name the studio and 1991 film that had digital techniques applied to the sets

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. This digital model was used to extend the physical tesseract set to infinity… and beyond. The 3D team had to come up with clever ways of handling the huge data load so they could render it using Houdini’s Mantra. All the elements of Murph’s bedroom were scanned at high-res and used to create a digital version, and from this they generated the multiple extruded timelines. VFX supervisor, Paul Franklin, told Art of VFX that the concept was based on a three-dimensional extension of slitscan photography (used to great effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey). But no one expected the final reel, in which astronaut Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) enters the ‘tesseract’, a four-dimensional construct of interlinked timelines, where he communicates with his daughter, Murph, in the far distant past. This fascinating exploration of space travel and the effects of time dilation features some beautiful effects work, including some truly realistic spaceship scenes (mainly done with miniatures) and a scientifically accurate CG representation of the supermassive black hole, Gargantua.

Name the studio and 1991 film that had digital techniques applied to the sets