Rodan’s Epic Monarch Return & Kong’s Titan X Battle Broken Down by VFX Supervisor [Exclusive]

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The second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ended with a huge battle between Kong and Titan X on Skull Island. The two giants fought while Keiko raced around them in her jeep. Luckily, no creatures were harmed during filming – because they’re not real! Instead, VFX Supervisor Sean Konrad and his team used special effects to bring these massive monsters to life. Konrad is highly experienced, having worked as a VFX artist on the 2014 Godzilla movie and as a VFX Supervisor for its sequel, 2019’s King of the Monsters. He’s also contributed to films like Loki, The Witches, Deadpool 2, and Justice League. In the final moments of the season finale, titled ‘Where We Belong,’ Konrad introduced the famous winged Titan, Rodan.

Konrad recently discussed with ComicBook how he approaches analyzing a script, creating exciting fight scenes, bringing Rodan back to the screen, and which monsters he’d love to work with in the future.

The show Monarch consistently feels like a movie. Considering the season finale, just how many visual effects were used in that single episode?

I’m not entirely sure, but I’d estimate around 450. I’d need to double-check the details, though. That episode has a lot of large creature effects, but it also includes smaller, supporting visual elements – those are all part of what we do.

That’s a high number of shots for a TV series. Thinking back to your 2014 Godzilla movie, how many shots did that film require?

I worked at NBC on a lot of the creature effects – around 350 to 400 shots. Other companies contributed another 300 or so, plus some finishing work. Overall, we had about 3000 shots for the entire season. While that’s a significant number for a TV show, we prioritized spending our budget on the monster sequences. That meant carefully considering whether expensive things like set extensions were truly necessary, or if we could achieve the same impact by focusing our resources on the creatures themselves.

This week’s main event is the fight between Kong and Titan X. We’re curious about the creative process – how much of that battle was planned out in advance with storyboards, and how much room did you have to improvise? The scripts can sometimes be pretty simple, like just saying ‘Fight scene: Kong versus Titan X.’ So, how detailed were the instructions you received?

It’s a fascinating combination of preparation and improvisation. No matter how much you plan and visualize a scene, something unexpected always happens when you start filming, especially with something like a car chase. The actual location often presents limitations – or, sometimes, opens up exciting new possibilities. For example, discovering a skilled stunt driver could allow for incredible shots you hadn’t even imagined.

Much of the action’s success relies on close collaboration between the special effects, visual effects, and stunt teams to create a seamless flow. We then enhance the footage in post-production, focusing on key moments like Keiko’s chaotic driving sequence. We planned for specific beats – starting with Keiko, including a quick stop, a reverse maneuver, and a background pull – before transitioning to Cate, and culminating in the truck’s destruction and their escape.

The transition between those moments wasn’t exactly planned, but it wasn’t improvised either. The stunt team practiced it extensively. We wouldn’t have been able to storyboard or even realistically plan something like that beforehand; it was beyond our initial capabilities.

As a movie fan, I learned they were really giving the visual effects artists very specific guidelines. Like, they’d tell them exactly how a tentacle should move – its width, how far it would curve, and even how wide the animators needed to make those curves when they were creating the movement. It was all about giving them the right measurements to work with.

Once you gather all the necessary resources, you quickly realize they’re far more expensive than the entire episode’s budget. Then the challenge becomes adjusting the scope to fit what you can afford. You start thinking about small changes – like extending a scene with a quick shot of Keiko and some atmospheric dust – to maintain impactful moments without breaking the bank.

You know, after we finished filming and started really digging into the editing, we realized some of the biggest moments – Kong’s punches, Titanus Rex’s bites – just needed a little more impact. We wanted them to feel really visceral. It was something we discovered in post-production, realizing we needed those moments to really hit – like a strong punctuation mark in the scene. A lot of it was just feeling our way through, making dynamic adjustments as we went along.

Did they give you a time limit for the fight? Do they say, “It should be around four minutes?” 

A lot of our decisions were based on what we could realistically achieve within the given timeframe. We had a certain amount of work we could handle, considering both budget and logistics. We knew this would be the largest and most ambitious undertaking for the TV series to date.

We aimed for a truly original moment – someone driving directly beneath the legs of a Titan, something rarely, if ever, seen, especially within the Monsterverse. This was intended to be the film’s standout action sequence, and we were given full creative freedom to make it as spectacular as possible.

Right at the climax, this massive creature rises from a volcano. Having worked with the Monsterverse for a while, what was the experience of bringing Rodan into the Monarch universe like?

I really enjoyed working on that part of King of the Monsters – it’s a fantastic and exciting sequence. While it’s great, it’s a shame Rodan gets defeated so quickly. I found it really interesting to connect this story to the original Rodan film from Toho, as it’s a creature with a lot of mythology behind it. It was exciting to revisit and build upon that history, and I especially loved the creature’s design. I was lucky to collaborate with Pier Lefebvre, the VFX Supervisor at Radio FX, who also worked on that sequence for King of the Monsters. It was a wonderful way to continue the legacy of these monsters on screen.

Can you talk about your vision for Rodan’s design and what you wanted to achieve?   

The overall design remained largely the same. As is typical, we tested the visuals within the environment and made adjustments as needed. Pier was instrumental in implementing changes that helped the scene feel more fresh and innovative.

Essentially, the core design of the creature remained consistent. Our main focus was refining its performance and personality. Unlike in ‘King of the Monsters,’ Rodan isn’t constantly attacking, so we needed to develop behaviors for those quieter moments. We filled that time by creating unique character quirks and actions, ultimately leading to the idea of giving it a distinctive mouth movement.

It was a really enjoyable but challenging project, requiring a lot of effort. We reworked one camera movement about six times! We pushed our artists hard, and we appreciate all their dedication.

Assuming there is a third season, is there a monster you still want to tackle?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I haven’t really had a chance to fully explore Mothra as a creature – I did some work on the Mothra scenes in King of the Monsters, but it wasn’t enough hands-on time, and I’d love to dive deeper. I’m always fascinated by the monsters that aren’t necessarily the most popular, and how you could reimagine them for a modern audience. Of course, those kinds of decisions aren’t up to me – it’s really the writers and the people who own the franchise who get to decide which direction things go.

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2026-05-08 17:41