Here is the trailer: https://vimeo.com/440092296
The charm of the GODZILLA franchise, in my opinion, is its extensive usage of a man-in-rubber-suit stomping and smashing his way through beautiful miniature cities, kicking over miniature trees and artillery and blasting everything in between with his radioactive fire breath!
Man-in-rubber-suit, rear projected background of city, miniature foreground buildings and CG flames.
BOOM!!
Our approach to the comedy/spoof NOTZILLA strived to follow in the gigantic footprints of GODZILLA in utilizing the same “old school” approach to special effects.
Our monster was a man-in-rubber-suit that was designed and built by Rick D. Baker and his son Jacob Kyle Baker, who also wore the suit and played the part of the monster.
The concept that our Director Mitch Teemley pitched was to have this show look and feel like a mid 1960’s film…utilizing period cars, wardrobe, props, etc….
I approached the lighting and lensing in a similar fashion using a vintage Lomo Anamorphic zoom lens [just like the “Tohoscope” Cinemascope lenses used in these classic films]. We lit the scenes mostly with hard light and lots of gobo/cookie patterns.
Lomo anamorphic zoom lens on a Red Epic Dragon.
Front anamorphic element of the Lomo 37-140mm zoom, note the lens support rig I had to cobble together below?
With some rough storyboards by writer/director Mitch, we ran around with a tiny splinter unit to grab both stills and motion footage to use in our rear projection scenes when we would later have the entire cast and crew assembled for our principal photography.
We decided to approach this project as mostly an “in-camera” effects film…relying on classic methods to place our principle actors and monster “into” the scenes in front of the camera with very little blue/green screen compositing. This allowed our actors to actually “see” the monster and other effects immediately as we filmed. I have always believed this helps them emote and respond better when looking at an actual object as opposed to a gaffer taped “X” on a green screen.
Rear Projection screen with city projection, monster in foreground..simple yet effective
Director Mitch Teemley rehearses actors on the rise [and added appleboxes] in front of rear projection screen, note the gobo on left, and the extra flags needed to keep stray light off the screen, these actors were literally inches from the screen for most of the time..
So, to do this, we had to deal with the logistical nightmare of figuring out which elements had to be shot in which order to make this process run smoothly.
We began production on location for the first 2 weeks which allowed our Production Designer Gabby Leithsceal and her team to fabricate our miniature valley with train tracks, high-voltage power lines/towers, miniature atomic blasters, computer consoles with many blinking lights and knobs, etc…. Gabby has a great website with some nice BTS shots: https://gablei.com/props-set/notzilla-props/
Control room that Gabby and crew designed and built!
All this was set up in an abandoned HH GREG appliance/electronic store at a mall. This was a huge 40,000 sq foot room with enough space to not only set up the 20x20 miniature “monster stomping” grounds, but it had ample space to also house our rear projection stage/screen/projector stage as well as a water tank [for our miniature ship sequence] and several other sets.
We had several shooting areas placed side-by-side inside the huge empty store, from this angle you can see the greenscreen on left and the “stomping grounds” on right..as well as the “crapazoid” sky backdrop!!
The “stomping ground” set has a 25’ sky backdrop that wasn’t of top quality and some time/expense was needed in post to clean up its wrinkles and seams…no matter how we lit this sky backdrop [rear and frontal] it always displayed it’s seam. Gabby crafted a series of low hills that were set in the back of the 20’x20’ grass floor to give the sense of depth and to help cover the bottom of the sky backdrop. She embellished the rolling hillside with miniature trees [courtesy of Entertrainment Junction in Mason, Ohio].
Model building and shrubs and miniature cars, pulled by monofilament line populated this environment and it was dressed and redressed multiple times for various locals in the movie.
We also had a rather small table top set that really only consisted of another sky backdrop [MUCH better than the large one] and we used rolls of moss for ground cover, dressed clippings from my frontyard landscape for trees and we shot the miniature RC army tanks, jeeps and missile launchers on this rig. Later, this footage was rear-projected on the RP [rear-projection] stage and we shot our actors in front of the screen to place them in the environment with the military hardware.
The smallest set was a 4’ long tabletop with moss and model train trees, cut/painted foamcore hills and sky backdrop..with RC controlled model tanks!
I also took this tiny set home and outside of my garage, I shot the over crank shots [high speed] of the missile launchers and firing artillery, a somewhat more forgiving environment for pyro work than a shopping mall!
Model kit truck with consumer grade fireworks that I “repackaged” in Army colors and decals!
Lighting the fuses on bottle rockets that were inserted into these plastic missile shells!
Like all consumer grade fireworks, they do not always do what they are suppose to..this one did not launch, instead it exploded on set!
It was spectacular!!
Chance Madison, our gaffer, matched the lighting of the images on the RP screen to whatever was positioned in front of it: monster, actress, Army platoon, etc…., he and his crew did an incredible job, especially since they had to light actors that are standing literally 2 feet from the RP screen! If you have ever worked with any projection system, you realize that spill light of any kind will wipe out the contrast of the projected image and pollute the screen.
