“Weta Digital has grown to now define state of the art in visual effects worldwide. Its dedication to storytelling and realizing director’s visions has lead to the company working with some of the best directors in the world. For The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Weta Digital continued to employ its exquisite attention to detail into helping to tell the story of the fantastical world of Middle-earth.” [Read More]
Category: WETA Digital
Ever wondered exactly what they do at Weta Workshop and Weta Digital? Richard Taylor talks about their work in this neat little clip. Plus there’s some footage and red carpet interviews from the Wellington premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey that you may not have sen previously. Continue reading “Richard Taylor talks about Weta’s work”
In amongst all the excitement and celebration of the new Hobbit movie, tonight the very sad news has broken that Eileen Moran, an Executive Producer at Weta Digital, died in New Zealand on Monday this week. Moran worked extensively with Peter Jackson and the Weta team, including on The Lord of the Rings movies and The Hobbit movies. She missed the Hobbit premiere last week because she was in hospital. You can read more here. Everyone in the TORn community would like to extend deepest sympathies to her family, her loved ones, her friends and her colleagues.
“It’s changed almost completely,” Letteri says. “On the outside, you want Gollum to look like the same character, but he’s completely different” underneath.
The biggest change from the first set of films is the way that actor Andy Serkis’ performance is captured and analyzed in order to create the digital character, according to visual-effects supervisor Eric Saindon. “Our facial capture has progressed leaps and bounds,” he says. “Now we actually capture all of Andy’s performance, when he’s acting with Martin (Freeman) in Gollum’s cage on set. We have a small camera attached in front of his face that captures his exact facial performance. Rather than an animator going in and doing it frame-by-frame, the computer analyzes Andy’s performance and then fires Gollum’s muscles to do the exact same thing. So the first half of the animation, which is the raw mo-cap data, is really Andy.”
“We know so much more about how the face works,” Letteri adds. “When people communicate face to face there are so many things that are going on that you really have to study now and put into the characters. We hope that people recognize that there’s this extra layer of depth.”
From Emma Horsley at the Manawatu Standard: Weta Digital approached New Zealands Massey University’s Institute of Veterinary, Animal and Biomedical Sciences equine scientist Dr Chris Rogers and the vets there for advice on how a horse worked from the inside out, so they could construct more believable and realistic computer generated horses for the big screen.
Weta has previously built models by looking at the horses from the outside. The institute has an equine treadmill which was used to collect motion capture images by several camera’s and Massey’s scientists were able to give them an understanding of the structure of the animal. [Read More]
Weta Digital were among the winners at this years’ Australian Effects & Animation Festival. The AEAF Awards is an international competition and screening, now in its 16th year with entries from around the world. Awards are given for creative and technical excellence in the use of visual effects and animation in the creation of screened work. The winners where announced at the lively AEAF Awards event held at in Sydney at Event Cinemas George St on 24 July.
Weta Digital took home two awards for Feature Films VFX silver medal for The Avengers and best Feature Films – Animation for The Adventures of Tintin.
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