Ian Nathan's Blog - Posts Tagged "special-effects"
They Have a Cave Troll: How Weta Digital Remade the Visual Effects Landscape
Inside a former panel beater's shop on Manuka Street, in the leafy suburb of Miramar that slides so serenely out into Wellington Bay, can be found the HQ of Weta Digital. Many moons ago, on a guided a tour, I was granted entry into the server room which hummed and blinked and hissed like the engine room of the Enterprise. At that point, as they strained to meet the demands of Return of the King, I was reliably informed that Weta Digital had the largest amount of processing power in the Southern Hemisphere.
Which was all a far cry from a small house on Tasman Street, near the cricket ground, with old furniture stacked against the walls upstairs while they created supernatural wonders for The Frighteners on the cramped ground floor. And back before then, right at the inception point on Heavenly Creatures, when they had a single computer, operated by a fellow named George Pond — the very first keyboard jockey in what is now a thousandfold operation filling buildings all over Wellington deeply embedded in the most ambitious digital project currently being mounted, a set of films that will surely redefine once again what a computer is capable of providing an artform: James Cameron's sequels to Avatar.
It may go relatively uncelebrated, but one of the themes I explore in my new book is how The Lord of the Rings trilogy marks the most important transition in visual effects since Jurassic Park. Not only in technical advancement, but in the strategies with which they are put to use in storytelling. Like so many blockbusters, the three films are built upon digital (and practical) spectacle, but such wonders never seem the point of the films. The point was Tolkien. Nonetheless, Weta Digital revolutionsed the way things were done and perhaps even more radically where they were done.
The responsibility Weta Digital were given in realising Tolkien's many creations (and Jackson's elaborations thereon) was New Line's biggest gamble. Even once the films had heaved into production like an ocean liner leaving dock, the studio still took convincing that Jackson's New Zealand outfit were up to the task of provisioning Middle-earth with visual effects of sufficient quality. There were teething problems. An early summit led to the arrival of the American Jim Rygiel (who'd worked on films as diverse as Multiplicity and Starship Troopers) to help establish of an efficient production line. Weta Digital as was needed to shake off its 'everyone trying their hand at everything' enthusiasm for the streamlined practices of ILM if they were going to achieve the volume of effects required. They needed departments, specialists. Even then, New Line's CEO Robert Shaye was determined Gollum, still at this point only to be animated in CGI, was wholly beyond their capabilities.
Effects were a real bone of contention between director and his backers.
Still, with Rygiel at the wheel, Weta Digital began making significant advances, not only in productivity but stylistically. In short, they began to do things their own way. Or more to the point, they became an enormously important constituent part of the holistic vision of the trilogy. Housed in the neighbourhood, within shouting distance of Weta Workshop, ten minutes by car from Stone Street Studios, fifteen from the director's house on Karaka Bay, they were part of a community.
The Cave Troll was the defining moment. This emphatic statement that Weta Digital was outpacing industry standards was revealed as part of the early trumpet blast of footage unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. It had been a battle to get it ready in time, but Jackson was intent the press see a complete sequence from the films and the confrontation between the Fellowship and the monstrous Troll (only a baby according to Richard Taylor) in the bowels of Moria encapsulated both an iconic branch of Tolkien's subcreation and Jackson's thrilling embodiment of it.
Their approach has been to build the creature up from a skeleton, adding layers of digital muscles and ligament, giving it life. "I don't think many other people had approach it like that," Jackson explained to me. "They usually just made a digital puppet that they moved around on the computer." More than that, it was a creature capable of expressing emotion: a quizzical expression when he thinks he puts an end to Frodo; a childlike look of dismay on reaching his own demise.
They had based the look loosely on the Hunchback on Notre Damme, as well as a homage to the repertoire of Ray Harryhausen, with the skin of a rhino.
Incidentally, the battleground of Balin's Tomb was part set and part digital environment and Jackson had previsualised all the moves of the ensuing combat, demonstrating them to his actors, often filling in for the missing Cave Troll.
