Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes' Visual Effects Supervisor Explains How Previous Apes Trilogy Helped Production

We talked to members of the Wētā FX team responsible for bringing Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes to life.

By Jamie Jirak

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is now playing in theaters, and the latest installment to the franchise is yet another entry that features stunning visual effects. The team behind the scenes included franchise newcomers as well as returning veterans such as Visual Effects Supervisor, Erik Winquist, who was previously nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. ComicBook recently had the chance to chat with Winquist alongside his Wētā FX team members, VFX Producer Danielle Immerman and Animation Supervisor Paul Story. During the chat, we asked Winquist what lessons he learned from working on the previous films, and how his history helped during the making of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. 

"The characters are the most important part of all of this and just making sure that [director Wes Ball] was getting the performance that he was happy with," Winquist began.

"So before we started shooting, Erik, having worked on the previous movies, did almost like a tutorial if you will," Immerman explained. "And it was a video, a couple of minutes long and -"

"It was an hour long," Winquist corrected, which led to big laughs from everyone in the room. "It didn't feel like an hour when I watched it," Immerman assured him. "Did I sit there for an hour?" she jokingly wondered. "But it explains the whole process and why it's important to get a clean plate and why it's important to shoot it this way. And he got the director completely invested in the process." 

"Well, by that point, Wes was already invested," Winquist continued. "It was all the other heads of department for the shoot we were about to do, and the actors. So because we had this wealth of information from the previous movies, I could literally just pull clips from those films of, 'Here was the final, it was everything that you saw in the movie. And here was what we started with and this is why we shot it this way.' And we could just walk through it. And so everybody could come away from this going, 'Oh, I understand why you're saying we need to do this now.'"

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"On the first one, it was a little bit more of an antagonistic kind of experience, because the film crew had no idea why the hell you were asking them to do [certain things]. 'Why are you walking around with that wand?' All that kind of stuff. And so that really kind of greased the wheels to make the process [easier]. It really made everybody on the crew understand that we are absolutely the essential part of this process and if we don't get what we need, this film's not going to succeed. And so that was the biggest thing about doing that and it worked great. It just got everybody on a side." 

Stay tuned for more from our interview with the VFX team behind Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. You can learn more about Wētā FX here. 

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