Godzilla The Series, 1998

First and foremost, there was the secrecy. I don’t remember any film before it having such a rigidly-controlled media campaign (Phantom Menace hadn’t happened yet). The new monster design was closely guarded and militantly protected. We all had to sign strict non-disclosure agreements to work on the show. If we leaked anything, the entire production would be shut down and we’d be out of a job. (I recall hearing that someone did leak something at some point, but it wasn’t traced back to us.)

To create some measure of protection, we worked under a pseudonym. The announced title of our show was HEAT Seekers. There was a fake logo for all our documentation, and it was to feature a giant monster called Gorgon. Actual press releases went out with this information, though I never got to see one.

This secrecy extended to every production partner and licensor of the film as well, over 300 different companies. These days it’s standard operating procedure for every big movie. Back then it was all new and kinda sexy. It made you feel powerful to know that your loose lips could sink ships. And we all did our part to protect the lizard. Mark that point, because I’ll come back to it later.

There was a standalone teaser trailer that caught everyone’s attention (which flipped a finger at Jurassic Park), and the “Size Matters” billboard campaign. For several months leading up to the release, billboards popped up in L.A. and elsewhere. “His foot is as long as this bus.” “He’s taller than this building.” “His cloaca is the size of this sewer lid.” I made that last one up, but you get the picture.

As an aside, I think someone did a post-mortem on this and found that none of these claims actually held up, but nobody cared after the fact. It was fun to drive around and see such a huge campaign and know that we had a stake in it.

What we didn’t have, for quite a while, was a Godzilla design to draw in our storyboards.

That was how far the policy extended; none of us was allowed to see the star of our show even though we had to create action scenes for him/it. We could work around this obstacle up to a certain point, but we couldn’t finish an episode under that restriction. At one point I asked if we could just draw the original Godzilla as a placeholder, but our Supervising Producer Audu Paden had seen the design and said they were too different to be swapped out. The best we could do on our own was to put in a sort of T-Rex with fins on its back (shown below) until someone did the sensible thing.

Storyboard reference for the atomic breath (based on my drawings from an episode).
“Fire walk with Gorgon” was a Twin Peaks joke.

There was also a struggle to design the humans. Fil Barlow, who led the character design team on Extreme Ghostbusters, continued forward on this show, but his first couple rounds didn’t light any fires. I remember Audu Paden calling all of us directors into a brainstorm meeting to see what we could come up with, and I brought a handful of anime art books to stimulate some thinking. Unexpectedly, Fil walked in, bleary after an all-nighter, and dropped his third round on the table. We all had a look and were very impressed. He left to take them upstairs and Audu said, “I don’t see any further need for this meeting.” So that problem got solved.

There was a non-human/non-reptilian cast member that still needed attention, a robot named N.I.G.E.L. It needed to look goofy and primitive, cobbled together from junk. I was given a crack at him and somehow managed to nail the design on the first try. There were land and sea configurations, since we went in the water a lot. The schtick was that N.I.G.E.L. would be smashed to pieces in every episode, then magically put back together for the next one (sometimes later in the same one). There was an action figure planned, but (A) it didn’t look much like my design and (B) the toy line never came out. Otherwise I could have added “action figure designer” to my resume.

We finally reached a point where the lack of a Godzilla design was actually stopping us from meeting our deadlines, so something had to give. One day, out of the blue, we all went on a field trip to a post-production facility where we would get to see some actual footage for the first time. It was my first visit to such a place, and it was…not impressive in the least. It basically looked like our office, divider walls and desks and workstations.

Somebody was processing CG effects on their desktop computer, specifically the bridge scene where Godzilla gets all tangled up and finally dispatched. We watched it a few times and thought, “THAT’S all it is?” I mean, there was nothing wrong with it, really, but it just didn’t live up to the hype. Anyway, the critical line was crossed and now we could finish the job we were being paid for.

Left: the bridge scene. Right: final monster design by Patrick Tatapoulos, which I never saw before writing this article.

It also allowed me to seriously get to work on the main title. This would be my third. The first was for Extreme Ghostbusters, in which I worked directly with our Exec Producer Richard Raynis. A few months later, he reeled me in for my second one: Men in Black. To this day, whenever I mention it everyone tells me they thought it was the coolest one ever. Which I never get tired of hearing. (Watch it on Youtube here and see the storyboards here.)

