Uploaded November 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Unused and unfinished shots from youtu.be/zuZjDH181Yo
Hopefully this will give some insight to the creation of videos like this, including the work that you sometimes don't get to see the result of.
The baby Godzilla was originally purple and green but I thought it looked too colorful and made her look too much like SuperGodzilla. The second option was a more muted orange but it looked pink in the final render. So I gave her a white belly that accentuated the skin details without looking too bright.
Zilla's introduction took over a week to figure out. There were loads of other versions that I didn't render out, with the camera swirling and zooming all over the place. And abandoned idea was giving Zilla flashing dorsal spikes, which would have acted as an intimidation display but it ended up serving little purpose, and I thought the video already had enough garish bright colors.
The video's conclusion was going to be open-ended, with an entire horde of Zillas crawling out of the mountains, camouflaged so you could only see their glowing spikes encircling Kong and the baby. Then I decided to give them more of a triumphant, less ambiguous ending. The final shot in particular, in which the baby and Kong work together to dispatch the second Zilla, was a late idea. I contemplated leaving it out but I felt it would be nice to show the baby helping Kong as gratitude for saving her.
The exploding crystal mountain was another idea I almost rejected, and I only kept it because the first shot already set up the concept that the glowing rocks contained some form of volatile energy.
The hardest parts were figuring out how to get Kong airborne and how to conclude the fight in the gravity barrier. Many days, maybe even weeks were spent animating, deleting, re-animating and then again deleting these scenes. This was a serious roadblock that almost made me want to scrap the whole animation. I thought of Zilla coiling his tail around Kong's legs and flinging him around, or jumping at him from a low angle and launching him into the air, but that just looked weird. In another version that I didn't render, Zilla would have jumped up and twirled around to kick Kong in the face to send him stumbling, which looked too much like some kind of martial arts maneuver, not a move an animal would perform.
I tried so many angles for the shot of Kong snapping Zilla's arm. Wide shots made them look like toys suspended in the air, but close shots made it difficult to see their faces unless I moved the camera around. Kong was also going to kick Zilla in the groin and bite a chunk out of his neck, but these would have happened too quickly or disrupted the flow of their motion. Every time I thought I was making progress, I reconsidered the scene and scrapped it. I edited together like 3 or 4 different versions, some of which didn't include the arm-snapping. In one version, Zilla would have smashed Kong's head into the "ceiling", forcing Kong to swipe at Zilla's legs with his arms.
I had different ideas for Kong landing on the ground at the end without destroying his feet. One version would have been him landing on Zilla, making him explode in a huge burst of blood, which really would have been excessive. I also animated a version where Kong lands on all fours, which would honestly make more sense than the final version, but you could only see his legs and butt due to the angle of the shot. So I made him land on his feet in a more upright position to make his upper body visible. The pieces of the ground shaken up by Zilla's impact helped soften Kong's landing.
I also thought of Kong doing his usual jaw-tearing move on Zilla, like to how he dealt with the meat-eater in the 1933 original and the final V. rex in the 2005 film. But there was no need for it and it would have been an uncreative reference anyway. Kong inspecting the dead Zilla's jaw was enough of a reference, and even that is pretty on-the-nose. I wanted him to pound his chest in victory, though it would have served no point beyond being a sloppy callback to the movies. Kong was thinking about the baby's safety, not his dominance.
There were going to be more giant lizards on the ground as well, but it was already tedious to animate just two because there was so much other movement happening in this scene. The shot of the lizards inspecting Zilla's body was longer and they just looked around awkwardly, I trimmed it down to be less comical.
Another idea that went nowhere was having the first half of the fight take place on the "normal" ground and the second half would be shown upside down. As before, I couldn't find the opportune moment to make this happen. The monsters would have had to move around way too fast and the action would be unfollowable if I tried to squeeze all of this in.
The video was also going to use a much less edited version of Akira Ifukube's King Kong vs. Godzilla themes, but for copyright reasons the music had to be changed. That's why it sounds so off.
