Interview: Jared Krichevsky on ‘Godzilla Evolved’, Power of Storytelling

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has truly catapulted its way into the hearts and minds of kaiju fans all over the world. Touting a brand-new look for Godzilla and a new array of original monsters to add to your favorites, GxK will be talked about for many years to come. Kaiju United was honored to sit down with the man behind the ‘Godzilla Evolved’ look, as well as the primary Shimo, Skar King, and Suko concept artist, veteran visual effects designer Jared Krichevsky, to discuss designing these creatures, breaking into the industry, and the true power that storytelling provides us all.

Interview

Jacob Lyngle: Hello, Kaiju United! I’m here with Jared Krichevsky! Jared is an everyman — anything visually that you see in movies, he’s done it all. Creature design, costume design, conceptual art, sculpting – just one of the most impressive resumes I’ve seen. Jared, did you want to introduce yourself?

Jared Krichevsky: I think that’s pretty good! I’ve been a designer in visual effects for the last 14 years, and I’ve been teaching young monster makers for the last 11 years.

JL: Does it feel like a long time, or does it go by quickly?

JK: It goes by quick, for sure.

JL: A while back, Kaiju United asked you about the film that made you want to get into the movie ‘biz.  For a refresher and our readers’ context, it was The Neverending Story. What standout moments from that film influenced your decision to go into visual effects? Did you grow up watching the film over and over again?

JK: Yeah, I did see it as a kid. In fact, I asked my mom about it. “Do you remember the first movie that I saw in theaters?,” and she said that she remembered taking me to Neverending Story. I don’t remember seeing it in the theater. But growing up, that movie was on repeat. I had it on VHS, wore out the tapes, you know, all of that stuff. Neverending Story is a movie that I feel is ingrained into me; it’s part of my DNA at this point.

But the thing that struck me about that movie, largely, is that it’s about a kid who is bullied. He steals a book from this old bookstore. Surprisingly, the old book shopkeeper kind of lets him cart away with it. He just knows what the kid’s getting into. And so, the kid runs away; instead of going to school, he hides away in the attic of the school, and proceeds to just read the entire book. He’s got his lunch, his peanut butter and jelly, and everything. And then he realizes that school’s out, everybody’s gone, but he continues to stay and finish the book because he can’t leave it. The book is powerful for him.

I identify with that movie for many reasons. One is, you know, I was bullied severely as a child, I went through my fair share of bullying as a kid. I identified with the kid that was being put in that position, who had a very active imagination, as I did. And then on top of that, the world building is really phenomenal. The film came around the height of 80s fantasy films; you had stuff like Falkor the Luck Dragon, Pyornkrachzark the Rock Biter, you had all these really fantastic elements. And then, on top of that, there are some really heavy moments in the movie. Many an 80’s child was traumatized by the swamps of sadness, and losing Artax within. You have this movie that has all these big sweeping elements, and then it’s not afraid to just punch you in the gut. It has that thrilling high fantasy adventure, and then it has the emotional grip of great storytelling. I just remember being in awe that this world and the creatures living in it existed. I remember it just having a really profound effect on me that continues to this day.

JL: The films of that era went very dark, it’s quite shocking to see as someone who didn’t grow up in that time period!

JK: Oh yeah. It really started on Don Bluth animations, like The Secret of Nimh. Fantasy was in a really dark place. And, you know, that’s how a whole generation kind of grew up. One that vividly comes to mind is The Land Before Time — they showed the levity in the sweet moments, and then they hit these really hard lows in the films too. Kids were allowed to feel the range of emotion from that stuff.

JL: How did you break into the business professionally?

JK: With breaking in, there’s multiple things. Because as a kid, I was a child actor. My mom was putting me on auditions for shows. I constantly remember going to various auditions for things, and I did a lot of commercials and a lot of commercial work. I did a Bubble Tape commercial that ended up running nationally. It’s still out there, it’s on YouTube somewhere. They actually shaved my head and cut my hair in weird places, and I screamed into the camera. So that, I guess, was like my first exposure to film and commercials and things like that. And so, for a long period of my life, I thought, you know, I was going to be an actor, I was going to do the acting thing. I went to college for theater. And after college, I kind of became more fascinated with what was happening behind the camera.