After that, every size and shape in Tolkien's bestiary was a matter of meeting the designs that fell from the book into the collective pool of Jackson, concept artists Alan Lee and John Howe, and the many sculptors and dreamers of the Workshop, who would walk around the corner with a monstrous maquette on a tray. When it came to Shelob the Digital crew caught a Funnel Web spider and studied its motion (before releasing it again).
Gollum, much debated, much extolled, is to my mind the chief accomplishment of the entire production. Shaye had finally been won over by the test footage, Weta Digital had hastily put together in advance of one of his rare visits. Joe Letteri was still transferred in from ILM to manage the slippery character, but he took to Jackson and Miramar, and ended up staying forevermore. Gollum's hitherto unthinkable fusion of actor, art and technology redefined what visual effects were capable of bringing to character, and for that matter how far acting could be extended into another dimension.
The battles were something else entirely. A challenge that worked in the opposite direction to Gollum, required termite sprawls of digital friend and foe that could somehow respond to direction. The answer was the development, virtually from scratch, of MASSIVE software. A fellow Wellingtonian named Stephen Regelous was the mastermind. He came with a facility for stretching the limits of traditional programs and a strange fascination with AI. He gave thousands of digital agents 'brains' enough to make decisions based on an increasingly detailed set of parameters (called "logic nodes") the programmers could set.
"What was wonderful to me was to watch people's reactions," Regelous recalled. "It is one thing to ascribe what agents are doing, but is a whole other thing to see what people think the agents are doing." When during one test battle one agent seemed to be running for the hills, he was in fact simply in search for his next opponent, they just hadn't programmed him to turn around if he was facing the wrong way. Through such unforeseen mistakes the software had begun storytelling.
The Hobbit trilogy was dominated by the prowess of Weta Digital, with so much of their achievement now taken for granted. "Full environments," Letteri told me keenly, "that was the evolution." They could control everything, even the weather — Olympian Gods breaking for lunch at The Larder on Darlington Road.
Let us not downplay the might of Smaug. The best sequence in the second trilogy going supra book as the dwarves and Bilbo do battle through the titanic halls of Erebor with a seething dragon mo-capped by Sherlock Holmes. The lithe camerawork was pre-ordained by the director working within the volume, in effect stepping into the mountain with his own camera to describe shots as freely as using a paintbrush.
For Jackson a key motivation in even taking on Tolkien was the future possibility of Weta Digital standing on its own two hairy feet. A portion of his motivation of even taking on Tolkien was to provide Weta Digital with work — to establish this visual effects kingdom on the other side of the world. So they wouldn't be reliant on his filmmaking choices. The work soon came, via Jackson and from elsewhere.
Weta Digital's work on Avatar (where Massive was used to populate an entire planet, the ecological opulence of Pandora left to grow and intertwine along the paths of life before it was ready for the film) took leaps and bounds, as did the mo-cap advances and filigree hair work that came with King Kong and then the revived Planet of the Apes franchise (with Andy Serkis never far from the action).
Today, Manuka Street, The Big House and the other sites are more than equal to ILM. They have put in years of R&D on Avatar 2, 3, 4 and is it 5? Produced by Jackson and directed by former Weta comrade Christian Rivers, Mortal Engines, with its far-flung future of mobile cities and airships, occupies different floors and buildings. Letteri presides over multiple productions. Middle-earth must seem a long time ago, but it is not forgotten. It is in their genes. And who knows, maybe a certain Amazon television series will knock on their door.
They are a marvellous bunch, proud of what they did, but pragmatic as they invented worlds. Every time I visited, they would bring laptops and explain their artistry with Power Point presentations, pointing out microscopic detailing, nearly impossible to detect amid the hurly burly of story, yet to their eyes vital to the whole.
Is there such a thing as a house style for Weta Digital? A different flavour to ILM or the other citadels of Hollywood's effects industry? I think there is. It is undoubtedly infused with the flights of Tolkien, the visions of Jackson and the reputation it gained from both. Weta Digital won Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards three years on the bounce. Another reason why so many other productions came to them for more of that good stuff. Mo-cap would inevitable be a mainstay, the teasing representation of living matter and 'real' movements. But it is organic world-building, more dreamlike and poetic perhaps than the Sturm und Drang of ILM. Not that they cannot be gritty and realistic, but there is a strangeness in the New Zealand light that glows within their work. Something like magic.