By this time I’d been drawing storyboards professionally for about a year and a half, but there were still new lessons around every corner. (There still are today, as it turns out.) As for the main lesson I learned from this show, I’ll quote myself from an interview I once gave to SciFi Japan…

“As a kid I loved seeing Godzilla movies on TV. They came around very rarely, so whenever one appeared it was like Christmas morning. Later, when I got older and special effects films became more sophisticated, Godzilla films stopped being about raw entertainment and began to pale. They hadn’t changed, of course, but I had. Entering the filmmaking business required me to have a critical adult eye that made it impossible to just be entertained by a Godzilla movie.”

“It wasn’t until our executive producer, Richard Raynis, put a fine point on it that I found the words to describe the gulf. Richard’s directive to me as I designed the main title sequence and directed my episodes was to keep the camera at human level as often as possible. In other words, don’t automatically fly through the ceiling every time a huge monster appears because it would immediately cancel out the realism. Instantly, I knew why the older films weren`t holding up any more; the cameras were almost always placed at monster level while filming the monsters and human level while filming the humans. Had the filmmakers picked one or the other and stuck with it throughout, it would have been a very different experience.”

“As flawed as the Sony Godzilla may have been in its story, I had to admit the images were riveting…and it was precisely because the cinematography followed this philosophy. I was glad later to see Toho pick up on this and apply it to the original Godzilla. It helped immensely to restore my respect and made it possible for me to be entertained again.”

Why don’t they look like giants? Because they were filmed like humans.

Then there was the eternal lesson about storyboard revisions. Settle in for some shoptalk here.

Nobody ever likes getting revisions, but they’re inevitable. You draw what you think works, then your director stomps all over it and makes you draw it again. That’s the negative way to look at it, and if you can’t get past it you won’t last long.

The positive way goes like this: you and your director are collaborating to find the strongest way to visualize the script. The first idea might be fine, but maybe it leads to something better. Draw subjectively, review objectively. Revision notes are not an insult, and taking them personally means your ego is more important to you than your job. Drawing storyboards for a living is like being in film school for a living. Except this film school pays you to learn. Which works out pretty well.

For a while I despaired that I would never get it right. No matter how hard I worked, Audu would always find something wrong with it. During my time on Godzilla, I came to realize I was looking at it the wrong way. Audu wasn’t finding fault, he was finding opportunities. Seeing a shot done a certain way would spark an idea for how it could be done better. Sometimes the reasons were technical (maybe it doesn’t connect strongly enough to another shot), sometimes practical (it will be easier to animate if you do it this way), and sometimes just for clarity (simplify that thing and the audience will get it quicker). There are countless ways to improve a shot, and your technique will improve if you’re open to them.

Over time, if you learn from experience, you start to anticipate revision notes and eliminate them before they happen. When you cross that line, you’re ready to direct others. I’ve worked on many more shows with Audu, and we both learn something every time we collaborate. I’ve gotten a few boards past him with no revision notes at all, but that’s just a reprieve until the next one.

We were a few months into production when the release of the movie finally approached. We all got a private viewing in a theater on the Sony lot, which was one helluva perk (we also got to see Men in Black and Starship Troopers before the general public). I think we were all in agreement that it was fun, but didn’t live up to the marketing campaign. That later turned out to be typical of Roland Emmerich films. The guy could promote like a master, but it would usually build up an invoice of expectations that the final product didn’t pay off.

And now the punch line. Remember what I said about everyone agreeing not to reveal the monster before the film came out? Well, someone did. And a bunch of us at Sony Animation saw it happen with our own eyes.

A few days before the premiere, some us went to lunch together at a local mall. The mall happened to have a toy store. As we walked past it, we saw an employee casually splitting open big boxes from Trendmasters. These boxes were clearly labeled GODZILLA: DO NOT OPEN BEFORE MAY 20. We could read them from outside the store. And yet, the employee was putting toys right up on the shelf as if the labels didn’t exist.

We went in for a closer look and one of the directors bought the biggest one: Ultimate Godzilla, a giant action figure that stretched a couple feet long. He took it straight back to the studio and put it up in his work space. Now we finally had all the drawing reference we needed.

That moment illustrated a valuable lesson: no matter how carefully you plan and no matter how many millions of dollars you sink into your secrecy campaign (about $80m in this case), you’re still at the mercy of your weakest link. In this case, one toy store employee who wasn’t paid enough to care.