There’s a lot of pressure involved in trying to follow a trilogy as acclaimed and accomplished as the Andy Serkis-led “Planet of the Apes” saga, which culminated with 2017’s “War for the Planet of the Apes.” For “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” director Wes Ball, actor Owen Teague, animation supervisor Paul Story and visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist, making their blockbuster sequel involved a lot of both looking behind and ahead of them as they pushed the visual effects of the franchise even further.
“The challenge with this movie was that we both had to give people what they were expecting, but also surprise them,” Ball told TheWrap for a new installment of How I Did It, presented by 20th Century Studios. “We’re standing on what’s done before and elevating [it] into a level that wasn’t possible a couple years ago.”
The starting point for Winquist, who earned a Best Visual Effects Oscar nomination this year for “Kingdom,” was returning to the work he did on the previous “Apes” trilogy. “One of the first things I did when we began prepping this movie was to gather a collection of shots from the previous three movies that illustrated what we photographed on the day and why we shot things the way we shot them,” he recounted. “It helps everybody understand what we are all about to embark upon together.”
The process of putting “Kingdom” together, which Ball equated to “making a puzzle piece by piece,” required taking entire mo-cap rigs into the Australian wilderness where production took place so that the movie’s production team could shoot Teague and his co-stars on location in their performance capture gear. “The benefit of that is that we’re able to capture our actors in a natural environment and really kind of get the best performances out of our cast,” Winquist explained.
This filming technique demanded not only that multiple, multipurpose cameras be used on set, but also that at least two versions of every mo-cap scene in “Kingdom” be shot: first with the movie’s “Ape” actors in the frame and then again without them. “The goal for us was to try and get what we call a clean plate where there’s no performers that have to be painted out,” Winquist said. That may seem tedious on paper, but the freedom it provided Ball and his team during post-production was invaluable and well worth the extra effort.
“One of the great things about that process is that we’re able to actually go through and not just stitch performances together. Now that, with the cameras, we’re recreating the backgrounds, we can actually stitch those cameras together,” Story noted. “So that just opened up a whole new level of possibilities for Wes and the editors.” This meant that Ball and co. could combine their favorite performance takes with their favorite environment shots.
“The benefit of performance capture is we can actually take the performance of that one character from take three and put them with the camera from take five,” Winquist revealed.
The longtime VFX supervisor believes that “Kingdom” and its fellow modern “Apes” movies have proven that performance capture can be utilized no matter where a film may be set. Filmmakers need no longer be constrained by the requirements of the technology.
“I think what these films have shown is that it’s possible to take this kind of performance capture approach to wherever a filmmaker wants to make their movie,” he revealed. “”The future, I think, is pretty bright in terms of where we can go from here.”
