The VFX supervisor for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes discusses how the CGI approach changed from the reboot trilogy and the new technology that made it happen. Taking place around 300 years after War for the Planet of the Apes, the latest film follows a young ape named Noa (Owen Teague) as he goes on a journey that shatters his beliefs and tests his morals and resilience. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes‘ reviews were positive, and the movie became a critical and commercial success, with an 80% Rotten Tomatoes score and earning $397 million worldwide.

In an interview with ScreenRant, the VFX supervisor for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Erik Winquist, discussing the film’s Oscar nomination for visual effects, talked about how the CGI process changed since the reboot trilogy and the new facial technology they used. Winquist first pointed out that their goal was to faithfully capture the performances and their intent, which could be lost in post and CGI. He did point out that their process with motion capture is similar to an actor in costume, as the actors and crew have to block out their scenes with the director.

Problems did arise, however, with this new movie, as unlike the reboot trilogy, which mainly consisted of sign language, a lot of actors had speaking roles, which put a lot of pressure and emphasis on capturing facial movements. Here, Winquist praised the new facial deep learning solver they used, which animators used to train a neural network to learn the actors’ facial movements. Because the new technology focused on the nuts and bolts, the animators were able to give their attention to the nuance of translating each performance. Read Winquist’s full comments below:

No, [Wes didn’t bring many changes] really, because I think our mission is to faithfully translate the performance, the intent of the performance, of what the actors and Wes were working on together, to find the truth in any given moment on the day. So our process is as it has been. We get incredibly talented actors in a suit, and they work with a director to sort of block the scene and figure out and explore in the same way as you would with any film. I mean, this is no different, performance capture is no different, apart from the fact that they’re not wearing a costume, they’re wearing a mocap suit, and in the sense of the actual filmmaking process.

So, from then, our job was complicated, I guess, on this one a bit further, because all of our cast were speaking roles in this one, where there’s a lot of sign language in the previous trilogy. There were certainly, you remember, Bad Ape and chatty characters like that, but a lot of the setup for the Caesar trilogy was a lot of sign language, where here, all of our new dozen hero-level characters were all speaking roles. So, that requirement to have all of that heavy facial animation to support all that meant that we had to find a more efficient way to deal with the facial animation process. So, for this film, the first time on our A characters, we rolled in the latest version of our facial deep learning solver, which really gave us a leg up in the sense that it took the movement of those dots on the actors’ faces, and a neural network was essentially trained by the animators to learn the relationship between when an actor does this, it means the character does that. Because it’s never one-to-one mapping. And what that really gave us, especially because, as we went through the process, essentially the brain, so to speak, of that neural net learned as it was fed more and more material.

It would get better and better at the first pᴀss of that animation, which basically meant that our facial animators, all of their time was able to be spent focusing on the nuance, and not the nuts and bolts, because that’s where we found, in the past — because all the previous films were still using head-mounted cameras on our actors, and we had that reference there — the actual animation itself was more of a hand key framed to match that reference. Whereas here, we could actually have the facial solver take the first pᴀss, and then the animator could pick up on top of that and just really focus on the subtleties. And for every moment in a performance on screen, we could spend all of our time talking about the effect of it all, the emotional hit that we get from the actor. “Am I getting the same emotional hit from the ape character? And if not, then we’ve still got some work to do.” So that thing was great. It allowed us to tackle the much greater amount of dialog and things on this one with a similarly sized team to the previous movies, which was great.

What This Means For Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes

Erik Winquist Is A Seasoned VFX Supervisor

Winquist is somewhat of a veteran when it comes to VFX, having worked with Weta on James Cameron’s Avatar and Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit, both films serving as solid exhibitions of visual effects, especially the former. He also supervised the visual effects in the reboot trilogy, earning his first Oscar nomination for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the most acclaimed installment of that trilogy. Being able to solve the creative problems that arose with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes comes with little surprise.

The results are impressive and justify his Oscar nomination, which he shares with Stephen Unterfranz, Paul Story, and Rodney Burke. As a film that heavily relies on visual effects, Winquist and his team were able to achieve the nigh-impossible goal of making talking apes who ride horses look convincing. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes does have some heavy compeтιтion in its category, as visually striking films like Dune: Part Two, Alien: Romulus, and Wicked were also nominated for Best Achievement in Visual Effects.

Our Take On Winquist’s Oscar-Nominated Efforts

Comparing Winquist’s Work To Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes Makes Kingdom More Impressive

Comparing the visual effects in Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Winquist had a harder job in the latter, as the former’s dark and gritty atmosphere and tone were able to make the visual effects look seamless much easier with its underlit frames and dim backgrounds. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a bright film throughout, giving Winquist and his team a bigger hurdle to jump, but, ultimately, on top of all the other problems he had, he was able to successfully solve these challenges.