VFX artists vs. The Golden Gate:
McMurry recalls plenty of discussion about adhering to any ‘real’ physics if that event actually happened. “There was a very fun debate about what would happen if the center broke. Some people said, ‘Well, these towers, since they’re under stress, they would just go immediately back out this way.’ We did some tests but then we said, ‘Well, that looks stupid.’” […]
“We were always scaling things up and down, cheating gravity stronger or weaker, just to make everything feel like it had the right scale but wasn’t too slow to maintain the excitement. The destruction simulations were tweaked just to look good. They’re not based on any mechanical analysis of material strengths.”
“The bridge attack is one of the biggest cheats in the whole show,” adds Knoll. “The nominal size for the Kaijus and Jaegers was around 250 feet tall, and we tried to stay around that where we could. The roadway of the Golden Gate Bridge is around 230 feet above the water, so the Kaiju in those shots is cheated up to around 700 feet tall!” […]
Godzilla’s interaction with the bridge – despite ultimately breaking through it – remains somewhat low-key. "In the movie, notes Bonami, “the cables are grabbed, shaken and cut. In reality if one of those cables were cut, the bridge would swing and if Godzilla were to walk thought it the effect on the bridge would be devastating. Our challenge was therefore to downplay the physics but also to try and maintain realism.”
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