King Kong

Creating the World of Kong – behind the wall

Behind the wall of secrecy that surrounds the world of King Kong, special effects directors and technicians are working on the virtual elements that will enhance the real-life look and feel of Kong as we will see it in 2005. At Weta Digital a city of computers is creating pre-vis, and the special CG effects that will bring the most life like and realistic version of the powerful fantasy film to the cinema screens of the world.

Visit to Weta Digital

Joe Lettari (visual effects supervisor and winner of two Academy awards for LOTR, Technical Achievement Award for his work on Gollum, The Two Towers and Return of the King) talks to Power Point slides. The design and building stages of the Empire State Building; New York City; T-Rex; a giant flesh-eating weta and an arm and hand of the king gorilla slide by demonstrating some of the digital complexities required to make the film real.

“For New York we are building the whole city. It is easier in the long run to have the flexibility to put the camera anywhere in New York where we want to have it because there are scenes that happen in two different places. It’s a period movie and we are building New York as it was in 1933. We have done a lot of research to figure what it actually looked like, starting with the Empire State building, so we have found the original blue prints for the building and built it accordingly.
Most of the Empire State Building has not changed too much since it was built but the top part has. The bit at the top where a lot of action takes place is completely different now. It’s overloaded with radio and TV aerials and there is a safety net and other things that did not exist in 1933. We are stripping all that off and rebuilding it as it was in 1933.
We have great old aerial surveys done of New York in the 1930’s and have lined up our New York with the old photos (shows a complete 3D CG virtual recreation of New York, 1933). We have taken out all the buildings that did not exist in 1933 and have recreated the city section by section. The set at Seaview will be used just for street level scenes and the rest will be CGI. This will allow us to do any height we need. For buildings we don’t know how they looked, we have researched all the architecture styles of the times so we know what all the windows, doorways, ledges, stairwells looked like in 1933. We have built a library of those elements and written software that will rebuild the city to what it would have looked like (shows shots of city). We are using Massive AI software we used in LOTR to do the crowd simulations to create a population for New York. We have looked at a lot of old photos of New York and tried to come up with the proper ethnic mix and built about thirty different types of people. We will use these to create different groups of people and we’ll have thousands of them in the scenes. (CG test photo of shiny old cars and clean people filing along 34th street in straight lines, showing what it might have looked like). The people in cars are driven by AI. About 300 extras will be used as part of the CG set. Trucks, vehicles, cars, fire hydrants and other elements, 1930’s style, will be used to recreate the city. We are still working on the cars and getting people here to drive like New Yorkers and it’s not so easy as traffic is a little calmer here. For the aeroplanes, biplanes no longer exist so we got blue prints, right down to the interiors to recreate on CG. There will be roughly the same number of planes in this film as in the original.

Lettari shows slides of creatures in the early stages of development.
Slide showing a virtual T-Rex swinging his open jaw as he lopes over the local Miramar Park grounds where kids play soccer in the week end.
Slide of a giant flesh eating weta. It looks pretty normal, just what you would expect to find in a log of dead wood in the back yard. But it is SO much bigger. The jaws, mandibles and long sticky legs and claws are immense. This is likely to produce pure terror in audiences who don’t like insects.
Slide of an arm and hand of Kong. Some challenges here are getting the fingerprints to scale on such a huge hand and putting the hair in digitally hair by individual hair so as to make it look real.

“This arm and hand have been sculpted for an eight metre gorilla. One of the tricky things about Kong is that he needs to perform on all fours and when he is upright. He is more menacing at times on all fours. To make Kong a natural, believable figure in the jungle he has to perform on all fours and we also want him to perform as the original did so he needs a skeleton that does both.
The whole musculature of a gorilla face is very similar to humans so they can do a lot of expressions we can. Although they don’t show emotion much we can read when they are happy or agitated, but the difference between a play sneer and an aggressive sneer is very subtle. The mouth shape does not change much. It’s whether they show their teeth or not, so we have to signal these subtle cues in such a way that people will understand what the emotion is as few people are gorilla experts.

