In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, long gone is Andy Serkis’ Caesar, and far in the future is Charlton Heston’s George Taylor. In the period between those two franchise icons, visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist was given the challenging task of creating an entirely new set of ape characters in a feature almost wholly composed of visual effects shots.
Kingdom is an exciting science-fiction adventure film that focuses on Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee whose entire clan is kidnapped by another group of apes. On his journey to find and save them, Noa meets friends, fights foes, and comes face-to-face with a new, terrifying threat.
Winquist makes up one-fourth of the film’s visual effects team, which is Oscar-nominated. Along with VFX supervisor Stephen Unterfranz, senior animation supervisor Paul Story, and special effects supervisor Rodney Burke, Winquist and his team are nominated for the Academy Award for Visual Effects.
The visual effects supervisor and Oscar nominee recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
How did you get involved with this project? Since you oversaw VFX on the last three Apes films, did you always plan to come back? What was that process like of coming on board?
I was a visual effects supervisor on the previous three films, but Dan Lemmon was our primary VFX supervisor on those projects. By the time we came along to this show several years had gone by at this point. It was mentioned to me that it was happening, would I be interested in being involved? These projects are a lot of fun, but there was a little bit of skepticism of, like, ‘What’s the story going to be on this one?’ because Caesar’s arc had been completed. Where to from here?
But when I read the script and saw that basically (Wes Ball’s) idea was fast-forwarding hundreds of years beyond the events, suddenly this became a really interesting proposition. It opens the door to all sorts of really interesting world-building, because what does the world look like when we’ve got many generations past anybody cleaning out the gutters and doing the gardening and maintaining infrastructure and stuff?
The other really interesting aspect of it was that now we’ve got a brand new cast of characters, right? All of the apes from the previous movies are long gone, and all that’s left is the legend, the story, the myth of Caesar, how has that been interpreted through generation upon generation as it gets passed down? Now we’ve got this kid, who’s naive, never experienced anything outside of his village trying to come to grips with what all this means, who was this Caesar guy, and all that stuff. The actual narrative of where Wes wanted to take this was fascinating. So immediately that was, ‘I’m in. Let’s do this.’
How did your approach to the realism of the characters change since the last few films? Were you feeling more comfortable since you had three films of a similar caliber under your belt? Or was it a little daunting now that you don’t have Caesar and Rocket and Maurice, and now you’ve got Noa?
We’re starting to build a bridge between the Caesar Trilogy and the ’68 film. You look at the apes that we had in the Caesar trilogy that were very rooted in a naturalistic depiction of apes. The first shots of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, for example, back in 2011, looked like a nature documentary. They needed to look like modern-day chimpanzees in the wild. And you’ve got Dr. Zaius, and those characters look very stylized. They look very human, but ape proportions a bit. We had to start to find out where we wanted to be on that continuum in terms of the slight evolution of the characters.
So there was a design process, especially around Noa, where we wanted to start maybe just introducing slightly different human proportions to his body. On one hand, we’ve got Owen Teague and Kevin Durand in particular, but even Peter Macon, who plays Raka, they’re all six feet plus. They’re quite tall. So for those reasons as well, because our cast was so tall and because the cameras were going to be framing our cast, it sort of required us to slightly increase the height, and change the proportions a little bit.
We also had the fact that so many of our characters were riding horses on this one. That has been a challenge in the previous movies too, because when you look at the proportions of apes, they tend to generally have shorter legs and longer arms, and so they look a bit goofy riding horses. That was another impetus behind some of the changes here too, is to make our lives a little easier, because we always have human riders who we have to paint their legs out in the stirrups and things like that to put an ape on top of that live horse.
The facial side of it, the awesome thing is, with Owen Teague in particular … If you spend enough time with Owen, you start to see these very specific things he does with his face. When Noa would be apprehensive or anxious or unsure of himself, he’d purse his lips together, and compress the skin around his mouth … there’s a lot more volume of material there on the muzzle of a chimp, but we wanted to make sure we were able to see Owen coming through when he was doing those things.
