planet of the apes:layout
7/11/14
3:13 PM
Page 17
DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES SWINGS INTO THEATERS STORY BY W. H. BOURNE • PHOTOS BY WETA AND DAVID JAMES - TM AND ©2014 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION
Malcolm (Jason Clarke) tries to make peace with Caesar (Andy Serkis), Koba (Toby Kebbell) and Maurice (Karin Konoval).
for the performance capture,” Serkis continued. “No one has ever attempted that combination of shooting native 3D in a practical location, at least not to this extent. What was really exciting was to take the aesthetic of photorealistic apes and then put these characters in naturalistic situations. It’s important to be thinking about what’s right for the story, so my first thought about the work was not necessarily about 3D; it was, ‘what’s this moment about?’” “It’s simply amazing—old-growth forest, 3D cameras, motion cap cameras, wires going everywhere, smoke machines, fog machines, rain and mud, a crew of hundreds and then there’s 50 actors performing as apes walking around the forest,” said actor Jason Clarke who portrays Malcom, Caesar’s primary human contact. “I always prefer shooting on location rather than on a soundstage. It just brings so much in terms of realism to the project. This goes for the actors portraying the human characters and for the ‘apes actors’ as well. These guys are not just sitting in a vacuum. They’ve got to interact with people and the forest and the mud and everything else and the rocks and the stones
awn of the Planet of the Apes opens July 11 in theaters nationwide. The film which shot in Louisiana and Vancouver is groundbreaking in that 85% of the film was shot in exterior locations. Motion capture without a stage is amazing alone; add to that the complexity of shooting in 3D while depicting a community of 2,000 apes, living in wild surroundings in humid, rainforest environments, and it’s easy to see why this is such a technological achievement.
D
Andy Serkis plays Caesar and reprises his role from Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The actor is considered a mo-cap genius and rose to fame with his role as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit movies. Serkis has an extensive history with Weta, Peter Jackson’s VFX company. Together, they have been on the leading edge of mo-cap in both technology and performance. For this movie, Serkis was so impressed with Weta’s latest developments that he proclaimed this was a “huge technical leap that enables there to be no disconnect with the other actors.” To capture the performances, Weta Digital had 35 people on each unit, an array of 50 or so mo-cap cameras and eight witness capture cameras that were constantly rolling on anything that involved an ape character. “Everything around us, and everywhere we shot provided challenges
ISSUE THREE 2014
LOUISIANA FILM & VIDEO MAGAZINE
17