Innocence And Truth: How Wētā FX Animated A Key Scene In ‘Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes’

Disney and 20th Century Studios’ Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the tenth film in the long-running Apes franchise, stands among five films currently nominated for a 2025 visual effects Academy Award. This is the fourth time the series has been nominated in this category, not counting an honorary award for John Chambers’ prosthetic effects in 1968. While the series has yet to win the vfx Oscar, many believe that this could be the year.

For the uninitiated, the series kicked off when Charlton Heston played an astronaut catapulted 2,000 years into future who discovers a shocking truth about human evolution: apes rule the planet. After four sequels, and a Tim Burton remake, the series entered a new phase when Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) reset the clock. The prequel revealed the beginning of ape ascendency and the first digitally-rendered ape in Caesar, leader of the species revolution. Based on a motion capture performance by Andy Serkis, animated at Weta Digital (now Wētā FX), Caesar and his tribe went on to earn Oscar nominations in Rise, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), and his trilogy’s conclusion in War for the Planet of the Apes (2017).

The new film picks up ‘many generations’ after Caesar, and follows a young chimpanzee, Noa (Owen Teague), and a mysterious orangutan named Raka (Peter Macon) who struggle to reconcile their destiny among the relics of a forgotten civilization. Cartoon Brew takes a close look at the new simian protagonists with the film’s visual effects supervisor, Erik Winquist – veteran of three previous Caesar films – and director Wes Ball, who joined the Apes series after previous collaborations with Wētā directing three Maze Runner films.

Cartoon Brew: What do Raka and Noa represent as characters in the Apes saga?

Wes Ball, director: They are innocents. They are like the purest version of what’s special about the Apes series, especially Noa. He is a naive character who is awakened to this new world. And Raka carries the torch of the ‘good Caesar.’ They both share a joy that does not exist in all the drama and intensity happening around them. That makes for very likable characters.

Raka is enigmatic and, facially, he’s quite different to Maurice, the orangutan in the previous Caesar films who we briefly see in the opening flashback. Why is that?

Ball: It has to do with puberty. The idea was more like why hasn’t Raka sexually matured yet?

Erik Winquist, vfx supervisor: He’s like a priestly character in his temple. Maybe he’s taken a vow of celibacy. Who knows?

Wētā FX’s facial animation architecture has evolved a great deal since from the Facial Action Coding Shape (FACS) approach used on Caesar and The Lord of the Rings. Did you have to adjust your approach to ape facial animation?

Winquist: We did look at the anatomically-correct facial system that Wētā developed for the Avatar: The Way of Water. The reality of it was, that system was built and tuned to humanoid faces. We realized it was going to take lot of time and effort to port that into ape topology. So, we decided we had a system that had been working very well for us on the Apes films, let’s go back and use the same FACS-based system. But this time, the big challenge was that we had about a dozen new, ‘hero’ characters in speaking roles. We had more dialog in this movie than the previous Caesar trilogy combined.

Did Wētā’s ‘Facial Deep Learning Solver’ (FDLS) help with that?

Winquist: That was made several films back, but this was the first time we used it on an ape. There were a lot of improvements and enhancements that had to be brought into the mix to make that viable. But what that gave us was a consistency of performance. The animators could train the ‘brain’ in this neural network to learn the relationship between how dots on an actor’s face were moving, which meant a very specific mapping to their ape character. We had to train and feed that as we went, and initially we had to hold its hand a lot.

Ball: Yeah, the first couple shots, man, we were working to get that thing to work.

Winquist: But, because we fed the FDLS so much information from all of our performers, it ended up giving us really quick first-pass animation of facial [performances] and allowed our facial animators to focus all their energy on on the nuances.

Ball: And that’s the hard part. By the end, we had a couple weeks left to go, I was throwing new shots at Erik, and, boom, a shot would come back, and it would be done! It was amazing, how these tools learn. In the hands of great artists, miracles happen.

How did you work out translations from Owen Teague to your Noa puppet?

Ball: We worked on shots from the movie. We spent some time on [animation model] turntables to get the characters right. A couple of times we found little issues in shots that we couldn’t see [during the shoot], and we’d have to fix a brow line or some other detail that we then had to ripple back through previously-finished shots. Sometimes it was a little hard to take reference from an actor, for instance Eka [Darville] who played Sylva [a giant silverback gorilla]. But in all the apes, Erik and his team put details into the models taken from the actors. That likeness helped us see the translation from what I felt when I was watching on set, and with what the model’s doing. It helps when you see the actor in there.

One of the most impressive aspects of what Wētā has done on all its Apes films is placing motion capture [‘mocap’] technology in very tough locations – rain, mud, snow, water, you name it. How did you hone that for Kingdom?