We spent a lot of time getting familiar with the faces of the actors that are playing these characters, and so eventually we started looking and flip-flopping Owen’s face and looking at it sort of mirrored and not mirrored, and you quickly see how asymmetrical our faces are as humans. But Owen in particular, one eye is lower than the other, and as we incorporated some of that stuff into his character, it was like the secret to unlocking who Noa was. So there’s all sorts of that kind of stuff that gets put into the design phase that allows the actual performance to come through. There are the expressions that Noa does that are just so very Owen, as an example. It was fun.
Something else that stuck out to me about the visuals is ‘What does our Earth look like centuries after a quote-on-quote apocalypse?’ I loved the wide shots of skyscrapers overgrown with weeds and crashed planes. How long does it take you and your team to kind of develop that minutiae? That goes for the apes too … How long does it take you and your team to approach those things?
It’s months and months of work. We essentially had about 58 weeks of post-production on the show, and we’d started designing and building the characters before we were even done shooting the movie. So there was well over a year in the design process. And we’re not working on every shot that whole time, but the evolution of the cityscapes and getting the skyscrapers and all the dressing … the first wide-shot where we establish it, where the eagle’s flying over the river and you tip-up and you see the expanse of all the buildings hugging this river.
That was months of work for that shot because there are I think something like 16 million plant assets that we had to sort of dress in around those things and make sure that they were all blowing in the wind just in the right way. The great thing is that the shot I was just talking about, that shot was based on a helicopter plate that we photographed in Australia of an actual river. We had a foundation of reality to build our city on top of. That just helps anchor the work.
The time for all this, the character side of things, again Noa was under construction for several months of sort of working back-and-forth and checking him out, how he looks in different lighting scenarios. Just sort of really assessing how he looks from every different angle and making sure that he’s not going to have a bad side so to speak. It’s a huge process but it’s also one that we’ve been through many times now between the Apes franchise, between other films that we’ve done in the last 20 years that’ve had simian characters in them. There’s a really deep well of experience within the team, and we know at this point pretty well how to create compelling ape characters.
Do you think having 20 years of visual effects experience and other work with Wētā and three other Apes films has made this project and this job a little easier?
It certainly informs how we might attack a particular challenge. It’s never easy, because the thing we always find is, yeah, whatever, computers are getting faster, but the filmmakers then, or the screenwriters, come up with, ‘What if we flood the place?’ and all those kinds of things. Technology is advancing year-on-year to be able to create these things, but then that just opens the door for storytellers to come up with more and more grandiose, crazy scenarios that we have to put on-screen.
The great thing is, I think because that experience is there, we’re not running around like headless chickens, you know? There’s a sort of pathway or framework of the tools that we’ve been building up over the years that help us. Our simulation framework, for example, allows us to simulate wind, water, ground interaction fire, and all these things in one unified simulation engine, so that we can have things like muscle and hair interacting with water currents and things like that. They’re all sort of together, it’s not a unified, ‘First we do this, and then we feed it to that, and then we feed it to this.’ We can solve all of those things at one time if we need to. It helps us get some of these wild scenarios on-screen.
As tough as it may have been for you and the team, I have to say I think my favorite sequence was the flooding sequence of Proximus Caesar’s compound … How did you guys approach water in this film?
Well, the great thing is that as this film was just kicking off, we were kind of getting towards the end of another big franchise that has to do with water, and the lead-up to that film had probably a good five, six years of really heavy R&D around simulation, knowing what the requirements of that project were. So we were able to benefit from all of that work, and then take it to the next level again.
In the sense that the requirements for our sequence were quite different from that project, but it was all using the same toolsets, and we knew that we had the experience and the talent within the effects team of how to tackle … you look at the big wide shot, let’s say, after the flood has kind of made its way in, and you’ve got Freya (Allan) standing up on this viewpoint looking out over this raging torrent of water that’s just a brown, swirling around, turbulent white water of seawater. That’s a very different look than what we had to do in those previous movies.
The other thing with that is there was the exterior stuff where we had a real location, or a backlot let’s say, where we had built a full-scale partial set. But then we also had to do a digital version of that, as well, for interactions, so that we could have the water looking like it’s actually interacting with the set that was there and then extend that set. But once we get inside, apart from just that little internal space that’s just inside the doors, everything that lies beyond is completely a digital environment, because we never really found the right kind of a large vault-warehouse-industrial-looking space like that, with one exception.