Unused and unfinished shots from youtu.be/zuZjDH181Yo
Hopefully this will give some insight to the creation of videos like this, including the work that you sometimes don't get to see the result of.
The baby Godzilla was originally purple and green but I thought it looked too colorful and made her look too much like SuperGodzilla. The second option was a more muted orange but it looked pink in the final render. So I gave her a white belly that accentuated the skin details without looking too bright.
Zilla's introduction took over a week to figure out. There were loads of other versions that I didn't render out, with the camera swirling and zooming all over the place. And abandoned idea was giving Zilla flashing dorsal spikes, which would have acted as an intimidation display but it ended up serving little purpose, and I thought the video already had enough garish bright colors.
The video's conclusion was going to be open-ended, with an entire horde of Zillas crawling out of the mountains, camouflaged so you could only see their glowing spikes encircling Kong and the baby. Then I decided to give them more of a triumphant, less ambiguous ending. The final shot in particular, in which the baby and Kong work together to dispatch the second Zilla, was a late idea. I contemplated leaving it out but I felt it would be nice to show the baby helping Kong as gratitude for saving her.
The exploding crystal mountain was another idea I almost rejected, and I only kept it because the first shot already set up the concept that the glowing rocks contained some form of volatile energy.
The hardest parts were figuring out how to get Kong airborne and how to conclude the fight in the gravity barrier. Many days, maybe even weeks were spent animating, deleting, re-animating and then again deleting these scenes. This was a serious roadblock that almost made me want to scrap the whole animation. I thought of Zilla coiling his tail around Kong's legs and flinging him around, or jumping at him from a low angle and launching him into the air, but that just looked weird. In another version that I didn't render, Zilla would have jumped up and twirled around to kick Kong in the face to send him stumbling, which looked too much like some kind of martial arts maneuver, not a move an animal would perform.
I tried so many angles for the shot of Kong snapping Zilla's arm. Wide shots made them look like toys suspended in the air, but close shots made it difficult to see their faces unless I moved the camera around. Kong was also going to kick Zilla in the groin and bite a chunk out of his neck, but these would have happened too quickly or disrupted the flow of their motion. Every time I thought I was making progress, I reconsidered the scene and scrapped it. I edited together like 3 or 4 different versions, some of which didn't include the arm-snapping. In one version, Zilla would have smashed Kong's head into the "ceiling", forcing Kong to swipe at Zilla's legs with his arms.
I had different ideas for Kong landing on the ground at the end without destroying his feet. One version would have been him landing on Zilla, making him explode in a huge burst of blood, which really would have been excessive. I also animated a version where Kong lands on all fours, which would honestly make more sense than the final version, but you could only see his legs and butt due to the angle of the shot. So I made him land on his feet in a more upright position to make his upper body visible. The pieces of the ground shaken up by Zilla's impact helped soften Kong's landing.
I also thought of Kong doing his usual jaw-tearing move on Zilla, like to how he dealt with the meat-eater in the 1933 original and the final V. rex in the 2005 film. But there was no need for it and it would have been an uncreative reference anyway. Kong inspecting the dead Zilla's jaw was enough of a reference, and even that is pretty on-the-nose. I wanted him to pound his chest in victory, though it would have served no point beyond being a sloppy callback to the movies. Kong was thinking about the baby's safety, not his dominance.
There were going to be more giant lizards on the ground as well, but it was already tedious to animate just two because there was so much other movement happening in this scene. The shot of the lizards inspecting Zilla's body was longer and they just looked around awkwardly, I trimmed it down to be less comical.
Another idea that went nowhere was having the first half of the fight take place on the "normal" ground and the second half would be shown upside down. As before, I couldn't find the opportune moment to make this happen. The monsters would have had to move around way too fast and the action would be unfollowable if I tried to squeeze all of this in.
The video was also going to use a much less edited version of Akira Ifukube's King Kong vs. Godzilla themes, but for copyright reasons the music had to be changed. That's why it sounds so off.
