Caesar on a Horse Planet of the Apes Art

If you're a filmmaker trying to bring fantastic characters to life with the well-nigh realistic, lifelike performances possible, you're probably going to desire to talk to Joe Letteri. The longtime visual effects supervisor has been working with computer-generated characters going all the way back to James Cameron's The Completeness . As part of WETA Digital, he helped the manager bring the Na'vi to life in 2009's Avatar. Peruse Letteri'due south filmography, and it's hard to observe a film he worked on that didn't intermission significant new ground in one class or another.

Over the past half dozen years, he'southward been role of the Planet of the Apes trilogy, which hasn't just used CG characters to surprise and awe audiences, but to carry the increasingly complex emotional weight of the films themselves. The latest installment, War for the Planet of the Apes, amps upward the story (and the special furnishings) even farther, with Andy Serkis' Caesar heading out on a revenge mission that takes him through extreme snow and other weather that would accept been impossible to create merely a few years ago.

I jumped on the telephone to chat with the amiable Letteri about working with director Matt Reeves, the challenges of 65mm flick, the development and iteration of the functioning-capture procedure, and how to create a CG woods that's so realistic you can't even tell that it'due south an effect at all.

Making Caesar intermission

You worked with Matt Reeves on the last moving picture, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes , but this moving-picture show pushes th east effects in impressive new directions. When you sat down to talk about War , what was his creative mandate?

Well, I think what Matt was after this time was more than of that Exodus kind of feeling. This was actually a story where he wanted to have Caesar, and all of united states of america, beyond where we'd been comfortable before. Going all the way back to Ascension, this is a story nearly a graphic symbol who straddles two worlds. Caesar grew upwardly in a human household, and pretty much idea he was human, until the globe intruded and said, "Now you lot tin can no longer live with humans." They sent him off to the ape enclosure, and suddenly he had to find this whole other identity.

But through the first two films, when humans started condign aroused by the conflict — the fear of what could be happening because of the apes gaining intelligence — Caesar e'er tried to encounter both sides of it. He always only tried to bring peace. In the third motion picture, Matt wanted to get beyond that. He wanted Caesar to finally intermission, to feel that rage he'southward been trying to proceed nether control the whole time.

Then he goes to some real emotional depths in this one to find out who he is, and what he's got to exercise to keep his his tribe alive. And that was really the heart of it. It was more well-nigh the performance, and that arc. And then everything nosotros have to do technically comes out of that. The fact that Matt wanted to go even deeper out abroad from civilization, shooting in the wilds of Canada, and having these big snowscapes and these big vistas; places where doing this kind of highly technical sort of work is hard. We wanted to push across all that to tell this story.

Images: 20th Century Fox

Performance Capture 101

The core technique in building these creatures is recording the performance, and while everybody has seen pictures of actors in crazy suits, it'south like shooting fish in a barrel to breeze by what's actually going on. At that place's a beautiful shot where Caesar and a few other apes are riding across the beach on horseback. Can you walk united states through the creation of that shot?

For a shot similar that, the actors are riding the horses. Commonly when you're doing something actually performance-driven, we do performance capture, which is putting up a lot of specialized cameras all around the set to record the motions from unlike angles. The actors are wearing a helmet with a caput rig and a picayune camera mounted in forepart of their face. We use that information to construct the torso motions of the apes and the motions of the apes' faces. And and so we have to rail the horses in place, because everything nosotros do has to fit into the iii-dimensional existent earth that's happening in front end of the camera.

So we need to know exactly where those horses are, where every limb is for every frame, because nosotros have to reconstruct that to exist able to paint the actors out, and put [the apes] on summit of the horses. Some of information technology is washed with hand painting. Some of it is actually done with CGI horses that are either wholly or partly reconstructed to fit under the apes, because you've got different torso types. Apes and humans are shut, but non close enough. And so there'southward a lot we have to reconstruct to brand that conceivable.