The love of film and entertainment has always been kind of the underlying factor. But I really became obsessed with like, how do they make movies? Someone’s got to be designing stuff, and I’ve been drawing just as long as I’ve been acting, so, drawing and creativity, these things were always kind of threads throughout my life. And, you know, I took the acting more seriously and did the drawing less. And then, in the latter half of my life, they totally flipped. And I started taking the art side of things very seriously. And really homed in on production because I was really fascinated with getting things made. So, at about 28-29, in my late 20’s, I was working at a bookstore called Borders when those existed, and I kept coming across these digital art masters books. I was fascinated! I was like, oh shit, this is what people are doing in 3D these days. And I asked my cousin like, who’s teaching this stuff? And he put together a list for me and so I decided to go back to school in my late 20s to learn how to do 3d and visual effects.

JL: What was going back to school like?

JK: Going back to school was kind of this life changing experience because I was surrounded by production, visual effects, and the artistry of making film. And so that period rewired my entire brain. I took a production design class with Jarad Marantz, who is a very prolific gifted artist and has been around. He broke into the industry when he was 16. I took his class, and when he put his work up on the screen, that was lightbulb moment. I was like, oh, my God, I got to do this. And he happened to come in the next week and say hey, my studio is looking for interns. Is anyone interested? And you know, my hand shot up right away. I was like, I got to do this. And the next week, I was interning at the studio. I finished the rest of school at Gnomon and my internship at the same time, and afterwards, my boss was like, hey dude, do you want a job? I was like, hell yeah I do! That’s how it started. I managed to get my foot in the door, and maybe I forced my foot into the door. But, because of that, I’ve been doing that ever since. I consider that to be a result of just right circumstances, right place, and right time. And I was just very, very lucky to meet the right people. A few years later, I went back to teach at Gnomon as well.

JL: When did you know that you were ready to flip the role from student to teacher?. Did you realize at one point that you’re qualified enough to pass the torch, or was there just a nice opportunity that came up?

JK: Honestly, it was kind of both at the same time; the paths converged. The teacher who was teaching the creature course didn’t want to teach it anymore. Unfortunately, that teacher wasn’t a real fan of creatures and wanted to do more character instruction. And so, it kind of came across my lap. And I was like, yeah, definitely, I’ll take it on. Gnomon requires you get some industry experience for a few years before you come back and teach. I thought with my theater & communication abilities, having garnered at least like a few projects under my belt, and having learned the techniques, that I was confident in being able to really communicate those things to students. I feel like it was just happy circumstances. I’ve been teaching ever since. What I like about teaching is that it keeps me hungry. And also, of course, I get to interact with students, I get to watch them grow and develop. Watching them grow helps me grow.

JL: You include some notes you’ve given students in the past on your official website. They’re very descriptive and pinpoints exactly what the designer needs to fix, such as “adjust the curvature of the vertebrae”.  What do you think is the biggest tip that you would give someone relatively new to creature design and using Blender and software like that? Is it mostly understanding anatomy?

JK: Yeah, I mean, like anatomy is like number one, right? You have to know the ins and outs of anatomy. If you’re just jumping in, do you need to know all the names of all the muscles? No, but you should learn their shapes, the shapes that they make, and how they connect. So that’s like number one — be curious about anatomy. Always be learning it because there’s an infinite wealth of knowledge to glean from anatomy. But the second most important thing is storytelling. Does your creature fit into a story? If you’re just wanting to make a creature, you should develop a little story around it. Storytelling as a whole will help your abilities in design, writing, and help you know everything you do. When I see students struggling with elements, usually they’re just trying to make a cool design. And when I tell them is like, build a little story around it. And if you build a little story around it that will give you all the pieces that you’re looking for.

JL: When you design a living creature, as you said, you have to learn the muscle shapes, textures, and such. How do you translate that same understanding of anatomy to something inorganic, such as Mechagodzilla?