Ian Nathan 19/6/2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-earth is out now.
Which was all a far cry from a small house on Tasman Street, near the cricket ground, with old furniture stacked against the walls upstairs while they created supernatural wonders for The Frighteners on the cramped ground floor. And back before then, right at the inception point on Heavenly Creatures, when they had a single computer, operated by a fellow named George Pond — the very first keyboard jockey in what is now a thousandfold operation filling buildings all over Wellington deeply embedded in the most ambitious digital project currently being mounted, a set of films that will surely redefine once again what a computer is capable of providing an artform: James Cameron's sequels to Avatar.
It may go relatively uncelebrated, but one of the themes I explore in my new book is how The Lord of the Rings trilogy marks the most important transition in visual effects since Jurassic Park. Not only in technical advancement, but in the strategies with which they are put to use in storytelling. Like so many blockbusters, the three films are built upon digital (and practical) spectacle, but such wonders never seem the point of the films. The point was Tolkien. Nonetheless, Weta Digital revolutionsed the way things were done and perhaps even more radically where they were done.
The responsibility Weta Digital were given in realising Tolkien's many creations (and Jackson's elaborations thereon) was New Line's biggest gamble. Even once the films had heaved into production like an ocean liner leaving dock, the studio still took convincing that Jackson's New Zealand outfit were up to the task of provisioning Middle-earth with visual effects of sufficient quality. There were teething problems. An early summit led to the arrival of the American Jim Rygiel (who'd worked on films as diverse as Multiplicity and Starship Troopers) to help establish of an efficient production line. Weta Digital as was needed to shake off its 'everyone trying their hand at everything' enthusiasm for the streamlined practices of ILM if they were going to achieve the volume of effects required. They needed departments, specialists. Even then, New Line's CEO Robert Shaye was determined Gollum, still at this point only to be animated in CGI, was wholly beyond their capabilities.
Effects were a real bone of contention between director and his backers.
Still, with Rygiel at the wheel, Weta Digital began making significant advances, not only in productivity but stylistically. In short, they began to do things their own way. Or more to the point, they became an enormously important constituent part of the holistic vision of the trilogy. Housed in the neighbourhood, within shouting distance of Weta Workshop, ten minutes by car from Stone Street Studios, fifteen from the director's house on Karaka Bay, they were part of a community.
The Cave Troll was the defining moment. This emphatic statement that Weta Digital was outpacing industry standards was revealed as part of the early trumpet blast of footage unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. It had been a battle to get it ready in time, but Jackson was intent the press see a complete sequence from the films and the confrontation between the Fellowship and the monstrous Troll (only a baby according to Richard Taylor) in the bowels of Moria encapsulated both an iconic branch of Tolkien's subcreation and Jackson's thrilling embodiment of it.
Their approach has been to build the creature up from a skeleton, adding layers of digital muscles and ligament, giving it life. "I don't think many other people had approach it like that," Jackson explained to me. "They usually just made a digital puppet that they moved around on the computer." More than that, it was a creature capable of expressing emotion: a quizzical expression when he thinks he puts an end to Frodo; a childlike look of dismay on reaching his own demise.
They had based the look loosely on the Hunchback on Notre Damme, as well as a homage to the repertoire of Ray Harryhausen, with the skin of a rhino.
Incidentally, the battleground of Balin's Tomb was part set and part digital environment and Jackson had previsualised all the moves of the ensuing combat, demonstrating them to his actors, often filling in for the missing Cave Troll.
After that, every size and shape in Tolkien's bestiary was a matter of meeting the designs that fell from the book into the collective pool of Jackson, concept artists Alan Lee and John Howe, and the many sculptors and dreamers of the Workshop, who would walk around the corner with a monstrous maquette on a tray. When it came to Shelob the Digital crew caught a Funnel Web spider and studied its motion (before releasing it again).
