"One of their goals was to bring Godzilla's roar into the real world, so the sound designers set up a 12-foot-high, boulevard-wide sound system on a street on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. Blasting the roar through 100,000-watt speakers lined in an array, they recorded the reverberations from a number of angles, such as inside cars, behind store windows, in alleyways. It not only rattled pipes and rooftops but could be heard up to three miles away."
Like his human co-stars, Godzilla’s soul is etched in his face. While the new incarnation hews closely to the dimensions of his short, steep skull, broad snout and carnivore’s mouth, to imbue it with a full range of expression in battle, the filmmakers studied the faces of dogs and bears, while also incorporating the nobility of an eagle.
To direct the character on the subtleties of performance, Edwards had a powerful assist from Rygiel’s “The Lord of the Rings” collaborator, performance capture pioneer Andy Serkis, who has brought his unique art form to digital characters like Gollum, Caesar and King Kong, and helped shape the title character’s emotional arc.
“At the start of the process, I felt that in some way we could decide and control who Godzilla was,” Edwards reflects, “but, as we went along, we started to realize that Godzilla was going to tell us who he was, just like actors who have their own take on their characters. We couldn’t totally dictate what it was going to be; it was more about just trying different ideas and permutations. And, slowly, he revealed himself to us."