SPECIAL-EFFECTS WIZARDS FROM `ID4' DO IT AGAIN.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

To build a better beast for their new, $100 million-plus ``Godzilla'' movie, director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin turned to two of the talents that helped make their previous movie, ``Independence Day,'' an international phenomenon.

Visual-effects supervisor Volker Engel won an Oscar for overseeing ``ID4's'' computer-generated (CG) images and has worked with Emmerich since 1990, when they made the outer-space thriller ``Moon 44'' in their native Germany. Production and creature-effects designer Patrick Tatopoulos built ``ID4's'' aliens and has worked on such films as ``Dark City,'' ``Jumanji'' and Emmerich's ``Stargate.''

A fan of the radioactive thunder lizard since childhood, Tatopoulos conceived the new Godzilla's look, and his company built the mechanical, miniature monster models. It's a testament to the project's sheer hugeness that one of these ``miniatures'' - a computer-operated, 1/6 scale, hydraulics-loaded 'Zilla head and upper torso - topped out at 35 feet, the largest such mechanical device ever made for a movie, according to the designer.

But first came the all-important look.

``When I started sketching, my designs were too influenced by the old Godzilla movies,'' recalls Tatopoulos, who attended every Japanese monster movie he could find while growing up in Greece and France. ``One morning though, I just woke up with an idea that I liked.

``It was a combination of my memory of what certain reptiles look like - and Godzilla himself. Roland wanted the creature to be more like an animal than a monster, but I felt that we weren't here to do another `Jurassic Park,' creature-wise. We didn't need a new dinosaur; I wanted something more along the lines of a dragon - but with realistic musculature and scales and such.''

Whatever he looked like, the movie's Godzilla, at a head-to-toe height of 200 feet, was too big to build. And even though the 1/6-scale upper body had thousands of moving parts and was incredibly fast for its size, it couldn't deliver the lightning swift animal moves Emmerich wanted - and probably would have killed everyone on the set if it had. So CG was deployed even more extensively than originally planned.

``We wound up with around 90 percent CG special effects, and the rest was animatronic stuff,'' Emmerich explains. ``For example, `Lost World' was about 50-50, `Jurassic Park' was more like 60-40 in favor of mechanical over computer stuff. But dinosaurs have a certain size; Godzilla is just too big. Even certain parts of his body, all we could build were downscaled versions of his mouth and stuff like that. They were huge, but could not be as huge as his would be.''

Tall order

The extensive use of CG required Engel to act almost as an associate director, kibbitzing on everything from the framing of New York street scenes to the helicopter shots that give us the monster's eye-view of the puny human world.

``I was on the live-action locations all the time,'' Engel says. ``After Roland would discuss a scene with Matthew Broderick or Hank Azaria, he'd turn to me and ask me where to place the camera, the fog, the rain rigs. There was always this exchange of information happening all the time.''

And a lot of information it was, since Emmerich insisted on shooting on the run, instead of with the locked-down cameras traditionally employed for effects scenes.

``I wanted to shoot this with Steadicam, with handheld cameras, with helicopters, from picture vehicles, from moving cranes,'' the director says. ``And the computer animators had to track all that stuff.''

The constantly changing backgrounds and perspectives such fluid footage would create compounded the already complicated task of compositing computer-generated creatures and vehicles into the shots.

To help keep the virtual Godzilla on the same scale as his 3-D environment, an architectural surveying tool made by Germany's cutting-edge Zeiss optical company was used to measure spacial relationships during the live-action shoot.

That data was later fed into newly developed tracking software, which then enabled Godzilla to convincingly boogaloo down Broadway.

Even with all this technology, making the CG Godzilla look alive came down to a typical process of artistic experimentation.

``It took months and months and months of trial and error to get the creature's moves nailed down,'' Engel explains. ``It took quite a lot of development to keep this creature as huge as it is but have it look sleek and make it fast at the same time and still have a proper sense of weight to it.'' All of which means Godzilla should look pretty cool. But what about the part everyone is REALLY curious about? All the filmmakers and billboards refer to Godzilla as a male. But we also know that he(?) somehow gets pregnant.

So what, exactly, does the big critter have down (or, from our puny human point of view, up) there?

``I'm not saying!'' Emmerich shouts emphatically. ``It's like with `The Crying Game.' You don't want to give certain things away.''

Interesting choice of movie comparisons. Maybe Engel can elaborate.

``Oh, the unit,'' the effects supervisor says with deadpan panache. ``That's more of a running gag. It's like what you'd see on a crocodile or something like that, just part of the creature design. It actually doesn't really matter that much in the movie.''

But don't the ads say size does matter?

``You don't necessarily see much,'' designer Tatopoulos explains, somewhat apologetically. ``It would have been hard to sell the studio on really defined genitals, because most of the shots are underneath the creature, looking up.

``So there's nothing too prominent - but there are protuberances there.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Color) Visual-effects supervisor Volker Engel, who won an Oscar for ``ID4,'' has worked with director Roland Emmerich for eight years.

(2) Production and creature-effects designer Patrick Tatopoulos' credits include ``ID4'' and ``Jumanji.''

(3) The animatronic Godzilla is the largest ever built for a film.