![]() The tone of Rampage is very different from the Apes franchise. Unlike Caesar in the Apes films, George is not super intelligent and at the beginning of the film, the Weta team needed to deliver a very believable normal animal gorilla performance. “It required the same workflow of sculpting custom facial expressions for George to match each of the actual FACS action units, just as he had done for not only the Apes films but say the characters in Avatar“. “The foundation of what our animators needed to work with was exactly the same,” Winquist commented. All the actual face shapes that animators are dialing in today, are those FACS action units”.Īlthough George in Rampage required more expressive comic acting, the modeling process the Weta team went through is the same process as they did to achieve the dramatic character animation in the Apes films. “All the facial shapes on the face of George in Rampage are a direct carryover from the work that was done on the Planet of the Apes films. ![]() “It is all based on that FACS foundation” comments Winquist. Much of the original thinking from King Kong is still carried forward today in films like Rampage and the Planet of the Apes films. The current Weta face pipeline started with back with the film King Kong and the initial approach of a FACS based workflow from the work of researchers such as Mark Sagar. and then incorporating some of the facial features of Jason into George’s face, especially his eyes and around the jaw,” explained Winquist. “The challenge for us from the outset was to create an original character. Given the limited number of great ape gorillas in captivity, Winston was also a model reference used for Red in War for Planet of the Apes. They designed George as a mix of SnowFlake and another gorilla, Winston, from the San Diego zoo. Weta went to great lengths to make sure George was different from Winter and felt original on screen in Rampage. Snowflake was also reference used for King Kong at Weta and the character Winter in War for Planet of the Apes. George was modeled primarily off the real world gorilla, Snowflake that resided in the Barcelona zoo and died in 2003. The Weta team incorporated part of Liles face into the design of George, “so that George’s eyes are Jason’s eyes, George’s expressions are Jason’s expressions”, commented Peyton. I want audiences to fall in love with George.” To that end, Peyton cast performance-capture actor Jason Liles. And since the most important dynamic in this movie is between Davis and George, to not build things around two actors in those roles seemed foolhardy. “I do a lot of effects-driven movies,” the director says, “but I’m still a big fan of shooting as much as I can in-camera. ![]() For the director, that meant using performance capture for the character so that an actor could convey emotion and work as much as possible with the actors on set. We will have more stories coming from the conference including the launch of the new Foundry Cloud service and the latest news from the Pixar RenderMan team on the upcoming v22.įor the film’s central relationship to ring true, it was important that audiences accept the gorilla, George as Primatologist Davis Okoye does, as a genuine personality, thoughtful, playful and funny, and of course suddenly angry and frightened. The FMX conference in Germany is the premiere conference for visual storytelling and world building in Europe. The work of Weta in this film clearly builds on years of creature work, facial animation, MoCap retargeting and specifically ape animation in a range of films. Weta Digital did just over 600 creature effects shots, the only significant creature work Weta did not do was the killer rat in the film’s opening space sequence.Įrik Winquist presented the film’s visual effects work this week at FMX in Stuttgart. Hydraulx VFX, co-founded by Colin Strause, handled almost everything else. ![]() Weta Digital’s team, led by Oscar nominated VFX Supervisor Erik Winquist, were exclusively responsible for the creatures in the film. Strause had previously served as lead visual effects supervisor on Brad Peyton’s San Andreas. This is his third collaboration directing Dwayne Johnson following the 2015 San Andreas which grossed $473 million worldwide and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island.Ĭolin Strause was the film’s production VFX Supervisor. Rampage is a science fiction monster film loosely based on the video game series of the same name and stars Dwayne Johnson as a primatologist named Davis Okoye, who must team up with George, an albino gorilla, who turns into a raging creature of enormous size following a rogue experiment, in order to stop two other giant mutant monsters.īrad Peyton directed and produced Rampage. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |