How the emotional Raka scene from ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ was made. An excerpt from befores & afters magazine.
Raka, Noa and Mae are confronted by Proximus’ muscle at a river crossing in Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. The FX simulations in that sequence would require 1.2 petabytes (1.2 billion megabytes) of disk space. To build up that scene, animation started with the original performance capture, some of which was carried out in partial sets with flowing water.
“Our work was a lot of back and forth with what shots retained plate elements for the water and what would ultimately be CG,” relates animation supervisor Paul Story. “We would be trying to keep as much of what the plate performance was there.”
“A great example of that is a close-up shot where Raka pushes Mae up out of the water,” advises VFX supervisor Erik Winquist. “That’s the performance take. Special effects provided us with a small river tank that had this current flowing that they could control. Freya and Peter are there in that river flow. We were able to use Freya, paint out Peter, and replace him with CG, of course, but the water that was actually pushing up against Peter’s chest in his wetsuit that he was wearing is in the movie. It was great to actually take advantage of the plate water.”
Although Wētā FX had gone through a major R&D phase for Avatar: The Way of Water to develop its Loki state machine for coupled fluid simulations, the river sequence in Kingdom presented some different challenges, in particular, that the water was of a nasty sediment-filled and dirt and debris type, with much surface foam. “For the purposes of efficiency and flexibility, we were leaning less on the state machine approach and bringing back in some of the older ways of working on water sims,” notes Winquist. “One thing we’d do is run a primary sim at low-res first that would give Paul and his team a really low-res mesh that they could at least animate to. So for example, they’d translate Peter as Raka, who was sitting in an office chair getting pulled around on a mocap stage, and work that into a very low-res sim. In the meantime, the FX team would direct the flow and get a rough version of that in front of Wes.”
This essentially involved ‘art directing’ the current and camera, specifies Winquist. “Does the camera dip under for a moment and come back over? What does that mean for having to play water sheeting down the lens? Once we had that art directed river in low-res, animation could go off and start animating apes against that current. Then also our FX team could go in and start looking at up-resing that into a much higher resolution sim.”
The next steps were a back and forth of animation animated to a low-res mesh. The benefit is that the animation done using the low-res mesh matches well to and integrates with the subsequent high-res fluid simulations, although tweaking is always required. Once these steps occur, the creatures team would take the flow fields of the simulation to affect the hair of the apes.
“For that we’re using Loki for the hair of the creatures and water to all interact,” says Winquist. “Then we take the creature bakes, bring them back into the sim, and then FX has to go in and do a super high-resolution, thin-film simulation against the hairs, because now we need to make sure that we’re taking into account volume preservation of the water. If they jump out of the water, we also need to show that the water is now starting to drain out of their hair.”
To help with simulating Raka’s complex fur in its wet state, visual effects supervisor Stephen Unterfranz pitched the idea of placing the digital character in the water, running a simulation and seeing what would happen to the fur and then sculpting a bespoke groom just for use when he is in the water. It helped with establishing a characteristic ‘parted hair’ look on the fur of Raka’s arm and body, owing to the pressure of the rushing water.
Interestingly, Raka’s fall into the raging rapids of the river was something Wētā FX had to revisit a couple of times, owing to a change in the line the character delivers. It was originally filmed in the Sydney backlot set with the scripted line of ‘The work continues’, said to Noa. “Wes came to the realization that that was the wrong thing for that character to say as his last words,” relates Winquist. “The switch to ‘Together. Strong.’ essentially echoes the ‘Apes. Together. Strong.’ line from from Caesar, it lands so much harder as the last thing we’re going to hear from this mentor character.”
With only around a month before delivery, Macon re-delivered the line by simply recording himself on video on his iPhone. “The audio from that is actually what’s in the movie,” reveals Winquist. “It really came down to an animator having to look at what we were seeing from that iPhone footage and put that in there. It was a, ‘My God, this is kind of devastating, this moment.’”
