Our Work on Godzilla Vs Kong

The fourth film in Legendary's MonsterVerse, Godzilla vs. Kong is a classic hero’s tale, following Kong as he embarks on a quest to find his home and family.

His journey takes him to Hollow Earth, an unbelievable world created by Weta Digital, where instead of a clear sky, a second landscape looms overhead. The temple is another of the 13 environments we created and the final last step in Kong’s Hollow Earth journey. Inside the temple was incredibly detailed—12 kilometres across and five to six kilometres tall—and designed to work at different scales for Kong and the humans in both close-ups and wide establishing shots.

We paid homage to old-school VFX with the vortex effect seen in the journey through to hollow earth. VFX Supervisor Kevin Smith wrote a Nuke script to simulate an effect that mimics the infamous slit-scan technique used in the 2001: A Space Odyssey ‘Stargate’ sequence.

One of the critical decisions our team had to make was how gorilla-like to make Kong. Would he walk on two legs or four, would his facial expressions be human-like, or would they be a match for his real-world inspiration? One thing is for sure—one of our favourite scenes is Kong’s morning routine, where he wakes up groggily and stumbles down the river for a shower in a 150m waterfall, making him more relatable than ever before.