Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes wouldn’t seem to owe an obvious debt to the films of James Cameron. But key special effects in the latest simian adventure couldn’t have happened without Weta Workshop’s creations for the Oscar-winning Avatar: The Way of Water.
“The Water Solver we used came off the back of that movie and had a good half-dozen years of concentrated research and development into water simulation. So coming into the project, that was one of the aspects of this film that I wasn’t as concerned about,” says visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist.
While the building blocks for the effects were there, pulling off director Wes Ball’s vision required “a different mix” of the water itself. “The ferocity and turbulence of the water is very different from what was done with Avatar. This gave us opportunities to add improvements to that tool set,” Winquist says.
Set 300 years after War for the Planet of the Apes, Kingdom sees a young ape named Noa, played by Owen Teague, embarking on a treacherous quest that leads him to Kevin Durand’s tyrannical Proximus Caesar. Not only has the narrative timeline rocketed forward, but so has the technology used to depict it.
Those advances enabled the most authentic re-creation of two notoriously challenging effects: water and hair, or more specifically, ape hair. They come together in an action set piece that ends with Peter Macon’s evolved orangutan Raka being engulfed by roiling rapids.
Showing Raka stuck in rapids required a challenging combination of water and hair effects that was made possible with Weta’s simulation framework Loki.
Jasin Boland/20th Century Studios
“We knew it was possible because Loki, the simulation framework we use at Weta, handles all of our simulation requirements,” Winquist explains. “We use it to simulate hair, whether dry or wet, and water. But we can also simulate those two things together so they affect each other.”
There was also plenty of fire (“A complete inferno,” Winquist calls it). That’s where the effects maven, who worked on the previous Apes trilogy and received an Oscar nomination for his work on 2015’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, admits the practical effects were vital for the visual effects team to do their job.
“Weta handled all the dangerous stuff they couldn’t do for real, but I can’t downplay what our friends in special effects gave us on location,” he says, citing a village attack sequence as an example. “They had an LPG fire system all around, providing us with real fire and contribution of light. While there were lighting fixtures, the natural fire gave us exact reference for what the exposure should be and the behavior of the flame. We always had something we could anchor our digital fire to.”
Kingdom also benefits from advances in performance-capture suits. Teague wore a streamlined third-generation suit, where elements were integrated internally rather than sitting on the outside of the suit where they might have caught on something.
Teague in his performance-capture suit, where “elements were integrated internally” to prevent snags, to play Noa.
Jasin Boland/20th Century Studios
“That is really important when he had to do things like walk out of the bushes,” Winquist says, adding, “A hallmark of the previous trilogy we have carried through is that these are live-action movies where we find and shoot in amazing locations. Doing so meant we needed to come up with motion capture markers that emitted light instead of reflecting it as they would on a stage.”
Kingdom has more than 1,500 visual effects shots, and 33 minutes of the 145-minute film are entirely digital. One of the most striking examples is the opening egg-climb scene, a sequence for which it was difficult to find a location that would work, while the crew wasn’t able to build a physical set big enough to achieve the same effect.
“That was a real place and anchored our scene, so we picked up from there,” Winquist says, adding that one of the trickiest aspects of digital environment work is “the organic stuff.”
In a perfect example of ape hair and water effects working together, Noa hangs on for dear life after the ocean wall of Proximus Caesar’s compound is blown up and water floods the abandoned bunker. It’s a pivotal moment in the gripping and action-packed finale of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.
Courtesy of 20th Century Studios (3)
“Doing a cityscape has its challenges, but when you cover that with vegetation and need to have the leaves fluttering to bring life into the place, you need to think about the volume and distribution of organic material in a frame,” he says. “That becomes an incredibly time- and labor-intensive process. I think the opening shot has something like 16 million plant assets scattered throughout it.”
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This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