How will you play the scene where Kong picks up Ann Darrow in his hand?
"She’ll have something they can puppeteer her with by hand and we will replace it with a digital Kong hand and get some articulation in there."

What can we expect for the dinosaurs?
"They will be true to the spirit of the original and we will go a bit further too. They have evolved in their own way on this island so will have their own characteristics."

Which fear is predominant?
"Probably isolation. One of the things we have been studying and learning about is that gorillas are extremely sociable. More so than even we are. So to have a gorilla you know is the last of his kind and who has no companionship would be extremely frightening for a real gorilla and to compound that by taking it out of its environment makes it even worse."

What is Kong going to do with real people?
"We have not decided that yet. We do not know how vicious he is going to be and are not sure how much he is going to be a natural creature and how much a monster. This is something Peter wants to work out as we go along. Right now he is concentrating on shooting all the live action bits so we are not sure how much he is going to be killing and eating people. We went through the same process with Gollum. The process of figuring out the personality. In The Two Towers where he does the Gollum/Smeagol scene, that came quite late in the process. That got written in very late and was one of the last scenes we did. When Peter, Fran and Phillipa wrote that scene and gave it to us it sort of solidified everything so I am expecting all that stuff will come out in the course of 2005."

Will you be keeping the old fashioned ways of looking at animals?
"That’s why we are keeping to the original so faithfully. If you can bring everyone into that feeling- where something like the Empire State Building was so brand new and people were not used to seeing things like gorillas. That’s what made the film so powerful when it opened. The Empire State Building had just been built. Most people had not seen or been to the top of it or even seen a gorilla. Yet here you are seeing the top of it and seeing a big gorilla up there. It’s great to have it set in the 1930’s rather than modern day because people are used to it now."

What kind of symbol is Kong in the 1930s and Kong in 2004?
"In the 1930s they played up the beauty and the beast theme. This time it will be more naturalistic than that. You just have the idea of Kong being in a foreign environment and what that does to him and that is all still evolving."

Visit to Weta SFX Workshop

Around the corner at Weta SFX Workshop Richard Taylor reveals the secrets of the Skull Island culture and some miniature realities behind the dense, forbidding jungle of Kong’s island kingdom.

“We have been working on King Kong for over 2 years running, in tandem with The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Universal turned us down 8 years ago for Kong, and that may have been a blessing in disguise. If we had done Kong then we may not have done LOTR. Now I feel we are equipped to do justice to what is arguably one of America’s greatest entertainment icons.

What have been the challenges in creating Skull Island?
"We love to research and involve ourselves deeply in the cultures of worlds. Tolkien had created a world with Middle Earth and we worked with that. The first 10% of the job is the most rewarding because it is the opportunity to envelop yourself completely in the research and the cultures. We are treating Skull island as if it really existed so we have had to find the ecology and the cultural reference that pre-dates the story, that has allowed us to build the history, the fauna and fauna and the evolution of the creatures which ultimately live on the island. In that way it has been similar to LOTR.
We were extremely green when we did LOTR. Now we come to Kong 7 ½ years later with a greater level of confidence, we can do justice to the film and achieve a staggeringly large amount of work in a very short time."

What do you find moving in the original film?
"I was asked recently if I am concerned that I am using technology to drive the creature that plays such a prominent part in the film. Technology was how they drove the original creature. Today it would appear to be relatively crude technology, but then it was the height of cinematic innovation. Through it they brought Kpng successfully to life. But regardless of the technology used then and now, Kong succeeds as a film because it succeeds at the most base level of film making, and that is the need for the audience to form an intimate relationship with the characters on the screen. You genuinely care for Ann and the peril she is in and very quickly, as the story goes through an incredible and subtle change, you grow to care for Kong. He goes from a beast to a very intimate and evocative character. When he loses his life at the end of the film you feel the loss for this creature. I also see an analogous relationship between what he represents and what we are doing to the world."