JK: I think for robots, specifically, it’s all about the pivot point. So like, where do you need something to move? How do you need it to move? Form follows function, so what is its function? What does this robot do and how do you need to make it move accordingly so it can do what you need it to do? On top of that, there are different kinds of rotations that you can make the design do. There’s hard bend rotations, which is just levers — it just goes up and down. Do you need full rotation spinning? Things like that. Depending on what you need to do, you can always design something around that. Because I consider myself a storyteller and not an engineer, it’s all about like, creating a little bit of personality in the robot. It all depends on where it is in the movie or the game. Again, what does it have to do? What purpose does it have? How can we design something that fits our purpose, but also looks unique, and is cool and memorable?

JL: You are one of very few people who has had the rare opportunity to design Mechagodzilla twice. Going from the Ready Player One iteration to the Godzilla vs. Kong design, you had to approach designing the same character in two completely different ways. What challenges did you face making something completely new and unique whilst maintaining familiarity with such an established character?

JK: With Ready Player One we had kind of free rein in the beginning. And so, I think my earlier versions are too lizard-like. Usually, it takes me a couple passes before I get it right. The filmmakers didn’t really have anything in mind in the beginning, but they gave me Noriyoshi Ohrai’s poster for Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla II, where you just basically see like, the top of them and like the arm. And, and they were like, we like this. My job on this film was just to kind of finish the thought and, and to offer that.

And when the opportunity for Mechagodzilla #2 (Godzilla Vs Kong) came along, the first thing I thought was like, there’s no way I’m gonna get this. What are the odds that I’m going to get two designs across? It’s not going to happen. So, despite me knowing that, I thought, well, here you go, I might as well try. The other thing I knew is that it had to be completely different. It couldn’t be the same thing, both in look and feel. RPO’s Mechagodzilla is kind of a very classic looking; it’s a modern update on a classic Mechagodzilla design. But I knew for MonsterVerse it had to be way different, because everybody tells you they want something they’ve never seen before.

My first pass was very much just a robot Godzilla. It had his body shape; it has his proportions. I really had no idea what the story was or anything… a lot of times you don’t get a lot of information. Thankfully, they liked it and gave me some notes, you know, change this, and change that. But the things that they liked were that I showed the inner parts of it, because originally, I guess that was going to play a bigger part in the story. And so, after getting the notes on that, I went back and made some changes. I have my supervisors at Legacy Effects, Lindsay MacGowan, and John Rosengrant, who were sitting in the meeting with us, and John Rosengrant, who’s this incredible legend in special effects. He’s like, this thing’s got to be a terminator. You know, it’s got to kill Godzilla. Around the place, they have these incredible busts of different characters. So, I just went downstairs, and I looked at the Terminator bust we had in the lineup. I stared at the Terminator it for like, I don’t remember, it must have been like, maybe 5 to 10 minutes.

I just kind of like studied it. I wanted to absorb the essence of what made The Terminator scary. And the thing that struck me, was that it’s skeletal. It’s robotic and skeletal at the same time. It looks like the innards of a person mixed with an engine. I remember just staring at it, just kind of letting it kind of wash over me. And then I went in, sat at my desk, and went to work. What came to my mind was like, Okay, this is not this is not a robotic Godzilla. This is an anti-Godzilla machine. This is a disease. This is a machine designed to kill Godzilla. And what are the things that I would need to do to kill Godzilla? And that’s, you know, no easy task because it’s Godzilla. I put my hat on, kind of kind of like I would as an actor, and I was like, Okay, I’m going to be an engineer. And I’m going to put myself in this world where I have been tasked to kill Godzilla. And that was really interesting to me. One of their notes was also asking for Godzilla & Mechagodzilla’s silhouettes to be different, different reads & vibes. I looked at Godzilla and took note of his notable attributes – he’s got large legs and a big body, and short kind of stubby arms. And I thought, you know, well, I’m gonna give him a bigger reach. Right, so he can, like, he’s got reach on Godzilla, so he can smack the crap out of him.

I thought the skeletal look might be scary for Godzilla to see; Godzilla is kind of seeing his own reflection, in a way. There were there were some other notes that Adam gave as well, such as wanting to try something different with the hands. thought about that as well. The first idea was actually something that I pitched in the room, which was mirror hands syndrome, which is a real affliction, that causes your, it looks like you have two hands together. And then I thought, okay, it could kind of look like a chameleon, because chameleons have kind of gripper hands. And so that was something I pitched in the room, they were kind of like, huh, but then when I was able to show it to them, they really dug it. And they put it to great effect in the movie, too. So those were my thought processes — it’s got to be faster, it’s got to be built like a tank, it has to look manmade. Where are they getting the metal for this thing? In my head, it’s probably that they’re scrapping it from buildings that Godzilla has destroyed. In Universe, they just had Rodan destroying the whole cities and Ghidorah and all this stuff, so I’m like, okay, they’re scrapping all this metal from these buildings, and they’re building each of these parts in different parts of the world, and then bringing this thing together to test. Most of the thought behind it was simply, what’s a grounded way to bring Mechagodzilla into the world?

