Takashi Yamazaki on making the VFX working conditions as comfortable as possible for ‘GODZILLA MINUS ONE’.
“We made it more comfortable & cozy; we spent some budget building out a kitchen. We have a designated sushi chef in the kitchen. We really try to avoid long hours, but if… pic.twitter.com/UeCq6abDFs
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) February 9, 2024
– He confirmed Godzilla Minus One had a budget between 10 and 15 million.
– On the workload needed to make a movie that cheap: Outsourcing to a third party is going to take time and money. We tend to keep it in-house. That’s just the most efficient and effective way to work. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have some external resources that we use. For example, the matte artists or miniature artists. We also have project-based freelance artists who have worked with us for many years. I would say, in this case, maybe one-third of the end-team-member count was freelance folks. We don’t always have 35 full-time employees in this office.Being able to be on-site and interact with the artists right then and there and having that feedback loop is very effective for us. As I said earlier, when I’m the director and the supervisor and I have this vision in my head that is so solid, it eliminates the need for outsourcing and saying, “Oh, that’s not what we thought we were going to get.” It’s very solidified upfront. If we didn’t have that workflow, I think we would go in circles and go back and forth, and that’s when you end up wasting a little bit of time and money here and there.
There’s one thing that we use as a best practice, in-house. We call it the second-round or second-cycle rule. Think of it as if you’re a track-and-field athlete. The first loop, you just run as fast as you can. But on the second round, you want to improve. So we do the first round. Let’s do everything that we feel that we want to. Just get it in. Then we take a step back and look at that and say, “We can do better here,” or “Let’s correct here,” or “What about this?” Then we give the artist maybe about a month to do that in the second round. And that’s pretty much it, at that point. Of course, when you let artists loose they want to do so much, so we give that opportunity to them during the first round, but then during the second round we say “Okay, you have approximately a month to work on it.” That’s the approach that we take.
– On the claims the Vfx artists were exploited: “In Japan, we literally call a company “white” or “black.” “White” is a company that doesn’t exploit its employees and “black” is one that makes you work overnight at all hours and really doesn’t pay you well. Our studio name is Shirogumi (“white team”), so we want to believe we are setting up standards and an environment that is very workable for all the artists and everyone who is with us here today. As a creative myself but also an employer of creatives, I feel like what they make is so beautiful, and I hope and wish I would be able to pay our staff members better, at some point.
We made it more comfortable & cozy; we spent some budget building out a kitchen. We have a designated sushi chef in the kitchen. We really try to avoid long hours, but if you do, it’s a very welcoming environment in which to spend a few extra hours.
Sure, it might be challenging at times when we’re in a crunch or postproduction and need to get our work done. We try not to do late nights. We have all of our weekends off… Hopefully, in due time, VFX budget increases will allow for more improvements. I am looking forward to the day when we can pay creatives more.”
– On Being Oscar Nominated: “As a person who’s born in Japan, the Oscars — anything that’s in Hollywood, anything that’s in the West — is something that we feel like is just out of reach, unobtainable, and is not something that will happen. It will never come true… Maybe domestic awards, similar to the Oscars’ level. That would be a great goal to set.”