And we take to compute all the lighting out there in the real world. Whether it's natural sunlight coming in through clouds or bouncing off the sand or off the water, or if there's any bogus light that's added. That sequence was shot with natural light. But we have to account for all of that just like you do in cinematography, friction match all the camera moves, then we start this intense round of ciphering to run everything through the computer and make sure information technology all does the right thing. That the fur simulates the right manner. That the light bouncing all around in that virtual world matches up to the light bouncing around in the real world, then we tin blended all the elements together. And once you do all that, you should come out with your shot in the end.

And what is Matt working with on ready? Is he looking at a previsualization of what information technology will look like with the apes composited in, or is he just working with the actors?

Just worried about the actors. The matter that's really proficient about these Apes films is that the chimps and humans are more than or less the same size, so we tin frame them as they need to be. You don't accept to do a visualization to imagine, "Well, what is this going to wait similar?" Because it'due south not a 25-pes-tall grapheme. Also, the photographic camera operators can concentrate on the movement of the actors, because what they shoot is exactly what's going to exist in the moving-picture show for framing. It'due south as well great for the editors, because they have exactly what the actors are doing to work from for their cut.

How has the functioning capture procedure evolved equally y o u' ve been wo r male monarch on the se films ?

The big breakthrough came on Rise of the Planet of the Apes when we figured out how to practice this live, and have it coexist with the residuum of the picture show photography. Up until and so, operation capture tended to be an after-the-fact process. Andy would go out and do his scenes on set — say, when nosotros were doing Gollum — and whatever selects nosotros'd like, he'd go dorsum and do them in a separate book [a motion capture phase]. So the power to capture those performances simultaneously with all the other actors was something nosotros really pushed for on Rise.

Once you have that liberty, y'all want to take it further and further. And that'southward where Matt really pushed this. On Dawn, out into the wilderness, out into the rain, a lilliputian farther from culture. And so on State of war: really far out from civilization. Harsh, wet, cold conditions. Merely you're capturing subtle, nuanced performances, and so the gear has to perform. There's a whole coiffure there to support gathering all that information.

So there are technical breakthroughs, but they're all backside the scenes. They have to do with getting better ways of connecting the systems and calibrating it, and putting wireless together to make certain the data all comes through without any dropouts. Simply the key aspect of how it works is notwithstanding basically the same. You're just trying to record every possible angle of what the actors are doing and so y'all can reconstruct it after.

Paradigm: 20th Century Flim-flam

Harsh weather ahead

The fur on these characters isn't put together by hand for every frame. Yous're using intense computer simulations that determine how it moves. Just you're besides putting Caesar in extreme conditions like snow and rain. How does that complicate the process?

Fur is complicated. You've got millions and millions of little fibers that all have to react to gravity, and to themselves, and to all the lighting. There's lots of simulations going on. Then they get wet, water runs off the fur, that adds some other layer of complexity. When they're rolling around in the snow, or snow's accumulating, it gets even more complicated, because snow packs on the fur. Y'all recollect you sympathise the physics — now it gets compounded by adding these icy packs that are constantly evolving and flaking and falling off.

We accept to run a whole extra level of simulation to make all of that piece of work. Plus snow has a way of affecting the lighting on the fur, and that all has to get computed as well. So yes, we do a lot of physical simulations, and also light transport, to arrive at both the correct motion and the correct photography.

Did that require a new round of software development?

A few years ago, we started writing our own renderer, which we call Manuka. Information technology's the software that computes all the lighting in the scene, and all the surface characteristics, and bounces all the light around, and computes what gets to the sensor, and what the picture should expect like. And so it'south the digital version of photographing your scene.

Nosotros broke it out for the commencement fourth dimension on Dawn, but because it was so new, nosotros didn't throw the shut-ups at information technology. Nosotros merely did information technology for the background characters, because it was skillful at handling big scenes with large amounts of fur in them. Only on this film, nosotros finally have pushed it far enough, and got it robust enough, to do all the close-ups with it. And so I think yous'll encounter the difference when you look at the shut-ups in this film, vs. what you saw earlier in Dawn.

