‘Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes’: Weta FX VFX Supervisor Erik Winquist Uses New Tech For Added Realism
Weta FX’s work on 20th Century Studio’s “Planet of the Apes” franchise reboot continued to evolve in 2024’s Wes Ball-helmed “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” which introduces a new cast including Noa (Owen Teague), Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham). The trio are pictured in this image, hanging out in the late afternoon sun.
“Our three actors worked with Wes Ball until they arrived at something that adds a wonderful depth to the relationship between these three friends,” says Weta FX VFX supervisor Erik Winquist. Before they got to that point, as part of their preparation, the actors attended “ape camp,” and Andy Serkis, who played Caesar in the three previous movies, visited with them to share some pointers.
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The performance capture data was then used by the Weta FX artists to translate the actors’ work into ape form. Building on tech advances from the previous “Apes” trilogy and “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Weta FX aimed to create even more realistic apes, including with the use of dual-camera facial rigs to capture performance with greater fidelity than the previous films in the franchise, as well as evolving software for tasks such as muscle simulation, facial animation and grooming.
A newer tool called Deep Shapes, Winquist explains, gave the artists a machine learning process that was a sort of additional layer to the artist’ work “to bring in lots of really subtle additional wrinkling and just give you a better sense of the tissue that makes up the face, [such as] the eye bags. The skin here is a lot thinner, a lot more malleable. It wrinkles more easily.”
Winquist notes that the team drew on references from nature for skin textures and the look of hair. Costume pieces, he adds, were built by Weta Workshop and then matched in the digital realm by Weta FX artists.
This movie takes place in an overgrown world set several generations after Caesar’s reign and was shot primarily on location in Australia, with environments often augmented digitally or, in some cases, fully digital in the final shots.
Winquist believes shooting on location also aided the actors, who could “just take in the space and really feel like they’re someplace, not a greenscreen stage. And it’s such a distinctive part of the look of this movie; we’ve got so many of these scenes that are out in this hot sunshine,” he says. Winquist relates that in the pictured image, the actual sun had already dipped behind the escarpment of the loca- tion and the sun on the trees was movie lighting. “The sun on the apes was added by Weta FX to provide separation from the background and convey a distinct time of day,” he explains.
The movie was lensed by cinematographer Gyula Pados with an ARRI Alexa LF using Panavision anamorphic lenses from the late ’60s and early ’70s to capture the period of the original movies, which was also a VFX consideration. Says Winquist, “We went to great lengths to match the optical signature of [the lenses] when adding the rendered apes into clean live action plates.”
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