What have you carried over from the original story?
"Except for necessary story changes to bring it to a modern audience very little is changed. We haven’t copied it frame for frame. This is Peter and Fran Walsh’s version of the original movie and therefore the emotional content and the heightened level at which you grow to know and love the characters has been brought to the fore. The same premises are there. We have looked to a much greater degree at the back story of Skull Island – why it is the way it is and who the people were that lived there before the natives. We have heightened this in the story. But the original story has a very sound base and that is what we are building on."


Can you tell us about the background to Skull Island?
“I’d love to! But we can do this more easily by looking through the workshop”.
Downstairs in the Weta SFX workshop, a former warehouse, the party treks after Taylor, pausing in front of miniature rock formations that are parts of Skull Island. Some of the miniatures tower above the humans, others are smaller.
On LOTR we built 72 miniatures in about 51/2 years and for King Kong we have to build 42 in just over a year so we complete a miniature every week and half. 2 conceptual designers do 30 to 40 paintings per model and the paintings are given to the pre-vis department who animate the sequence for Peter’s approval. We then get back the pre-vis as 2 D printouts. We create cross sections that we then enlarge and from that we are able to build our miniatures. We have to keep very closely to a strip that we call the red carpet. This is the area that the actors will run down in the miniature, so the footfalls in the pre-vis correspond to the footfalls of the actors when they will be shot on blue screen and touch our model”.
(He points to a large, rocky cliff).
“This is a tenth scale section of cliff that Ann runs down with a T-Rex chasing her. She slips over and slides on her bum down a muddy slope and ends up at the bottom”.
The cliff looks realistically rocky but is made of insulation foam.
“We take silicon molds from rock faces along the coastline of Wellington bring them back and inject them with polyurethane”.

A miniature of the wall comes into view. This is a tiny version of the set they are shooting on at Massey’s Memorial – where Ann will be sacrificed tonight over and over again.

“The wall was built on a massive scale by an ancient race of people, sort of like the Aztecs*. They lived in harmony with the animals on the island and the wall contained the large animals and kept them out of the city. But due to possibly to seismic movement the island has sunk and the only bit of wall left is this full stretch across the headland. This is all that is left of a Biblical style city and all the original inhabitants have long since died out. About four generations before our story starts a canoe of natives had been washed up on the island and they had ended up on this promontory of rocks. They can’t enter the island because of the dinosaurs running amok so they subsist in the catacombs of this windswept rocky outcrop of the island, on this side of the wall. You are standing in the sea at this moment. This maquette is what used to be the grand causeway down to the harbour mouth where all the trade happened for this huge city. It has fallen into ruin and collapsed and all the buildings are dishevelled.
The doors still exist from the original culture. They were built as an entrance-way into the city and are fortified in a futile way by the natives. They have reinforced it by putting these massive shafts of bamboo through the door, thinking it will stop Kong bursting through. Little do they know!..

* In the Aztec myth of the journey through hell, the realm of the dead is a blood-framed skull, the center of the world… The underworld vessels of death and transformation have the shape of devouring skulls, with eyes and bared teeth.

Taylor leads through to the next workshop where there is a small forest of stunted, twisted trees.
“These are the miniature trees we are building for the model you have just seen next door. The fauna and flora of Skull Island is a major part of our job. We have a team of people who cultivate the trunks of the trees off a mountain range that is north of Wellington. That mountain range is hit by the winds that come direct from the South Pole. It is so intense that it dwarfs the growth of the plants on the mountainside. The team has been going up there in 4 wheel drives for over a year, cultivating twisted plants for us. They are then brought back to Wellington and the trees are grafted together using bolts. All the foliage is removed and artificial leaves called “Babies tears” are re-grafted onto the ends of them. They are articulated to move appropriately when blasted with wind and shot at 48 frames per second. We have also cultivated dwarf ferns in the Orongaronga Mountains. But we have created foliage that will feel primordial, specific to the island, and not look New Zealand.
One technician has been creating vines and root systems for two years and we have had to put weights inside our vines so they hang with the right parabolic curve when hanging between two places.

