Page 21 - 3D World - October 2017

Feature
Journey’s end

All of the human location, location, location
actors are replaced
with digital When live-action shots just aren’t possible,
representations of it falls into the hands of the cg artists to
the apes create environments

In addition to all of the live-action photography,
CG augmentation was needed for building
A close-up shot of environments. “The Hidden Fortress is one of our
the motion capture big environments in the film,” remarks Weta Digital
performers travelling Visual Effects Supervisor, Dan Lemmon. “A portion
through the harsh of the exterior we shot in British Columbia but we
winter environment ended up digitally adding the waterfall and all of the
interior. The baskets, totems, sconces and torches
were built off of designs or pieces that the prop
master or set decorator had put together with the
production designer.” A significant element that
needed to be simulated was the waterfall. “A big part
of making it feel believable had to do with building
the terrain underneath the waterfall, such as the
rocks, channels, and interruptions the water flows
over. By making the surface underneath the waterfall
bumpy enough in the right places, you can get
behaviour that looks realistic.”
That wasn’t the only challenge. “The prison camp
was a big set out in the middle of an empty lot near
the airport in Vancouver,” reveals Dan. “It would have
been several hundred metres in each direction. But
even that was only a fraction of the size the prison
camp was supposed to be. We had several walls
of big green screen surrounding that set. This was
the first time I worked with inflatable green screen
walls. They go up quick, stand up against winds, and
are smooth. Ours were 50 feet high and 100 feet
long, stacked side by side. Then on top of that we
used cherry picker lifts to extend the green screen
to be 100 feet tall. Even that wasn’t tall enough
to cover the whole set.” The foreground plate
featured the human actors and the motion capture
performers playing the apes. “We sent an aerial unit
to Witney Portal in California and then we built our
environment based on a lot of that photography.”

in those kinds of environments,” technical challenge because of
remarks Joe. “Caesar was at home, the complexity of the fur system,”
in an office building and outdoors remarks Dan. “Each ape has
for a little bit. On the second film millions of individual hairs on their
Matt Reeves [Let Me In] pushed body and in some cases as much
it. He took it out to the wet forest. as five million to 10 million; that’s
We had to deal with the water a whole lot of processing you have
interaction and more elements. to do to make each of those hairs
In this third film, Matt took it as move around and dynamically
far as he could. This is a harsh adjust to the wind, motion of the
environment. We were shooting ape, pick up snow and release
out in the snow and looking at snow.” Snow can be powdery, wet,
what that’s doing to the actors heavy, sticky, and crusty. “Often
and thinking how are we going to times you’ll get mixes of different
transfer that to the behaviour the kinds of snow within the same
apes need to have and how that environment,” explains Dan. “You
snow cumulates with the fur.” might have a great setup that
Over half of War for the does a particular kind of snow but
Planet of the Apes takes place in having to match into the live-action
snowy environments. “It’s a big footage means that you need to

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