JL: You were saying earlier, tell a story. There’s your story.

JK: Exactly. Because I don’t get any information, I just make up my own stories. A lot of times, I don’t get a script. I get maybe a basic pitch, or a couple of lines of, of like, hey, it’s got to be this, this, and this. And that’s it. So, because I get I don’t have any information. I have to make it all up.

JL: Did they tell you outright that you were designing for MECHAGODZILLA?

JK: Yeah, they came up and said something. Legacy Effects had designed many of the MonsterVerse’s inhabitants, like Godzilla, Ghidorah, and a bunch of creatures there. I knew, like, it was a possibility that that I could get to work on a Godzilla movie. And then when my supervisors came around my desk, they were like like, hey, we got this Godzilla movie in, we want you to work on Mechagodzilla. I went, you know, I already did Ready Player One, right? And they were like, Oh, cool. And that was it. I just knew in my brain, I’m like, there’s no freaking way that I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna get two of these things across the odds are so slim. The second meeting we had was with Adam and the production designer, Tom, and I think some of the writers were there. We presented the image that I did of Mecha G and I kind of turned around and looked at them and They were all they’re all kind of like doing this thing, like, not bad. And I was like, woah, I got it. I got him. And that was it. You know, they gave me just some basic notes, and that was pretty much it. I didn’t see it again until, honestly, the toy leaks.. I saw that leak, and I recognized the silhouette through the blurry photo. and I was like, that looks like what I did. And then, they released the t-shirt that literally had my art on it. And I went home, oh, my God, they did it, they really did it. You know, because a lot, a lot of times in concept art, once it’s out there, there’s no further contact with me. I don’t know if it’s changed down the down the line in production, because that does happen a lot.

JL: Did they change anything of note after taking in your Mechagodzilla concept?

JK: The work that Scanline and their team did was basically making it make sense. They took my shapes, and then they put that level of tertiary and quaternary detail on it. For example, they put the rivets in, they made it look like it was hammered metal. I believe it took like a year and a half of development on that model alone. It was a huge operation with a lot of people involved. I just love everything that they did — I gave him the blueprint, and they took it and made it believable.

JL: We talked a lot about the silhouette and the arms and the reach of Mechagodzilla. And in my head, I was thinking that sounds a lot like how Godzilla Evolved was changed up for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Did some of that seep into this new Godzilla? What is the story you’re telling with this new version of the King of the Monsters?

JK: When I got the call for GXK, my supervisor at Legacy Effects, Lindsay MacGowan, was like, hey, you want to come back and work on another one? This was actually at the tail end of 2021, so the pandemic has wound down. We met again in the meeting room at Legacy, and Adam and Tom came in, and Adam basically gave us the pitch and told us the story of it. There were a lot of things that he had talked about in interviews. After doing GVK, where he talked about wanting to do a more monster centric story, more storytelling with the monsters themselves. He had brought that up, and that was really fascinating. He also stated that this is our chance to kind of go for it a little bit; to do something kind of crazy. Adam [Wingard] was saying his influences for the movie were gonna be like 80’s movies. He talked about how They Live was an inspiration for the fight scenes. We talked a lot about like 80’s movies as references, and being an 80’s kid, I knew exactly what he was talking about. And having seen Godzilla Vs. Kong, I also understood his tone better. I got Adam’s whole vibe.

When he brought up Godzilla, I was like, oh my god, I’m exploding on the inside. There really wasn’t much information about what to do with Godzilla at the beginning. He said, “This is a mid-transformation. We want to see him evolve, but not too far.” I think that was really it. After that, I sat, and I went to work on it. Skar King was one of the first things that I did for the film. In fact, the order was Skar King, Suko, and then Godzilla. And so really, the process was very quick, especially with Godzilla.

