LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

When live-action shots just aren’t possible, it falls into the hands of the cg artists to create environments

In addition to all of the live-action photography, CG augmentation was needed for building environments. “The Hidden Fortress is one of our big environments in the film,” remarks Weta Digital Visual Effects Supervisor, Dan Lemmon. “A portion of the exterior we shot in British Columbia but we ended up digitally adding the waterfall and all of the interior. The baskets, totems, sconces and torches were built off of designs or pieces that the prop master or set decorator had put together with the production designer.” A significant element that needed to be simulated was the waterfall. “A big part of making it feel believable had to do with building the terrain underneath the waterfall, such as the rocks, channels, and interruptions the water flows over. By making the surface underneath the waterfall bumpy enough in the right places, you can get behaviour that looks realistic.”

That wasn’t the only challenge. “The prison camp was a big set out in the middle of an empty lot near the airport in Vancouver,” reveals Dan. “It would have been several hundred metres in each direction. But even that was only a fraction of the size the prison camp was supposed to be. We had several walls of big green screen surrounding that set. This was the first time I worked with inflatable green screen walls. They go up quick, stand up against winds, and are smooth. Ours were 50 feet high and 100 feet long, stacked side by side. Then on top of that we used cherry picker lifts to extend the green screen to be 100 feet tall. Even that wasn’t tall enough to cover the whole set.” The foreground plate featured the human actors and the motion capture performers playing the apes. “We sent an aerial unit to Witney Portal in California and then we built our environment based on a lot of that photography.”