Extract: “Designing Mechagodzilla” — Godzilla vs Kong Concept Design by Legacy Effects

Godzilla vs Kong - Mechagodzilla concept design by Legacy Effects

In this exclusive extract from The Illusion Almanac: Creating Godzilla vs Kong, Legacy Effects concept designer Jared Krichevsky discusses the company’s design work for Godzilla vs Kong. The production design department brought in Legacy Effects to develop designs for the 2021 iteration of Mechagodzilla, a human construction built by APEX for use as a weapon against Godzilla. Legacy Effects co-founder Lindsay MacGowan directed Krichevsky, together with concept designers Simon Webber and Darnell Isom, in the task of reimagining the mechanical monster for the 21st century.

Read the full story about the design, cinematography and visual effects of Godzilla vs Kong in Issue 1 of The Illusion Almanac, available now as an 80-page* digital magazine formatted for Kindle. Download it from Amazon online stores worldwide — just search for “illusion almanac.”

While the new design veers significantly from the look of the robot in the 1974 Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, Krichevsky did pluck one specific piece of detailing from the original film. “If you look at the front of the original Mechagodzilla’s chest,” said Jared Krichevsky, “you can see these little X-shapes. I decided to put those same shapes all the way down the arms and legs. They kind of look like scales, and they also give him a reinforced tank look, which felt like something a human designer would do, because this guy has got to be reinforced as hell — I mean, he has to take a punch from Godzilla! That’s why everything is blocky, chunky, heavy.”
Krichevsky devised his own logic about how the engineers at APEX might have assembled their latest war machine. “I always figured Mechagodzilla would have to be built from the scraps of the ruined cities in the last several movies,” Krichevsky commented. “I mean, you’ve had Ghidorah zapping everything, then Rodan flies over a city and just wipes it out; I figured he would be pieced together from all the scrap. He’s probably been put together in secret, assembled in different facilities across the world, so there’s no way he’s going to look super-clean or like a perfect copy of Godzilla.”
Extract from “The Illusion Almanac: Creating Godzilla vs Kong” — available now for Kindle from Amazon