There’s a section of that space where we’re sort of looking down on multiple stories of what looks like apartments or something like that. That was a parking garage at the Sydney Olympic Village that was built for the Olympics. So we were able to do a little bit of stuff there, but everything else you see in that space was completely digital because there just wasn’t a real place that was going to serve our needs.
The other thing is that the requirements of that scene were such that even if we had found a real place, it was always going to have to be digital water because there were no humans in the scene. If we had said, ‘Special effects, let’s come up with the world’s largest dump tanks and we’ll flood the space for real and everything else, we’ll have it interacting with our actors,’ the problem is the actors don’t have the same shape and silhouette as the characters they’re playing.
So whatever interaction (we) may have been getting if we had done that, it wouldn’t have been of any use to us because we couldn’t have put our digital characters into the hole that they left, so to speak. For that reason, it was pretty much clear from day one that that sequence was going to be entirely digital water all the time, but also the environment itself was entirely digital.
Because we had all of the photography — the production design work and the cinematography of the live-action pieces that surround that flood scene — we sort of had guideposts of what the design of the space and how it might be lit and all those kinds of things that we could look to inform what the rest of that space might look like. You contrast that scene with the river, for example, the river in the second act of the movie … we had Freya Allan’s character, Mae, that had to be in the water there. That one was a special effects shallow tank that was built.
So special effects and stunts departments, we worked closely with them on a small piece of the actual bridge outside on our backlot, and we could actually spend several days with our actors in the water with this rushing current going past them and use the actual photography from that space, and then add our digital river rapid extensions all around that and sort of decide from a shot-by-shot basis how much of the real water we were going to use on this shot, how much was going to be extended, were we going to replace it all, and it was just a kind of a whatever worked best for a particular angle. It was two different approaches. One was partly practical, one was entirely digital.
What was it like working with Wes Ball?
It was a good time. He’s a really good dude, but also there’s a real passion and exuberance for the storytelling. I’ve told this story before, but some of my favorite stuff was in prep when we were getting ready to shoot the movie because we didn’t do a huge amount of pre-viz on the film. A lot of it was storyboards. We would work with a storyboard artist and he was kind of just breaking down the kind of shots that he wanted for a given sequence. But then he would walk all of the other heads of departments through what the scene was about.
That became this amazing kind of pitch, essentially, where he would walk through shot-by-shot and talk about what’s going on, but it was very him-animated, kind of acting out the parts and making the sound effects and everything else. You’d get to the end of that scene and you’d already seen it in your head. It was a great way to kind of get everybody from all the various departments that were shooting the film on the same page in terms of what we were trying to achieve, but it also got everybody pumped for what we were going to do because he made everything sound so exciting. You really kind of could tell what the movie was going to be, or what we were going to aim to achieve.
By the time we got into post-production, the great thing is, obviously Wes had a background in 3D animation. The Maze Runner films that he did before this, he got on the back of a 3D-animated short film that he made himself called Ruin back in 2011 … If you look up that film and take a look at the opening shots of it, it looks a lot like what we ended up finally doing on this movie, with overgrown skyscrapers and stuff. So this is something I think that’s been sort of churning in his brain for years at this point. It’s pretty fun to come full circle on all that.
The whole process of post-production on this was one of the most creative partnerships that I’ve been involved with … Wes was very trusting in the process. We had already done the three previous films, which he was a fan of, and knew that we were able to pull this stuff off, but also the fact that he had that background and sort of knew at least the basics of the pipeline and how we were going to be progressing through the material. It meant that I didn’t have to spend a bunch of time trying to explain to him that you should only be looking right now at the animation… all that kind of stuff was, ‘Yeah, yeah, we get it, we know how this works,’ and it just basically made all of our review time a lot more productive because there’s a lot of shorthand around the process.
Would you mind, as detailed or brief as you’d like, walking me through those 58 weeks of post? Because Wes kind of had that shorthand knowledge already and you didn’t have to explain as much, did you and the team kind of approach the visuals in stages and then give him a presentation, and he’d give you notes and you’d continue? How exactly did the workflow work at that stage?
There were two picture editors, Dan (Zimmerman) and Dirk Westervelt. Wes and Dan would work very closely together on putting an edit together, and of course, the material they were editing was the performance that the actors gave on the day. They were cutting the film to actors in gray suits with camera rigs on their faces and stuff. So there’s that leap of faith that they had to take. But also they found it interesting in the sense that, they could go, ‘Oh, you know what, Travis’ (Jeffery) performance was maybe better on take three, but Owen and Lydia (Peckham), maybe they were better on take two or take four.’
