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The need to blur the line even further between the film’s human actors and their digital alter egos necessitated a level of detail beyond anything the Weta team had done in the past.
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In this film, there’s clearly dialogue where he needs to communicate his thoughts and intentions with the humans and there’s reasoned thought behind the action.” “He had not yet developed any kind of sophisticated communication, but gradually you saw him taking on this mantle of leadership. “In the previous film, Caesar mimed his way through a lot of it,” explained Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Joe Letteri in an interview with Variety. “They find a way to take the shapes and put them into the face of an Ape who doesn’t share the same anatomy.”Īs if that wasn’t a tall enough task, Weta also had to take the next logical, narrative step beyond Rise of the Planet of the Apes and give the film’s simian stars a level of sentience well beyond what was seen in its Oscar-nominated predecessor. This time around, the already impressive VFX techniques that turned motion-capture actor Andy Serkis into the intelligent ape Caesar had to bring an entire colony of apes to life – numbering well into the thousands – and do so while they were in their new, natural habitat: the rainy forests surrounding San Francisco. It wasn’t enough for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves and the visual-effects team at Weta Digital to simply add more apes to the mix in last year’s sequel. The film’s impressive performance made a sequel inevitable, and last year’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes picked up the story a decade after the events of its predecessor – and upped the ante in more ways than one. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was one of the surprise hits of 2011, managing to find success at both the box office and with critics and audiences alike. This time, we look at the (literally) groundbreaking effects that brought the Planet of the Apes franchise back into the Oscar picture with Weta Digital’s work on last year’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Previously, we looked at the face-mapping effects that made Falcon fly and Peggy Carter look her age in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In recognition of these five films and one of our favorite Oscar categories, we’re putting the spotlight on one “Visual Effects” nominee each day leading up to Sunday’s broadcast and taking a closer look at what made them stand out. Fitbit Versa 3įive films are nominated for an Academy Award in the “Visual Effects” category this year, and they each offer a nice look at the amazing tricks filmmakers and their effects teams can pull off on the big screen.
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