The geometric shape of New York is ideal to do digitally but the jungle on Skull Island is near impossible because of the chaotic randomness, the visceral and gritty realism you need in the surface textures of plant life and land cover. It’s easier to build these things as physical properties”.

This makes a contrast with the order of New York?
“Yes but we are also trying to draw visual parallels between the two as well. These huge soaring trees will take on the almost cathedral like nature of the streets of New York. It is interesting the things you don’t think about – Kong would never have seen his own reflection but in New York it is all reflection with the windows. He only has to step into the street and look to one side and there reflected in rows and columns of buildings he sees himself.
We are saying that Skull Island is somewhere in the Indonesian Islands but we have also chosen for it a very unique culture of architecture. They have utilised a natural product on their island to build with. We have called it basalt logs. It is like on the Giant’s causeway where you get the huge geometric six sided shafts of basalt and they have managed to mine it and use it to knit together the architecture. It allows them to create the very unusual, sweeping, Asiatic shapes in their buildings.

Next door there is a miniature of the Venture.
“The Venture has been built as a set and is also a live action, real ship that Peter bought from Tonga. It came with a full shipment of frozen fish that he had to get rid of and now we are also building it as a 12 scale miniature for any storm sequence interaction.
A perfect 14-foot miniature replica sits in the middle of the workshop with technicians working at benches around it.
“The ship has been made to exacting levels of detail right down to the telephone inside the Captain’s cabin in case we see through the windows. It’s fully internally lit. The camera will shoot extremely closely on this model using a snorkel lense to get as close as possible.
The ship is built on a live gimbal so we can puppeteer it by hand as we did the Master and Commander ships and it will be on a 6 way hydrolic motion mover so we can drive it. He rocks the ship with a finger.
It will never be shot in water – that will be digitally composited around the ship”.

Visit to the 10th scale miniature set “The Fight Clearing”.
Kong vanquishes 3 T. Rexes.

Alex Funke (30 years as a cinematographer, Oscar winner and winner of 3 Academy Awards for work on Total Recall and LOTR) shows detailed work in process on Skull Island miniatures.

“The clearing does not have the classic Skull Island lush jungle look. It is very sparse and barren because it’s a clearing but it does give a good idea of the detail in the miniatures. To get the movement of the trees in the wind to look real, 10ths scale at a frame speed of 64 frames per second gives us the right look. The branches have been chopped, sections have been taken out of strategic branches, and spring wire and little sinkers are loaded into them and covered up again, so that when they move the movement of the trees looks realistic. The way miniature trees move, as they don’t have the weight of a large tree, they do not look as realistic when they sway in the wind.
There are three RE 435 advance motion control cameras and what they are doing is tiling the set. They take little snap shots of the set and digital then have these different pieces that they then all piece together to create a real environment digitally by stitching all the tiles together. Compared with LOTR this is a different environment with different challenges. LOTR had quite a bare environment with a lot of buildings and there was not the same kind of movement. You also need more light when movement is involved and more power. It gets very hot in here - 45 degrees Celsius yesterday.

We need to pay attention to a lot of detail on the sets. There is a mixture of real and fake plants. We have cultivated a lot of our own miniature plant life. The real plants help to give the real look of the film a boost. The orange marks on set and the blue screen enable digital to create a 3D map as guides to put in characters and other CG images."

On the miniature set of “The Killing Ground” beneath the rock face sculptured primitive faces peer out of the rock wall. This is where Kong hangs out and tears up his victims. The people searching for Ann have just come across this and find it littered with bones.

“This would make an enormous set but by doing it by miniature we get a much better sense of space. When they do live action shots they are sent to us by digital so we know exactly what goes on. We shrink it down to 10ths size and reproduce it so everything matches and locks in.
We are using a combination of vines and plants made in the Weta workshop. Plants are made in China which is the world centre for fabricating artificial plants. We also use real plants as they have flexibility in motion that artificial ones don’t.
Peter is doing something here that nobody has tried to do before which is shooting the miniatures in wind. He has decided that one of the things that makes the miniature shot believable is when there is actually motion within the set. Once you start shrinking things down to the 10th of the original size they start getting very stiff. Peter is really stretching the envelope in this, the way he did on Rings. He wants to be way ahead of what anything anybody else has ever tried. Peter wants the jungle to be realistic and also more bizarre and more jungly than anybody has ever seen. So the leaves have to be believable but they also have to be the most amazing leaves you have ever seen."