Winquist: Our core technology is the same as we’ve used across these films, using custom-made for us, but fairly standard motion capture cameras. The big difference is that the actors are emitting infrared light from their mocap suits, instead of it being a passive system [reflecting light] like on an indoor stage. Another thing that we did a lot more this time was what we call ‘fo-cap’ [a play on ‘faux’]. Instead of spending days pre-rigging, as we did for some of our larger [environments] – like Noa’s home in Eagle Clan village, which took days to rig our cameras in a very large space. But other times, for example, on a forest path, or where characters were wading through a creek, those were not viable locations to set up full-blown mo volumes. Instead, we’d set up an array of from six, to eight, to sometimes 10 witness cameras. They were global-shutter video cameras, phase-locked in synchronization. From that, in postproduction, we could track optical markers on the actors’ mocap suits, and reconstruct the performance. That allowed us to be a lot more nimble, and keep up with Wes.

Ball: [laughing] Yeah, we were flying! I’m a big fan of happy accidents, things you can’t plan until you’re there on the day. Being able to grab those moments of spontaneity was huge.

Let’s focus on a small scene, where Raka and Noa shelter in a cliff-face with the human girl, who they learn is ‘Mae’ (Freya Allan) – where did you shoot that?

Ball: That was on location, in New South Wales. We weren’t allowed to shoot in national parks, because we had horses and a lot of equipment. And so, we found private land. That was a hard location to get to, but it looked cool. For the first half the day, we shot that daytime scene. And then, we rolled right into a night shoot.

Did you use mocap, or ‘fo-cap’ there?

Winquist: That was our standard active mocap suits. The markers emitted infrared light that the motion picture camera couldn’t see, but our mocap cameras can. As Wes said, it was a tricky location to get into, because we had a film crew trying to squeeze into corners in this tight little alcove of a very shallow cave. We had to get our mocap cameras tucked into corners and clamped to rocks in ways that didn’t damage the location. The tricky part for us was, we only had about 180 degrees of that area where the camera was looking, where we could put our mocap cameras without them being blocked by camera operators, grips and all the gear that went along with the lighting for the scene. But we knew ahead of time that we were going to be shooting there, and so we had the time to pre-rig that space. We rocked up, got our work done, and we did not hold up the process.

What was important for you, dramatically, Wes, about that scene?

Ball: Spoiler alert – that scene follows Mae speaking for the first time. It’s a huge change in the story. Suddenly, our apes, who thought this creature that was following them around can speak and converse. For Noa, his world is changing. Things that he thought were true, are not. Plus, they are being hunted now, because of her. It’s a real shift in the story.

How much of that came from the performers?

Winquist: Everything we see there was Wes working with his cast and shaping the performance. Once we had that, we shot a clean plate.

Ball: That became our ‘truth’ that hundreds of artists worked towards capturing. We were not inventing; we were translating. And that’s what we spent months doing, in postproduction, trying to hold on to what the actors did. They author the performance, and then all these incredible people come on to make sure that translates.

What were your main beats in the scene?

Winquist: The scene was about Raka being intrigued. Here’s this human he’s been trying to track down and study, he’s finally found that she can speak, and you see it on his face, the way Peter Macon played that. He’s like, ‘Tell me more! There’s more of you?’ Meanwhile, you’ve got Owen Teague playing Noa, who’s suddenly suspicious. He feels betrayed. All that came through Owen’s face. That’s exactly what they gave us.

Did fur and ape anatomy influence the performance?

Winquist: We sometimes made subtle adjustments, maybe to the tilt of somebody’s head, because the angle wasn’t quite giving us the same ‘read’ as what we saw on the ‘take’ that Wes selected. And also, if you look at Peter Macon’s anatomy, versus Raka’s gangly arms, we had to make pose adjustments to accommodate those differences. But the overall expression, that’s the translation process Wes is referring to. The facial animators look at the emotion we get from the actor, and [compare] what are we getting from the ape character. If those two things don’t match, then we’re not done, and we figure out how to subtly tweak facial shapes to elicit that response.

Ball: It’s interesting. Ape faces don’t move the same way as humans’. If an ape’s brow couldn’t move a certain way, Erik and his team, and [Wētā FX animation supervisor] Paul Story, had to interpret [a way] to give the same effect. There were a lot of creative solutions happening there. And I also want to mention: we did lot of mocap; but there are also shots that we fully hand-animated. For instance, we had a minute-long shot of Noa crying at the side of his father, who dies. That was fully hand-animated by a really talented artist. The scope of work on this movie for me, as an outsider looking in, it’s amazing to witness.