Killer sequence: The dramatic walk between south tower and north tower – which Petit performed six times. Everything else – towers, sky, clouds, cityscape, slack-jawed bystanders, precipitous drop to certain death – is all digital, which was lit in Katana and rendered using V-Ray. Only the top corner section of the south tower was physically built, surrounded by acres of green screen. Overall, the work is stylishly convincing, and the climactic walk – which in reality took place 1,368 ft above World Trade Center Plaza – is just as nerve-jangling and heart-in-mouth as you’d expect. The task fell to three vendors: Atomic Fiction handled the wire walk RodeoFX saw to the creation of ground-level shots of the towers and Czech Republic-based UPP contributed a number of shots, including digital recreations of Paris plus head replacements, swapping the face of a real wire walker for that of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. With the destruction of the towers in 2001, every aspect of the buildings had to be recreated in CG – along with the city of New York stretching off to the horizon. Watch The Walk to experience, at first hand, Philippe Petit’s vertiginous high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. VFX: Atomic Fiction, RodeoFX, Universal Production Partners.Killer sequence: Baloo singing Bare Necessities while floating along an all-CG jungle river. The scale of the project meant some of the workload was handed off to Weta Digital, which handled shots of Bagheera the tiger, plus King Louis and the destruction of the monkey temple – which should have been a doddle for the experienced Planet of the Apes team. Houdini, Flowline and Maya were used for water, mudslides and fire, and in-house program Kali handled object destruction. To create the panoply of creatures needed for the film – 54 species and 224 unique animals in all – MPC relied on its in-house hair system, Furtility, while developing new software to generate authentic musculature. Apart from a handful of props, the only real thing in the movie is Mowgli, played by Neel Sethi. This reimagining of Disney’s classic 1967 animated feature is groundbreaking for the photorealism of its entirely computer-generated environments and animals – plus the fact that its a cracking yarn, beautifully told. Killer sequence: The final battle is great, but, really, all of the VFX are outstanding. To do so it employed a range of in-house tools – Facets for facial performance capture Tissue for muscle and skin Wig for fur Lumberjack for vegetation Synapse for smoke and fire Manuka for physically-based rendering – and the results speak for themselves. The New Zealand-based VFX house surpassed itself, not only with the incredible fidelity of the ape recreations, but also with entirely digital environments, water, weather and battle scenes. It’s night-time, it’s raining, the ape fur is wet and clumpy, and CG characters stand shoulder-to-shoulder with real actors… Despite being a compositor’s nightmare, it’s all totally seamless and utterly believable. Through the bars we see Woody Harrelson and his men, alongside a servile gorilla, and in the background is another cage full of apes. There’s one scene where we see Caesar caged in the Alpha-Omega military base. We could have included any of the three films, but with War for the Planet of the Apes, Weta Digital really nailed it, taking the levels of realism to new heights. Watch it for the incredibly lifelike apes, of course.
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