Gollum, much debated, much extolled, is to my mind the chief accomplishment of the entire production. Shaye had finally been won over by the test footage, Weta Digital had hastily put together in advance of one of his rare visits. Joe Letteri was still transferred in from ILM to manage the slippery character, but he took to Jackson and Miramar, and ended up staying forevermore. Gollum's hitherto unthinkable fusion of actor, art and technology redefined what visual effects were capable of bringing to character, and for that matter how far acting could be extended into another dimension.
The battles were something else entirely. A challenge that worked in the opposite direction to Gollum, required termite sprawls of digital friend and foe that could somehow respond to direction. The answer was the development, virtually from scratch, of MASSIVE software. A fellow Wellingtonian named Stephen Regelous was the mastermind. He came with a facility for stretching the limits of traditional programs and a strange fascination with AI. He gave thousands of digital agents 'brains' enough to make decisions based on an increasingly detailed set of parameters (called "logic nodes") the programmers could set.
"What was wonderful to me was to watch people's reactions," Regelous recalled. "It is one thing to ascribe what agents are doing, but is a whole other thing to see what people think the agents are doing." When during one test battle one agent seemed to be running for the hills, he was in fact simply in search for his next opponent, they just hadn't programmed him to turn around if he was facing the wrong way. Through such unforeseen mistakes the software had begun storytelling.
The Hobbit trilogy was dominated by the prowess of Weta Digital, with so much of their achievement now taken for granted. "Full environments," Letteri told me keenly, "that was the evolution." They could control everything, even the weather — Olympian Gods breaking for lunch at The Larder on Darlington Road.
Let us not downplay the might of Smaug. The best sequence in the second trilogy going supra book as the dwarves and Bilbo do battle through the titanic halls of Erebor with a seething dragon mo-capped by Sherlock Holmes. The lithe camerawork was pre-ordained by the director working within the volume, in effect stepping into the mountain with his own camera to describe shots as freely as using a paintbrush.
For Jackson a key motivation in even taking on Tolkien was the future possibility of Weta Digital standing on its own two hairy feet. A portion of his motivation of even taking on Tolkien was to provide Weta Digital with work — to establish this visual effects kingdom on the other side of the world. So they wouldn't be reliant on his filmmaking choices. The work soon came, via Jackson and from elsewhere.
Weta Digital's work on Avatar (where Massive was used to populate an entire planet, the ecological opulence of Pandora left to grow and intertwine along the paths of life before it was ready for the film) took leaps and bounds, as did the mo-cap advances and filigree hair work that came with King Kong and then the revived Planet of the Apes franchise (with Andy Serkis never far from the action).
Today, Manuka Street, The Big House and the other sites are more than equal to ILM. They have put in years of R&D on Avatar 2, 3, 4 and is it 5? Produced by Jackson and directed by former Weta comrade Christian Rivers, Mortal Engines, with its far-flung future of mobile cities and airships, occupies different floors and buildings. Letteri presides over multiple productions. Middle-earth must seem a long time ago, but it is not forgotten. It is in their genes. And who knows, maybe a certain Amazon television series will knock on their door.
They are a marvellous bunch, proud of what they did, but pragmatic as they invented worlds. Every time I visited, they would bring laptops and explain their artistry with Power Point presentations, pointing out microscopic detailing, nearly impossible to detect amid the hurly burly of story, yet to their eyes vital to the whole.
Is there such a thing as a house style for Weta Digital? A different flavour to ILM or the other citadels of Hollywood's effects industry? I think there is. It is undoubtedly infused with the flights of Tolkien, the visions of Jackson and the reputation it gained from both. Weta Digital won Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards three years on the bounce. Another reason why so many other productions came to them for more of that good stuff. Mo-cap would inevitable be a mainstay, the teasing representation of living matter and 'real' movements. But it is organic world-building, more dreamlike and poetic perhaps than the Sturm und Drang of ILM. Not that they cannot be gritty and realistic, but there is a strangeness in the New Zealand light that glows within their work. Something like magic.
Ian Nathan 19/6/2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-earth is out now.