We saved a LOT of time and energy by shooting on stage with rear-projection backgrounds…I would go out during pre-pro and shoot high rez still photos of various locations and we fed these into our laptop that ran the large video projector..INSTANT location! This also kept that vintage look of the 60’s as they did this a lot back then.
Here is another location that we simply projected as opposed to travel to..my background plate photos required some PhotoShop as the actual brewery location had signage and banners which we removed electronically.
Flatulence plays a big part in the comedy of this beast. Not only does the monster possess the ability to breath fire, he also produces it from his “other” end…if you catch my meaning! And, of course, fire always plays a big element in these types of monster flicks! Knowing that we could not create actual flames or fires of any sort in our appliance store/studio, we relied on post CG for the flames and on-set reflections of fire on our actors, monsters and miniatures. Our gaffer, Chance, brought to set the new LED Asteras and they are incredible and versatile lights! Any color of the spectrum can be created with these units as well as flashes and flickering light, traveling light motion [used in the train sequence] etc. Our Editor, Jim Bailey, created beautiful CG flames and with a combination of on-set flickering light and smoke machine, these elements all came together in a realistic and comical way.
Another city shot of rubber suit, rear projected city and Jim Bailey’s CG flames.
One scene that I feel is rather special was the ever-classic “Girl in the Giant Paw” scene! Our lead actress Tifani Ahren Davis was to be picked up and held in the monster’s hand whilst being carried around downtown and delivering several lines of dialogue to the monster. I had to scratch my head for a while on this one as our tiny budget would not pay for a giant “hand” prop, and to simply green-screen her into a shot of the monster’s paw would look terrible. So, we did this scene with several rear-projections of a rear projection, a shot of a shot rephotographed like a “reality sandwich”. Basically we started with a still element of a skyscraper that I shot during pre-pro when we gathered many images for future RP work. We rear-projected this locked-off shot of the building and I rephotographed it in a slightly bouncing manner to replicate the stride of a giant monster. We then took that footage of the moving building and rear-projected it and this time had Kyle wear the monster suit, but we only photographed his right hand with the thumb folded back [a VERY tight shot]. We then took this footage of the hand in front of the moving building and we again rear-projected it with Tifani standing in front of it. To make it appear that she was inside the paw, we took a large scale thumb, which I had made weeks before out of a cardboard sono-tube with a skin of sprayed on expandable foam that was painted to match the monster’s skin [also a giant finger nail made from an old funnel] and placed this large thumb up against Tifani on the camera side. It was rigged so that she could rest her arms upon it...so to the camera she had the monster’s palm and fingers behind her and the thumb in front of her! With the addition of a fan to blow her hair and moving light sources, it appeared that she was a hundred feet in the air and being carried down a city street!
Here is the completed effect, all done in-camera!
BTS shot of Tifani having her hair repaired after a take with a strong wind machine by HMU artist Anne Taylor. As you can see, the “thumb” is a cardboard tube that I coated with expandable insulation foam and then spray painted ..its rigged on a short stand and the projection is seen behind them. With the laptop, we could instantly resize our projected images as well as do color correction on the fly!
I snapped this shot from the viewfinder, note the 1.2:35 aspect ratio lines, I had to shoot at a 144 degree shutter due to some slight pulsation from the projector.
The great thing of having the extra space to hold several sets at the same time in the abandoned appliance store was the luxury of being able to come up with quick solutions to FX problems and having the ability to jump 30’ over to a miniature set and quickly shoot an effect, import it into the laptop that controlled the rear-projection projector, and shoot our actors immediately in front of that image!
We had 2 cameras built and ready to go at all times, one on the live action RP stage and the other available to jump to any of the miniature sets or to shoot “B” camera coverage of the live action. This saved up time from having to do multiple retakes and setups as our air-conditioning had to be shut down for the audio shooting and the store would get very hot. Our poor actors were wearing 1960’s heavy clothing and especially poor Kyle was in the very very hot and stuffy rubber monster suit!
Another view of our “stage”
During production one day, we were shooting a ton of coverage and Kyle decided to simply stay in his monster costume as opposed to take it off, put it back on a few minutes later, then take it off, etc…. After wearing the rubber suit for several hours, and with our air conditioning shut down and the room well into the 90’s Kyle was seen standing in a growing puddle…it was a puddle of his own sweat and the bulk of it was dripping out of his finger tips and down the pointed monster claws and dropping to the floor!!!
The final scene of the film shows several additional monster eggs floating in the river. Gabby made several rubber eggs and we shot this in my Koi pond at home…making sure to frame out any curious fish that wanted to see what was floating in their pond.
Rubber eggs that Gabby made, floating in my Koi pond…hey Gabby, I just found these in my garage..you want them back??
all photos (c) 2020 Creepy Ex-Boyfriend Productions