My thought process really was, okay, this is a mid-transformation. We can’t change him too much. Because it’s got to be the Legendary Godzilla that we know and love. I couldn’t like change his whole face or change his whole look or anything like that, because it just wouldn’t make sense. Continuity was a part of kind of my thought process, making sure that it felt like Legendary’s Godzilla, but here’s the next stage of him. I think I knew from the story that he was just gonna get totally handed it, just completely beaten up. Or, that maybe Godzilla was a little bitter after his fight with Mechagodzilla and just totally aggressive. The other thing that I knew, was that he was molting throughout it, so he was going to be shedding like big chunks of skin, something like that. And so, I thought, okay, let’s expose the dorsal spines with something translucent. That was not a note or anything, that’s just kind of what I was thinking in my brain. Let’s expose the plates so we could see the veins underneath. I thought that translucency would look really cool in various lighting scenarios.

I remember looking at this model, and I’m like, man, how do you how do you update this? It felt like some kind of Herculean task — how do you change it just enough, so it’s recognizable, but not too far? remember thinking to myself, I’m gonna have to remember what I’m thinking about right now, because people are going to ask about it years down the road. The things I remember doing very specifically were adding the spikes on the cheeks and the spikes down the rows. I remember doing that and going like, yeah, that’s kind of cool. I added the spike beard look, because again, I’m running through 80’s movies. Godzilla’s going through his training montage, and he’s pissed off that Mechagodzilla just beat the snot out of them. He’s got a bigger challenge he’s got to face so he’s working out, he’s getting buff.

With the gut, I knew it was going to be controversial. I decided that the transformation was going to burn so many calories, he was going to lose the gut, and it was all going to shift to his back. All of that fuel from, from his extra fat and weight was going to fuel the transformation. You’ll see that I had him hunched over more, as well, because the weight on his back was pushing him down. So that was my logic, the transformation was going to burn an excessive amount of energy for him. Because usually, when you go through a transformation, it’s like a cocoon, you know, you have to expend a lot of energy to transform. And that’s what this mid-transformation was meant to be. It was an extraordinary amount of energy burned, so he could evolve into the next state.

I presented it, and I showed it side-by-side with the Legendary Godzilla. I was like, here’s GVK Godzilla and here’s the new Godzilla. And the “Evolved” thing was just something I wrote on the images that I don’t think they really intended to call this new incarnation “Godzilla Evolved.” That’s just what I wrote down. And I was like, Godzilla Evolved. There you go. Seeing that it’s stuck, I was like, oh my god, they used it. That’s the coolest thing. After that, I presented it to Adam and Tom, and Adam had some great notes. He wanted to add the elbow spikes and the thagomizer at the end of the tail. He liked the thagomizer because of what I did with Mecha G — he liked the spikes on the tail. I think it just gave him more stuff to play with in action sequences. I remember an old interview where someone had said that Godzilla looked like a Stegosaurus, and at the time, I was like, what the hell am I gotta put on the end of this thing? I thought of that, and thought, well, let’s come full circle with that.

JL: Regarding the new titan Shimo, in some of the art it kind of looks like Shimo is standing is in a bipedal stance, but in the film, it’s quadrupedal. Was there a different version in the concept stage? If I recall correctly, the original prompt was just “Ice Godzilla.”

JK: Initially, the prompt was just “Ice Godzilla.” And there was really no information beyond that and the name “Shimo.” Another artist, Simon Weber, had been working on it. And he did a very literal ice Godzilla. The work he did was great, and it was it was really, really cool. The initial versions I did were very dragon-y. Like I said, it takes me a couple of tries to get it right. I do remember them saying, like, it’s on all fours, but it can rear up, you know, occasionally, like a bear. So yeah, that was that was kind of the initial thought process with Shimo.

JL What kind of story were you telling when you designed Shimo?