They quickly learned that they could kind of take and mix and match performances, maybe blend a particular part of an actor’s performance from a different take, let’s say because maybe a particular line delivery had a more impactful sort of delivery. It complicates things for us, but it’s a possibility with performance capturing. The way that editors have been since the beginning of cinema has been using the best of what an actor maybe gave and mixing and matching.
Previously you may have had to say, ‘Start on a wide shot, and then cut away to something else, and then come back on a close-up,’ and you would have to sort of cut away, cut away, because you couldn’t just blend from one performance to the other. We don’t have that limitation. We can take whatever might’ve been the wide shot, maybe there was a really good performance there, we can take that and put that in the close-up shot. You can sort of mix different performances and different cameras.
That was part of their whole jigsaw puzzle of the editorial process. Once they turned that work over to us, we would start essentially match-moving the camera so that our virtual camera was exactly matching what the anamorphic photography was doing on the day. Meanwhile, our mocap tracking team was taking whatever selects that they had made — whichever take and whichever piece of those takes — and essentially tracking that information from its raw mocap state into actual animation puppets that our animators use.
Animators would then take that and make any refinements or adjustments that they need to make. Facial animators, meanwhile, ‘re taking the facial data from the face cams of the actors and blending all that, so then we would present that to Wes in a very crude form of just, no hair, fur, anything like that, and make sure that Wes is really happy with the composition and the timing and the general delivery.
Once we had that in a good place, sort of refined what we needed to refine on the animation side of things, that gets essentially sent to our creatures team who handles all the muscle and tissue simulation, the hair, all that stuff. They would kick out what we call ‘bakes,’ essentially taking multiple minutes of frame kind of computations to solve the sort of way the muscle structure works.
Hand that off to our lighters, who would match the actual set lighting on the day. The renders then would get passed off to our compositors, who then blend those renders back into the photography. Along the way, we were sort of looking at in-progress versions of those things with Wes, and we’d start talking about the specifics of exactly the way the face is moving, and did we match every little nuance.
Or more importantly, did we match the emotional intent? When you look at the ape performance, are you getting the right hit emotionally from what we saw when we were looking at Owen or Kevin or Peter or Lydia, or whoever … So we would make those adjustments, the review process.
The way that the film typically would go is we’d have maybe reviews once or twice a week for a few hours, and by the end of it we had reviews every day for six, seven, eight hours a day … and by that point they’d sort of gotten through their editorial process. We just keep lather, rinse, repeat until everything is signed off on and delivered, and we’d take a look at it in the grading suite, and put the final color touches on it, and that’s what you see in the cinema.
Can you think of one scene that showcases visual effects that you’re proud of?
I can think of many scenes. The thing that I always keep coming back to is, that there are shots — maybe not one single shot — but there are many examples across the film where the spectacle gets a lot of attention, there’s a lot of focus on the technology and things, but what makes these films stick in your mind is the storytelling and the performance work.
The really interesting thing is we’ve got a little over 1,500 shots in this movie, and the movie’s two hours and twenty minutes long. We did only, like, 38 shots in addition to that that had no visual effects. So almost every shot in the movie is a visual effects shot. The fact that there are only 1,500 of them, when you think about a typical tentpole superhero movie or big action blockbuster, a lot of those films are in the 2,500, 3,000 shot range these days.
What it sort of tells you is that we don’t have as many shots because the shots themselves are longer. (Wes is) holding on to these performance moments for a long time, and it means that that’s a really big challenge for us to put those characters on-screen and hold an audience’s attention, and then just keep them up and engaged with the performances going on.
It speaks to the caliber of performance that the actors are giving us, but it also speaks to the caliber of the visual effects that are translating those performances into these apes that you’re just riveted watching. The fact that we’ve got these quiet, intimate shots with two or three characters in a space just having a conversation, those are some of my favorite shots because they’re the deceptively simple-looking shots. Those are the things hopefully that you think back on, the things that endear the characters to you, the things that make you care about these characters in the first place, so that when the flood comes at the end, there are stakes there.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is currently available to stream.