Peter has said it will be the “Jungle from Hell”
"He wants people to feel like it is just like jungles they have seen in documentaries or National Geographic. It has its feet in the real, but it is pushed so much past that, so you really are afraid to be in it. So when these guys are clambering up some muddy slope and constantly slipping back he wants you to feel, “I know exactly what that must be like”. We have a lot more gadgets and tricks than they did in 1933, and yet nothing is modernised.

This bit of set is where they have the fight between Kong and the three T-Rexes. Kong takes them all out. In this sequence there are over 300 shots and Ann appears in only a few shots. Most sequences have some miniature work in them as Peter has found it very efficient to build a partial set and then extend it with miniatures."

Set where brontosaurus stampede – a model of extensive high cliff that mounts and descends with sheer slippery looking pathways beside an abyss that will plunge dinosaurs and humans hundred of metres to their death. A tiny model of a brontosaurus shows the immensity of the environment.
"Carl Denham and his camera guys come across a huge herd of brontosauruses peacefully grazing and they start filming it. Some carnivores suddenly come upon them and they start stampeding. These guys who are exploring the island have to race ahead of the brontos in the course of which they get stepped on... (Funke stops suddenly as if he realises he risks divulging too much of the action)
"The development of this sequence is quite a major one with 278 shots. This is a maquette of the entire set it happens in. This is 1000th scale and it shows the entire set as it will be, starting here with a temple complex and then where the stampede starts. And of course we don’t shoot the whole thing, just sections – the bits we will be seeing and those are the bits we need to build miniature sets for – like this deep trench which is like a city street.
This maquette is the first step. The action has already been worked out in pre-vis – a rough animation that shows how fast the brontosauruses are running, where the actors are – and they will be shot on green screen or a treadmill, because they are running like mad. This maquette shows the detail of where the 20 or so brontosauruses are in the scene and where the walls are.
This piece over here (another model of a broken away piece of rocky terrain, 100th scale) is where they race across. Chunks of stone are falling off, brontosauruses are falling into the abyss, men are falling into the abyss, and they tear around the corner and shoot off down there … and it’s the end of the scene. We will build another at 10th scale which will be about 8 meters tall and used for live shots.
Shots that have been designed by Peter and the animators are brought into this stage which is like half way between animation and the real thing. It gives it a certain amount of life and also Peter can look at it and make adjustments, say for example – “I want it to be toppling like that, we want this wall to lean over more … Give me another one falling there …”

In the next area 3 technicians are manipulating images on monitors from the other half of the Fight Clearing set. There is more blue screen, rocks, cliffs and stunted trees clawing at existence under the bright lights.
“We shoot on two cameras at once just to get the work done quicker”, explains Funke. “This is 10th scale. We put Ann in there as actor scale reference when we do a shot. The handover to the digital guys is crucial. They only know what they see on their monitors, we see the set, cameras, and we know where things are. So how do you tell them where the ground plan is, where vertical is, how far away things are. We are working very hard to send information to them, letting them know dimensions and scale – this is one metre, this is where level is and so on. Before, the film went physically to the guy who was putting it together and there was an interface, but now, when we have finished it disappears, so you hope the guys who are putting it together know what they have to do."

Walking past a pile of brown rubber vines and bark that looks like giant sea kelp washed up on the shore, Funke concludes by telling how they make the vegetation that helps to make the jungle from hell even more hellish.
"We take molds on real bark and reproduce and mix them with human created plants and vines. We recycle these constantly and make them into other parts of other sets.
We blend natural and artificial plants so you don’t really know which is which. We have an amazing talent pool to draw on here in NZ – they can do anything and bring a depth of experience and vision to whatever they turn their hand to. And then there is Peter’s vision as well."