Godzilla: King of the Monsters × Diesel Brothers

Putting the monster in monster trucks

Warner Bros. wanted Godzilla: King of the Monsters inside Discovery’s Diesel Brothers. Our answer: let Heavy D and Diesel Dave build their own titans.

01The brief

The integration led into Diesel Brothers: Monster Jump LIVE on Discovery and ran the week of May 27, 2019, tagged “Godzilla: King of the Monsters. In theaters everywhere Thursday.” The package: an integrated :30 tune-in, two :30 custom vignettes and a :10 bump.

The Heavy D-Zilla monster truck mech in a smashed arena beneath a Godzilla billboard — **From the spots**Heavy D-Zilla in the arena

02The idea: monster-truck titans

Our creative outline started with a simple premise: Heavy D and Diesel Dave talk through building their own Godzilla-inspired monster-truck mechs, and CGI brings them to life. Heavy D gets Heavy D-Zilla. Dave gets Diesel Ghidorah, three heads and all.

A three-headed, fire-breathing, wing-sporting dragon monstrosity!Diesel Dave, Vignette A

The titans smash through the walls of the garage, and green screen puts the brothers inside a pulverized arena built to echo the fight stages from the film.

Diesel Dave with arms crossed in front of the spiked Diesel Ghidorah mech — **From the spots**Diesel Dave and Diesel Ghidorah

Heavy D standing in front of the glowing Heavy D-Zilla mech — **From the spots**Heavy D and Heavy D-Zilla

03Two days, two worlds

We photographed the garage as background plates on a pre-shoot day, then brought Heavy D and Diesel Dave onto a green screen stage on March 28, 2019. We shot single camera at 8K on RED, with a teleprompter for the to-camera callouts and playback of the talent over our 3D environments, so every camera position and frame matched the world the trucks would live in.

A monitor showing a top-down shot of the two talent on green screen — **Behind the scenes**The top-down shot, checked on playback

Heavy D and Diesel Dave composited into the garage plate — **Behind the scenes**Green screen talent comped into the garage plate

04Building the titans

Both trucks were modeled and animated in Cinema 4D: Heavy D-Zilla with plasma blasts and glowing spines, Diesel Ghidorah with three spiked heads and fire breath. Then the edit put the brothers at the controls for a full titan brawl.

The two monster-truck titans fighting in a wrecked arena — **From the spots**The titan brawl

Heavy D-Zilla firing a blue plasma blast in the arena — **From the spots**Plasma blast

05The package

Everything below is in the slider at the top of this page:

Tune-In :30Heavy D and Dave tease the titans ahead of Diesel Brothers: Monster Jump LIVE.
Vignette A :30Monster Truck Titans: Heavy D-Zilla and Diesel Ghidorah crash through the garage.
Vignette B :30The brothers take the controls and the titans battle it out.
Bump :10“Don’t go anywhere.” A roar sends Discovery into the break.

Godzilla × Diesel Brothers

Every spot in one reel