Led by MPC VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron and VFX producer Philip Greenlow, the UK-based Moving Picture Company serves as the lead VFX studio bringing the iconic title creature to life in Warner Bros Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ ‘Godzilla.’
The UK-based Moving Picture Company (MPC) was the lead VFX studio bringing the iconic title creature to life in Warner Bros Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla, which opened worldwide May 16, 2014. The team was led by MPC VFX Supervisor Guillaume Rocheron (Academy Award winner for Life of Pi) and VFX Producer Philip Greenlow.
With his background in visual effects and understanding on how best to use them to give the audience a unique cinematic experience, Gareth Edwards, the film’s director, presented MPC with an opportunity to push the envelope in designing and executing shots for an epic action adventure while focusing all the tools and technology towards realizing Edwards’ strong artistic vision.
Translating Godzilla from concept artwork to a photo-real living creature took MPC's artists seven months, working up each part of his body—from the underlying bones, fat and muscle structure to the thickness and texture of his scales. With the close-up nature of the camera work and the sheer scale of the asset, a tremendous amount of detail had to be painted and sculpted to ensure Godzilla came vibrantly to life onscreen.
With respect for the Toho Co. Ltd.’s original “man in a suit” version, Godzilla was animated as a fluid living and breathing creature with the addition of humanistic elements to capture his attitude and personality. MPC’s artists used a mixture of body language and carefully designed facial expressions, which allowed them to translate emotions and expressions on screen, without breaking the believability of the creature. MPC’s animation team utilized a variety of references, including the movement of bears and reptiles, as a basis for the keyframe animation that gave Godzilla movement.
For the climatic 3rd act of the film, the team created a digital version of downtown San Francisco, giving the filmmakers complete control over the large scale virtual cinematography, in order to fully realize Edwards’s striking visual story telling.
The various destruction effects for the complex creature battle sequence were used as an element to remind the viewer of the scale of the monsters in addition to showing a spectacle. A tremendous amount of detail had to be simulated to convey the 350ft height of Godzilla, involving some extremely high-resolution simulations of buildings collapsing and swirling interactive dust.
MPC’s in-house destruction simulation tool Kali was upgraded and given a number of significant incremental improvements to make photo-real destruction. The MPC software team added new tools to Kali for tetmesh creation and post-processing as well as giving it performance improvements, to allow faster simulation and rendering.
MPC's other work in the movie includes the airport reveal of Godzilla, HALO jump, Golden Gate Bridge attack sequence, the epic third act battle, and more.
MPC (a Technicolor company) leads the world in postproduction and visual effects for the Feature Film, Advertising, Digital and Television industries. Working with international motion picture studios and worldwide advertising groups the company has networked bases in London, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Bangalore, New York, Amsterdam, Montréal and Mexico City. Recent international feature film includes Godzilla (Warner Bros Pictures), Maleficent (Walt Disney Studios), Guardians of the Galaxy (Marvel/Disney) The Lone Ranger, (Walt Disney Pictures) Man of Steel (Zach Snyder, Warner Bros Studios) and World War Z (Marc Forster, Paramount Pictures). In 2013, MPC won a VFX Oscar and BAFTA for their work on Life of Pi (Ang Lee, Twentieth Century Fox).
Source: MPC
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