JK: Shimo was hard to get right. It was a lot more challenging, I think, than anything else I’d done. With the last few, they were like do this, do that, and boom, there’s Suko. Same thing with Godzilla & Skar King. With Shimo, it took a lot of iteration to discover, which sometimes happens. It’s a discovery process. I’m grateful to Adam, because he was just like, let’s keep trying stuff. I would present my initial ideas, and then he would give feedback, such as I like this, or I like that. The thagomizer at the end of Shimo came from Simon, so Adam was like, I like that tail, put that on there. I didn’t have a set story for this particular Titan other than it, it had to be kind of ancient looking. I knew that much. It had to contrast Godzilla and be completely different looking. Some other notes that came from Adam and Tom were that it’s got this kind of like white, translucent pearlescent scaling, and things like that.

I tried a lot with ice horns on top of Shimo’s head, and I did one that that looked very chameleon, because I love the shape of chameleons faces. Adam pulled it up in the meeting, pointed to the shape of the face, and said, “I really like this. Let’s take away the horns, and let’s try it.” I did and I gave them that version. They dug it, they liked it a lot. I kept I did a few more where I kind of tweaked it a little bit more. At that point, most of the tweaks were just giving her ice spikes or different kinds of spike configurations. They settled on a face that they liked and then the rest was just kind of like we like this shape for the for the ice spikes in the head, this is cool, or stuff like that. There was a lot of little tweaks going on with that. By the end of the process, I fell in love with that shape. And I was like, man, if they really do this, it’s going to be really unique and really cool. It would contrast really well against Godzilla.

The thing that I seem to get wrong, most of the time is scale. Like, they made Mechagodzilla much bigger than Godzilla. And then, they made Shimo much bigger than Godzilla. In my initial designs against Godzilla, they felt more similar in terms of size. And so, once I saw kind of the final I was like, oh, man, they really made her bigger… much bigger!

JL: Is it true that part of “Godzilla Evolved” was partially influenced by Kaio-ken and Dragonball Z, in regard to the pink color and energy blasts?

JK: Well, the pink didn’t come from me, that kind of developed after me. I thought it was brilliant, though. But yes, my logic for the transformation was Kaio-ken. When Goku does Kaio-ken, it’s very taxing on him, but he gets that 20 times energy boost. So yeah, the philosophy of Kaio-ken was in there when I was working on it. I’m a nerd! Oh, man. I love Dragon Ball.

JL: Were there any other elements or philosophies influenced by Dragon Ball on your work?

JK: Not particularly. I was just applying the logic of like, when you go through a transformation, that it saps more of your energy. And then, you get the power boost, but it also drains you faster.?

JL: Can you briefly tell us about your Creature Corner livestreams?

JK: Creature corner is a weekly stream I do for Gnomon with my partner in crime, Matt Millard. And basically, we just go on live, and we just sculpt and talk industry, movies, creatures, whatever. We have guests on occasionally sculpting with us, some you may recognize, such as Dopepope. We just wanted to recreate the vibe of like, here’s what it was like working in the studio with us because Matt and I worked very closely in a studio for years. And it was just kind of hanging out with us. The other thing was to kind of like, pull back the veil on the creation process. Because a lot of the times, I go on the stream, and I just struggle. I want people to know that art doesn’t come easily. Some days we all struggle, and that’s a part of the process. We want to open that up and be realistic. Many times, at the end of these streams, I walk away like, well, I hate it, this pisses me off and. And then, we come back next week, and then we do it again. You know, so, so that’s something that we wanted to kind of share with people — art is not always pretty, that sometimes the process can be hard, and getting through that process is a part of what we talk about a lot.

JL: Lastly, Jared, we’ve talked about designing creatures and telling their stories… but what do monsters mean to you, in YOUR story?

JK: As far back as I can remember, I’ve always loved monsters. I think it’s a chance to express kind of our inner animal nature. It’s a mirror to our own animalistic instincts. What kid doesn’t want to be 400 feet tall and stomping on buildings? There’s something kind of primitive and primal about it. I talked about being bullied as a kid and stuff like that earlier. Picturing yourself as a monster and crushing your enemies is a little bit of wish fulfillment, I suppose. But also, monsters are kind of outsiders, as well. They’re strange, different, and unique. Those are all things that I felt growing up. So, identifying with the monster, in a way, you know, is something that people that feel like outsiders experience. Storytelling is the quintessential human experience, and monsters tell those stories.

JL: Thank you for hopping on and making the time to talk to Kaiju United.

JK: Thanks for having me. Thanks for all the great questions.