Weta Digital; Masters of VFX

by Kyle Kull

An animated "Engineer" by Weta Digital in the film Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

The digital age has revolutionized many different markets, making more advanced products with better efficiency than ever before. Film is a powerful example of this truth. At the turn of the millennium, filmmakers were beginning to test the digital forms of cinema, and developed progressive programs and products to enhance the viewing experience for audiences. A forerunner of this movement was the famous director, Peter Jackson.

Jackson was set to direct the lesser known film Heavenly Creatures in 1993, while he was still unknown to the common citizen, and was looking for a company to create his visual effects in post-production. Having produced most of Heavenly Creatures in New Zealand, and unable to find a suitable company to accomplish this task, Jackson decided that he would establish his own visual effects company in his home of Wellington, New Zealand. Weta Digital was created in 1993, and has become one of the most successful visual effects companies in film history.

The use of MASSIVE during a battle in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)

Weta Digital and Jackson’s impact on the growing digital film industry was minimal at first; that is, until 2001. Peter Jackson was given the rights to the famous Lord of the Rings book trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1997 and he immediately began to devote his time to creating his masterpiece. When The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001, using Weta Digital for the visual effects in post-production, it was applauded and praised for its groundbreaking digital effects. One program in particular that the company created solely for The Fellowship of the Ring, was MASSIVE, or Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment, which selected a group of characters on the screen and replicated them to make the screen appear filled with extras. This strategy was mainly used for the large scale battle sequences in which thousands of warriors were depicted; a feat that is nearly impossible to achieve with real people.

Weta Digital using motion capture during The Lord of the Rings for the character of Gollum

Weta Digital received an Oscar for Visual Effects for their achievements in The Fellowship of the Ring, and received two more for the sequels The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003) the following two years. This success made Weta Digital the most influential visual effects company of the digital filmmaking age, and showed that digital filmmaking could legitimately create epics on scales that were previously unimaginable. Peter Jackson’s vision and spark led a digital revolution in the world of cinema.

King Kong

Weta Digital and Peter Jackson did not take a break with their influential moves on the digital film industry. In 2005 they created yet another epic, King Kong, a replica of the 1933 adventure film of the same name. The main character of this film is a massive ape who scales buildings and fights dinosaurs, so the visual effects were to be heavily relied upon throughout the story. Weta Digital and Jackson were determined to make King Kong as realistic as possible, and to do so required the creation of numerous new programs and software. Given that he was an ape, the visual effects team at Weta decided to animate every single strand of hair, resulting in 460 billion single strands of hair in King Kong’s animation. They also were able to create the software CityBot, which allowed for the visual effects team to create the New York cityscape which King Kong famously scales. These sets of software are what led to the Academy to select Weta Digital for their fourth Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

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Zoe Saldana digitally transformed by Weta Digital to play Neytiri, a Na'vi.

Weta was not finished with their powerful visual effects skills after King Kong. The digital film industry was becoming flooded with more and more artists wanting to create masterpieces with digital technology and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) was becoming increasingly popular. In 2009, Weta Digital decided to again revolutionize digital visual effects, by helping to create Avatar (James Cameron). Seeing that CGI was becoming the standard for VFX in cinema, Weta decided to expand the technique, by creating an entire world using CGI technology. The world within the film Avatar became famous and James Cameron was praised for his vision and complete utilization of CGI technology, but the team with Weta Digital were the people capable of carrying out Cameron’s vision. Weta Digital was awarded their fifth Oscar for Visual Effects with the release of Avatar, and once again proved themselves to be one of the most competitive VFX companies on the market.

The on-location motion capture technology allowed for apes to interact with humans on the big screen.

Weta Digital was named after one of the largest insects in the world which inhabits New Zealand, and is a perfect name for the VFX company, as it accurately represents the impact that Weta has made on the digital revolution in the film industry. Weta Digital is still working hard today, creating productions such as The Hobbit (Peter Jackson, 2013) trilogy and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014). For Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2012) they reinvented motion capture technology so that the crew would be able to shoot certain scenes on location. This is just a further example of how Weta Digital continues to make impacts on the film industry.

Be sure to check out their films when they are released in theaters, including Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014), which premieres on July 11, 2014.