minus one was so good!  tempted to see it again in black & white

 

Fascinating two articles that just dropped on Godzilla Minus One's development from director Yamazaki himself. Delves into the challenges Shirogumi faced while working on the movie, the VFX industry in Japan and what Hollywood could learn from the film's success. There was a lot of talk about the miracle they pulled off with Minus One's miniscule VFX budget when the movie came out so I thought this would be worth sharing. Way, way more in the links below.

How Godzilla Minus One Pulled Off Oscar-Nominated VFX for Less Than $15 Million

The director of the Oscar-nominated Japanese kaiju epic on the workflows that kept his effects-heavy movie under $15 million.

 

I'll just get right to it: How were you able to make Godzilla Minus One look this incredible on such a small budget?
This is the office. As you can see, I already have my staff members around me. They are all pretty much here. There's no downtime or waiting time. On top of that, if I'm the director and also the VFX supervisor, I'm the one who has the vision in my head. It is very efficient because there's no gap between what the director is thinking or asking for and the work that is being brought to me. The effectiveness of me being one mind and one body, and then having my staff around me, has helped accelerate the process of working together well.

In Japan, film budgets —and in particular when we talk about how much of a film budget is reserved for VFX — they're not that large. So, we have been educated to work within the constraints of a small budget when it comes to VFX. For example, in terms of the destruction effect. We had worked on something called Godzilla: The Ride, which is in a theme park. We knew that there were some assets that we might be able to reuse or recycle, or perhaps we could use it as a reference. So we have ways that we come up with to save on costs to make it work.

Marvel movies, for instance, use a lot of third-party VFX companies and they tend to waste time having to redo things. Are you saying that's not what Minus One's workflow was like?
Outsourcing to a third party is going to take time and money. We tend to keep it in-house. That's just the most efficient and effective way to work. But that doesn't mean we don't have some external resources that we use. For example, the matte artists or miniature artists. We also have project-based freelance artists who have worked with us for many years. I would say, in this case, maybe one-third of the end-team-member count was freelance folks. We don't always have 35 full-time employees in this office.

Vulture has done lots of reporting on working conditions in the American VFX industry. How are the conditions in Japan? I've read that they're tough for animators — long hours and not especially high pay.
In Japan, we literally call a company "white" or "black." "White" is a company that doesn't exploit its employees and "black" is one that makes you work overnight at all hours and really doesn't pay you well. Our studio name is Shirogumi ("white team"), so we want to believe we are setting up standards and an environment that is very workable for all the artists and everyone who is with us here today. As a creative myself but also an employer of creatives, I feel like what they make is so beautiful, and I hope and wish I would be able to pay our staff members better, at some point.

Sure, it might be challenging at times when we're in a crunch or postproduction and need to get our work done. We try not to do late nights. We have all of our weekends off. A lot of us have families. A lot of us are also not at the age anymore where we can pull off all-nighters. So, we don't let that happen. I also think that our teammates really work in harmony and they work very fast, very quickly. The output is great and that works to our advantage, that everyone is here working together.

What could Hollywood blockbusters learn from Godzilla Minus One's success?
I don't even know if I'm in a position to say. We have learned so much from Hollywood that I don't know if there is anything in return that Hollywood can learn from us. If I were to maybe point out one thing — without really having any concrete basis to back this up — it's that if there is a solid vision throughout the process of making a single film, then I think there is a way to cut down on costs. Yes, there are trial-and-error costs, and bouncing ideas off each other is necessary to a certain extent. But, if you can clearly communicate that vision, then maybe there is no need to do a lot of experimenting on the side that eats up a lot of cost and time. Perhaps that's it, but I don't think that's anything that Hollywood would be learning from us.

How VFX updates take Godzilla back to its nuclear roots

Minus One’ director Takashi Yamazaki, who earned a visual effects nomination, has tricked out Japan’s iconic kaiju and added some unique details.

www.latimes.com

Yamazaki definitely has a knack for self-control. "Minus One's" rich, gorgeous visual effects, seen in two-thirds of the unusually emotional, 38th Godzilla movie, cost between a quarter and a third of the film's bargain-basement budget (less than $15 million). There were no limits to his formal ambitions, though. "In terms of polygon counts, we're talking millions that went into creating Godzilla this time," says Yamazaki, who did initial drawings and sculpture software models that were then refined by artist Kosuke Taguchi with optimized computer graphics data. "In terms of the skin texture, there was a dinosaur origin, but when it's wounded, a regeneration happens and there's a different texture, like you would see on any wound. We wanted a mix, brought in new layers that would make the look very unique."

Since Godzilla grew out of Japan's atomic bombing trauma, his destruction of Tokyo's Ginza district and assorted ships culminate in terrible — but gorgeous — mushroom clouds. Trouble was, the look Yamazaki craved was too big to simulate in CG. An old-fashioned technique saved the day for the otherwise computer-generated spectacle. "We had a matte artist who did 2-D that had a little bit of movement," the director says. "Once we found that that switch was actually working, we were like, 'Oh, my gosh, we spent so much time with CG that couldn't get it, but now we have this really cool trick to get the mushroom clouds in there!'"

Simulating water also takes up reams of CG space. But thanks to young compositing artist Tatsuji Nojima — who was elected by the whole VFX crew to share Japan's first nomination in the category with supervisor Yamazaki, effects director Kiyoko Shibuya and CG team leader Masaki Takahashi, more seagoing shots became doable than initially planned. "He was very much into water simulation," Yamazaki says of Nojima. "He had built his own super computer at home and was like, 'Can you please take a look at what I've built out here?' We were so blown away that we added more water scenes into the scenario. In the end, I think we went a little overboard!

"Building water simulation is very data-heavy. You can't easily create that and assume that everything is going to work. One simulation would take an average of a week; we'd build one, use it, then basically have to empty the drive of data to build the next one. The entirety of the water simulation tallied up to one petabyte, which is 1,000 terabytes."

The trawlers and decommissioned Imperial Navy ships that confront Godzilla were all digitally built from the single practical vessel the production could afford to photograph. Yamazaki's computer crew got so accustomed to labor-intensive work that, when it came time to rerelease the movie in black and white, still more VFX were added.