00:13My job basically was to take, having got the script, kind of make a plan with the other
00:20filmmakers and my team back at Weta and kind of come up with a way to best realize the
00:28film and a big part of that for this project was figuring out how to take our performance
00:34capture technology that we'd kind of developed for Avatar and we'd used over the years on
00:40King Kong and Lord of the Rings as well and take that into the live action environment.
00:45Performance capture as we call it now because it's not just capturing motion, it's capturing
00:50the entire performance, is really ultimately it's a tool, it's a piece of technology and
00:56it's really a bunch of cameras which records an actor's performance, much like a film
01:01camera records an actor's performance, it's just that what we were able to do on this
01:04film is to put both the performance capture cameras and the actual film cameras together
01:08in the same, on the same location.
01:10One of the challenges and one of the great things that we got to do on this film was to
01:14take that performance capture tool set in terms of the cameras and the funny dots and the funny
01:22suits and put them into the live action environment and that allowed us to get really good interaction
01:27between the human actors and the actors that were playing digital characters.
01:36When I'm acting in a role in a role that uses performance capture technology I'm just playing
01:40that character fully and then it's the look of the character is then added on afterwards.
01:49We had to create apes that were in proportion and physically looked like the apes that we
01:56know in present day so that kind of level of detail had to really work.
02:03Eventually way down the line the visual effects shots start to come in and you see Caesar being
02:07painted on top of, you know the look of Caesar being painted on top of my performance so in
02:12terms of the acting part of it it really isn't any different to playing a live action role.
02:16So getting everything as believable as possible was one of the big challenges.
02:30You start with the basic building blocks which is the research into primate behaviour and
02:36understanding that and what a normal chimpanzee, you know how their DNA works, what their behaviour
02:42patterns are, how they work in a group, how they exist and so on and then you learn their
02:49physicality and all of the movement side of things.
02:52By nature as Caesar he was the leader of these apes but as a cast member he also led
02:57all of these other actors who were quite new to performance capture and he gave them confidence
03:01and gave me confidence.
03:02When we're trying to create a believable interesting digital character to have such a good core
03:08performance to build from is it's key.
03:22One of the challenges of making films is you live and breathe it and you know every aspect
03:27of it and you know that the microphone is above the head and all of those things that take
03:31you out of it so it's always trying to look at the film from a sort of objective point of
03:37view and really the answer to doing that is just focusing on the story.
03:41How well does the story come across and hopefully that's worked for us.
03:46If we've done our job right they'll walk out of the theatre having you know rooted for the apes
03:50and feeling like they've been through the you know Caesar's journey essentially from infancy
03:57growing up with humans and kind of being you know betrayed and kind of rising up against the humans
04:03through the end of the film.
04:10Caesar.
04:11Caesar.A
04:11All right.
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