Weta Digital’s track record of successful showings at the VES Awards continued with the recent announcement of this year’s nominees. Based in Wellington, NZ, Weta was the lead visual effects house on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which topped the VES’ VFX-driven, live-action feature film field with five nominations. (Also receiving five noms apiece were the animated film contenders Big Hero 6 and The Boxtrolls.)
Meanwhile, tallying four noms in the effects-driven, live-action feature arena was The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in which Weta also figured prominently. The four Hobbit nominations are for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Photoreal/Live Action Feature; Outstanding Models in any Motion Media Project; Outstanding Effects Simulations in a Photoreal/Live Action Feature Motion Picture; and Outstanding Compositing in a Photoreal/Live Action Feature Motion Picture.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ five VES nominations are for: Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Photoreal/Live Action Feature Motion Picture; two in the category Outstanding Performance of an Animated Character in a Photoreal/Live Action Feature Motion Pictures (one for the Caesar character, the other for Koba); Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in a Photoreal/Live Action Motion Media Project; and Outstanding Compositing in a Photoreal/Live Action Feature Motion Picture.
Additionally, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes earned a Best Visual Effects Oscar nomination this month, following in the footsteps of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which scored its Visual Effects Academy Award nom in 2012. Among the Weta artisans on both Oscar-nominated Apes films was visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon.
Lemmon over the years has played a role in several of the VES nominations and awards earned by Weta, including Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2012 (winner of Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature); Avatar in 2010 (nominated for Outstanding Created Environment in a Feature); Travelers “Snowball” ad in 2007 (winner of Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial); and King Kong in 2006 (winner for Outstanding Created Environment in a Live-Action Motion Picture.
Similarly Weta has over the years won five Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), King Kong (2005), and Avatar (2009).
Lemmon served in varied capacities on these films, including as 3D sequence lead technical director on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 3D sequence supervisor on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, digital effects supervisor on King Kong, and VFX supervisor on Avatar.
Creative challenges
SHOOT connected with Lemmon to gain insights into Weta’s Oscar- and VES Award-nominated work on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. As the film’s overall VFX supervisor, he related, “There were two big challenges for us on Dawn. We had done a bit of on-set performance capture on Rise, but they were fairly friendly locations. About two-thirds of the first movie was shot on stages, and the other third was shot on easily accessible locations in good weather. Dawn took us deep into the woods, up the sides of mountains, slogging through knee deep mud and driving rain. That was a challenge for our performance capture equipment, and we had to re-engineer much of it to stand up to the rigors and logistical challenges of these more-remote, less-hospitable locations.
“The second big challenge was that there were many more characters in this film that would need to emote at a much more sophisticated level than in Rise, and there was a lot more ape talking than before. We had to subtly redesign many of the major apes’ faces and extend their facial animation rigs so that they could perform at the level Dawn required. That also meant casting a new crop of talented actors to play principal apes that weren’t in the first movie. We had to study their faces and their performances, and working out the best ways to make the expressions on the apes’ faces match the actors’ faces while still looking completely like real apes."
Regarding how valuable their experience on Rise was to Lemmon and his team on Dawn, he shared, “Our technology was pretty “bleeding-edge” on Rise. We were inventing new equipment as we went along, making adjustments as things came up in the field. We learned a lot in the process, and so we had a bunch of ideas on how to make everything work better on Dawn. That’s one of the great things about these kinds of films: you never stop learning, and you’re constantly looking for ways to make things better.”
The learning curve also figured in the transition from director Rupert Wyatt on Rise to director Matt Reeves on Dawn. “I think there were fewer teething pains on Dawn,“ observed Lemmon. “The on-set performance capture technology was quite a bit more mature, and we’d learned a lot in postproduction as well. Figuring out how to translate human facial expressions on to ape faces took a lot of artist-hours and iterations. We learned a ton from the process on “Rise” in terms of what worked well and what didn’t, so when it came time to do “Dawn” even though there were many more characters and a lot more talking, we’d already figured out a lot of the creative problems. So in that sense, I think Matt was benefiting from some of the groundwork we’d laid out with Rupert in the first film. But the scope of Matt’s movie was a good deal larger, with more challenging locations and a sprawling story with many important ape characters that needed to do some pretty sophisticated acting.”
Getting the gig
As for how Weta got the opportunity to work on the Apes movies, Lemmon recalled, “We were just coming off Avatar when Fox approached Weta about an idea they had to reboot the Planet of the Apes franchise with an origin story. We were all big fans of the original films—many of us grew up watching them and we had a lot of respect for the pioneering effects and makeup work that had gone into making those movies. This origin story, though, would require a different approach. We were setting out to tell the story of how present-day apes grew to become superintelligent and the dominant species on planet Earth. Those apes would need to look indistinguishable from the apes audiences would be familiar with from the zoo or nature documentaries. We couldn’t use actors in furry suits and rubber masks—their proportions would just be too different from real animals, and they wouldn’t be able to move or climb like real chimps. So we proposed using performance capture, using actors to drive the digital characters.
The digital characters’ facial expressions and body movements would match what the actors would be doing on set, but of course their appearance would be very different.
“The big challenge, though, was that up to this point we’d primarily been doing performance capture on dedicated stages,” continued Lemmon. ”For the Apes movies, we needed to do performance capture on working film sets. That’s where we started having to invent new equipment and processes.”
Weta did 98 percent of the visual effects work on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. There was some removal cleanup work—about 40 shots—that was done by Exceptional Minds in L.A., and Stereo D converted a handful of shots that, for a variety of reasons, weren’t shot in native stereo.
Lemmon described the collaboration with director Reeves as being gratifying. “Matt is a brilliant director and an absolute pleasure to work with,” assessed Lemmon. “He is a passionate movie lover and throughout the production he was constantly referencing films from every era of cinema. In one conversation we’d jump from The Godfather to Akira Kurosawa to The Empire Strikes Back to Wong Kar-wai. He is decisive and consistent and unequivocal in his love for some things and his hate for others.
And he really pushed realism, which might seem out of place in a movie about talking apes, but it was actually really important and I think one of the keys to the success of the film. He mentioned to me that when he’s making movies, he’s constantly asking himself, ‘Do I believe this?’ Whether it’s the lighting, the acting, the sound or the visual effects, he is trying to create a world that is credible and effortless to believe. When every component of the film has been considered and crafted to tell the audience ‘this is real,’ that is a huge help to us in the visual effects department. When we get asked to break physics or to do something that couldn’t possibly be photographed, it’s a lot harder to get the audience to stay engaged and believe that what’s up on the screen is the truth.