Images: 20th Century Fob

There's a shot with Maurice looking at a young girl (Amiah Miller) that was so realistic , it actually bumped me out of the flick for a moment, only to gut-check myself. But there's also a lot of nuanced performance piece of work for Caesar. How much of that is Andy, and how much of that becomes the animators?

From the start, going dorsum to Rise , we knew the apes would exist completely digital. We didn't look at doing anything with prosthetics, because the whole point of the story was, they had to wait realistic, so yous would believe it when they start to evolve. And then the combination has always been, yous've got the player's operation, just what you see on the screen is fully digital. The emotional drama is there. It's given past Andy; it's given by the other actors.

Where we would pace in is, things that can't exist captured, or that need to exist adjusted because of differences in the apes. As much as the actors train to exercise the proper ape motion and ape behavior, there are however differences. Human legs are longer than ape legs, and arms are shorter. So there are always slight adjustments. Y'all lower the hips a fiddling so information technology works with the longer legs, which means the shoulders are in a different position, only you've got to become the head right back to where information technology was, then the eyeline works and the attitude works. And then as animators, those are the kinds of things we're trying to do so you don't call up about the differences betwixt humans and chimps.

Image: 20th Century Flim-flam

Working with 65mm

Matt Reeves has said he wanted this flick to feel like an old ballsy, or a David Lean film. One of the means he got that feel was shooting on 65mm film. How did that impact your work on the visual effects side?

It'due south similar anything worth doing: at that place is e'er extra work involved. It'south a great format. It'due south widescreen, but information technology's got shallow depth of field. Which is beautiful for the photography. It's groovy for really getting that separation betwixt characters, and between foreground and groundwork. It'southward got a tremendous filmic quality, but when you're dealing with having to pigment actors out and supplant them with digital characters, the more you have to work with, the amend. Technology ever wants y'all to have the simpler thing, because that makes life easier. But creativity wants you to have the more complex matter. And creativity always wins. It's like, we'll figure out the technology if that'southward what Matt wants the picture show to look like, and that'southward definitely what he had in mind.

So you're saying shallow depth of field makes it harder to paint an actor out of a shot because they might be out of focus?

Information technology does. You were saying before: actors on horses. So say yous've got a whole bunch of actors on horses, and you've got to paint out the actors' legs to put the chimp legs on the horses. Now the actors' legs are longer, and then there'due south always some of the equus caballus that yous've got to paint back to track back in. So if this is in the background, and that little scrap is out of focus — well, how do you know exactly that you lot've got the track working for the digital equus caballus torso you lot're putting in? Considering they have to match upwards pilus to pilus. And so you can't see it past looking at the frame; you have to play it back in motion and just use your sentence.

You would call up that it being slightly soft means information technology's more forgiving, but information technology's actually non. Because you can still perceive if annihilation is sliding, you simply don't have annihilation to lock into.

Image: 20th Century Fox

Simulating mother nature

W hat about the environments ? Was anything there a detail challenge?

Yeah, 1 of the things we did on this movie was, we grew the pine woods upwardly behind the fortress [where the climax of the film occurs]. In the past, we've congenital lots of jungles, and copse have incredible diversity. The modelers have to brand each tree by hand, and it's a really time-consuming process. And then y'all art direct them into place to try to get the whole layout to look natural.

What happens with trees is, they don't grow isolated. They grow in groups, and the same species of tree volition give you an infinite amount of differences, depending on how they grow. So we've written a system nosotros call Totara. Now, rather than growing trees one by one, nosotros abound them in groups, and then they compete for resources. The older ones overtake the smaller ones. Sunlight and shadow determines which side might get more branches, which side doesn't. And the end result is, we build the terrain, and then nosotros sprinkle a bunch of seeds around, and so nosotros run a simulation that lets the copse grow for a few hundred years. And when you look at that, you go something that immediately looks natural, as opposed to something that looks like you built a forest from a lot of private trees. Hopefully that's something people don't notice, considering it should experience completely natural, but it'south a whole new way of approaching environments.

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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/18/15988096/war-for-the-planet-of-the-apes-joe-letteri-visual-effects-interview

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