G FORCE

VFX SUPERVISOR SEAN KONRAD SHARES THE SECRETS OF GODZILLA'S TV TRIUMPH IN MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS 

- NICK SETCHFIELD

FOR SEAN KONRAD, GODZILLA IS something large, green and primal. "I know that I saw Godzilla at an age when I didn't understand it all," he tells SFX, remembering his first brush with Toho's Tokyo-trampling kaiju superstar. "I think I saw the narrated American version on TV when I was seven or something. It was like, 'Whoa, that's scary!', but I didn't really grasp what an important thing it was.

"I think I really started appreciating Godzilla properly after watching Bong Joon-ho's The Host, which is a really terrific, emotional movie in the way that the monsters are used. It made me start thinking about monsters as a parable. I went back to Godzilla and I've been a devotee since that point."

A digital effects veteran with credits on everything from Guardians Of The Galaxy to Deadpool 2, Konrad's first professional engagement with Ol' Atomic Breath came with 2014's Godzilla, the film that launched Legendary's Monster Verse. Returning for 2019's Godzilla: King Of The Monsters, he's now VFX supervisor on Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters, the Apple TV+ series that charts the decades-spanning story of the shadowy taskforce set up to tackle the MUTO menace. The screen may be smaller but the global threat remains supersized...

SFX: You’ve worked on two of the MonsterVerse movies. Is the Godzilla design in this show essentially the same we’ve seen on the big screen, or have there been tweaks?

SK: The way this all works is that once you finish a project the studio, Legendary, collects all the assets from the vendors who worked on it – the sub-contracted studios. It goes into an archive and what that contains is the model, the textures, reference imagery of what it looks like all around, the positions of the joints for animation and so on.