‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ VFX team captures ‘the soul of the performances’ as primates develop a spoken language
Over the course of four films, the reinvigorated “Planet of the Apes” franchise has become synonymous with photoreal digital effects which bring the titular primates to life. Visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist asserts that his team’s job is to connect audiences with “the soul of the performances.” In the fourth film, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” that soul is captured clearer than ever. Gold Derby recently sat down with Winquist, animation supervisor Paul Story, head of facial motion Stuart Adcock, and sequence VFX supervisor Stephen Unterfranz, who walked us through the painstaking detail required to create these digital creatures. Watch the video interview above.
“Kingdom” is set some 300 years after the events of the third film, and by this point the primates have evolved from using sign language to having a robust spoken language. “They’re speaking now,” says Winquist of the apes, “but biology still doesn’t make it easy for them like it would for a human being.” So it was essential for the effects team to take their cues from the actors, who all learned their controlled ape movements and language from former series star Andy Serkis. “It’s often about restraint with animation,” notes Adcock, “the actors actually do a lot of that in their own performances.”
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The team uses two setups to get to the final product. “It’s key that we get that emotional performance through first,” explains Story in reference to the actors. That performance is then processed through a facial “solver” to help attach it to a digital character puppet. “Apes don’t have eyebrows, they don’t have classic brow muscles like we do,” continues Adcock, referencing one of the many animation challenges. “So we have to look at all these ideas of, okay, how do we have the empathy in Noah where we might not read his brows as clearly, but we can see the pull on his eyelids and we can read the white of his eyes.” A single character puppet goes through “months of evolution” before reaching the final product audiences see on screen.
The team also faced a major artistic challenge courtesy of two epic water-based scenes: a skirmish atop some raging rapids and the climactic battle in a flooded ape city. Luckily, many members of this Weta FX team had for years explored the dynamics of soaking wet characters while creating effects for “Avatar: The Way of Water.” But the highly emotional, and exceedingly hairy, ape characters “pushed the technology further” than they had ever taken it, according to Winquist.
In order to convincingly make each water droplet and rivulet react to each strand of hair, every single VFX department had to work together in unity. “You kind of skin the onion,” admits Unterfranz, as he reveals the level of detail his team waded through, down to the precise level of aeration as water levels change. “You see the hand of the artist in the shot,” he explains, “they’re painting through two different renders to get that transition from more to less aerated just right. So it’s like all the technology is this whole big scaffold, but still standing on the top of the scaffold is an artist…to push it over the edge.”
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