Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Team on Weta FX’s Latest Tech and the Most Challenging Sequences
It took a village of storytellers to bring “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” to life.
At the heart of it all was VFX house Wētā, which had a crew of over 1000 artists working on delivering 1500 visual effects shots. The film, which won Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature at the Visual Effects Society Awards, is also nominated for an Oscar in the VFX category.
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Speaking at the Variety FYC screening, presented by 20th Century Studios, VFX supervisor Erik Winquist explained how performance capture technology had advanced since the last film, “War of the Planet of the Apes.” Over six years, tech advancements allowed Winquist and his team to give the apes even more realistic features. He explained, “All the advancements had been brought into the mix. Instead of using a single camera on active spaces, we’re using a pair of cameras that allowed us to get a 3D mesh of their faces at 48 frames a second.”
In the previous trilogy, apes communicated via sign language. This time, the apes are the superior beings and speak English after the majority of humans have been wiped out. The story follows Owen Teague as Noa, a young chimpanzee who is forced on a journey of self-discovery after his village comes under attack. Winquist said, “All of that had to be worked through as a facial animation process. It meant they (the animators) could focus all of the time that they had on these shots, to get every little nuance of facial expressions and all these micro-movements in the facial muscles of our actors and translate that.”
The software could push the visual effects of the film further than ever before.
In addition to capturing the actor’s performances, the film features scenes with fire, water and even birds, all of which Winquist’s team had to translate. Luckily for Winquist, there was a process in place for water effects. “We had a framework in place, and we had artists that knew how to work these tools. So, whatever this story was going to throw at us, we were going to be able to figure it out.”
Director Wes Ball, whose credits include “The Maze Runner” and the upcoming live-action adaptation of “The Legend of Zelda,” found working with Winquist and the team to be “an amazing learning experience.”
By setting the story 300 years in the future, he could abandon the characters audiences had fallen in love with. “It opened up so much new territory for us…and opens up a new door that we can explore moving forward.”
As for working with Winquist and Weta’s technology, Ball says, “There are CG horses standing next to real ones and you can’t know the difference.”
While the action sequences such as the flood proved to be a challenge, the quieter moments also required work. In one scene, the apes have a dinner, each with their own agenda, Proximus (Kevin Durand) wants to evolve his feudal realm with long-lost hardware, while Noa (Owen Teague) wants his family back. “We have just over 1500 visual effect shots in the movie, and only 30 shots have no visual
effects,” Winquist said.
Ball added, “What that means is that we have a complicated hold on the shot for a long time. You can’t break away. You have to hold that spell, as long as you can, and not break it. “We can’t have a single moment where the performance breaks, because otherwise the magic is broken and people get taken out of the film.”
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