Tag: Weta Digital

One of the earliest visual effects shots Weta Digital delivered to “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” director Rupert Wyatt was a closeup of the film’s lead chimp, Caesar (Andy Serkis), in a moment of guilt and confusion. Born with hyper-intelligence thanks to an Alzheimer’s drug and raised by humans, Caesar had just tapped into his ape instinct and rampaged violently through a suburban neighborhood. Serkis filmed the scene wearing a motion capture suit and head rig, and it was up to the artists at Weta to retain the look of contrition and bewilderment on his face while turning him into a chimpanzee. “We needed the audience to understand what Caesar was feeling with no dialogue,” said Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor at Weta. “Andy had delivered the performance with his eyes, with his whole body, and we ...

In “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” a reboot of the sci-fi franchise due in theaters Aug. 5, a scientist’s attempt to cure Alzheimer’s disease leads to the development of some highly intelligent — and dangerous — apes. A new app 20th Century Fox has released for iPhones and iPads makes that fantastical premise seem a lot more plausible. The app includes a game in which a user has the choice of playing the “easy,” “hard” or most difficult “ape” level. The game is based on a short-term memory test conducted at Kyoto University in 2007 in which the numbers 1 to 9 appear onscreen in random configurations and then are quickly covered up. The player has to remember those positions and touch the squares in numeric order to pass to the next round. When the Japanese researchers pitted ...

“Rise of the Planet of the Apes” chat, Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. (PDT) There’s a key difference between the simian stars in every prior version of “Planet of the Apes” and the ones who will appear in this summer’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” —  the power of speech. “Caesar has got to carry the scenes with no dialogue,” said Joe Letteri, who is supervising the digital creation of the apes in the film for Weta Digital, Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based company that was behind the visual effects in “Avatar,” “King Kong” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. “We had to figure out how to portray a lot of the emotion just through the eyes, which is something we learned on Kong and with ['Lord of the Rings' villain] Gollum.” In the future-set 1968 Charlton Heston film that ...