Joe Letteri, the senior visual effects supervisor and Director of the Weta Digital studio, has recently done a Reddit AMA. We’ve gathered the Q&A about The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, but you can read more on Reddit.
How is Peter Jackson like in person?
Peter’s great in person. He’s really collaborative, really open to ideas. And he’s got a LOT of energy. And I think one of the things that motivates Peter, which I think applies to everyone at Weta, is that you don’t give up on the film until you have put every ounce of effort you possibly can into it, to try to make it as best as possible before it goes out the door.
What are your future projects?
Future projects? Well, right now we are working on the second Maze Runner film, with FOX. We have the extended cut of HOBBIT going on right now. We have a film called SPECTRAL that we’re working on. And we’re doing pieces of other films as well, but those are probably the ones that you would see coming up the most immediately.
So say for a crowded battle scene like you’d see in Battle of the Five Armies or the LOTR movies. How many actual actors are there in a shot? And how responsive are the virtual actors to one another?
There are 3 ways that we create characters for battle scenes:
- One is live-action characters – so you would have, for example, in BATTLE, you would have your main characters shot on a green screen, probably no more than 5-6 at a time, because you tend to focus on the main action that you need, knowing that you’re going to fill in details later
- As we did on DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, we used performance capture and we focus on the main actors in the same way – for example, in the scene at the end, the fight between Caesar and Koba at the end on the tower, that’s choreographed with just the 2 main actors in mind, but on this case it’s done on a virtual stage with a virtual camera (which is a technique we developed for AVATAR)
- To fill out the background (and that can be a combination of either more motion-capture or some automatically generated animation) and we mix the two together, depending on how many characters we need for the background – for example, in DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, we would have about 1,000 apes in the battle scenes, with some of those on horseback
So usually a mixture of those 3.
We have a software package that we wrote, back on LOTR, called Massive, that will allow armies of characters and each of the agents has a brain, eyes and ears, so they can respond to the action of the other agents around them, automatically. So it’s like choreographing a crowd of extras. If we want more specific behavior in our crowds, our animators will use motion capture and animation to create exactly what we want, in the moments that we want, and then use animation to blend and connect all the actions together.
You mentioned that gollum from lotr and hobbit is your favourite character; how did the idea come about to use an actor for the portrayal of gollum rather than use cgi? And what did you think of Andy Serkis as gollum? I thought he was amazing, really brought the character to life!
Well, Gollum is a CGI character. What happened is that Andy was brought in, to record Gollum’s voice. But Andy, being an actor himself, worked with Peter to come up with this idea of having him perform in front of the camera with the other actors.
And that brought a whole new level of drama to the performance, because that meant that the actors could work with Andy as if Gollum were really there with them.
And so we then recorded Andy’s performance, and used that as a guide for creating the Gollum character, on top of the performance he gave on the set.
Now, when we did RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, we made a technical breakthrough where we could use the performance capture at the same time that Andy was performing onset.
And so that really allowed us then to do Gollum the same way for Hobbit, which was fantastic because it really kept Andy’s performance in the moment. And then we were able to take that one step further with DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, because then we were able to take all the recording gear to a remote location. So it’s given us the ability to work with actors to create these characters anywhere in the world.
And obviously, a huge fan of Andy. He’s a fantastic actor, and we’ve been fortunate to work with him all these years.
How was your experience working on the hobbit:battle of the five armies movie?
The experience working on those films was great, because we got to really spend another 3 years in Middle Earth, which is a fantastically open environment for us. We had the ability to not only walk through this fantastic landscape of Middle Earth, but help to create large parts of it, and as the series went on, we got to create more and more interesting characters. So it was great in the first film, to be able to bring Gollum back again, because he’s a favorite character of mine. It was great to be able to create Smaug, because he’s such a fantastic character. And, in the end, we created about 130 different characters for those 3 films.
You can read the whole Reddit AMA here.
