With the premiere of Monarch: Legacy of Monarch set for the end of this week, Dorkaholics was invited to speak with Sean Konrad, the visual effects supervisor for the series.
Jessica Tseang: What everybody first thinks about when they think of Godzilla is all of the visuals and all of the visual spectacles and everything that goes with it. What are some of the challenges that you faced doing it because one of the first questions people would ask me is how do you bring something to life on the big screen onto your everyday television and they want to know how that would transfer over?
Sean Konrad: I’m really fortunate I got to work on the Godzilla 2014 film as an artist and so I was really intimate in how we made those shots work and one of the things that we used to do [was that] my supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, on that project he would always like look at some of the shots we were working on and he would shrink them down to the size of an iPhone funnily enough on the screen, so we’d call it the iPhone test. What that would do is it would allow us to say “is this a good composition” “is it legible on a small screen” because if it’s legible on a small screen then you can blow it up and you can add all the detail you need to add. So, that’s a lot of how creatively the shots come together but then on top of that we’re trying to tell a human-sized story from a human point of view and week to week we want to follow that human drama and we want our monster scenes to support that human drama. We want that to be essential to how that story is being told and we want these scenes to reflect their hopes and fears and the interiority of them and so that really means that we’re staying with their perspective functionally. We’re not going into these big wide objective visual effect shots; we’re really telling it from that subjective point of view.
Be sure to catch Monarch: Legacy of Monarch on Apple TV+ this Friday. The first two episodes will be out this week with one new episode each week leading up to the finale in January 2024.
