Weta Digital

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WETA Digital is a digital visual effects company based in Wellington, New Zealand, an offshoot of the Weta Workshop physical effects company. Director Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor and others founded Weta Digital in 1993 to produce the digital special effects for Heavenly Creatures, working with just one computer on that film. The company has grown immensely in size and complexity since then. Their most powerful computer is listed at #109 at Top500 for November, 2005.

The American film industry recognised WETA Digital for its outstanding effects for the Peter Jackson's film trilogy based on The Lord of the Rings by presenting it with Academy Awards for visual effects for its work on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), and King Kong (2005). Due to the phenomenal special effects for the Lord of the Rings, WETA Digital is generally considered to be in the same special effects league as special effects giants Industrial Light and Magic and Digital Domain. Peter Jackson learnt the use of special effects from George Lucas. Many consider them to be the top effects house in the world, due to the incredible quality and amount of photorealistic effects in their work.

The scale of the battles required for The Lord of the Rings trilogy led to the creation of MASSIVE, a program which allows the animation of huge numbers of agents: independent characters acting according to pre-set rules. MASSIVE can be seen in action in the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring, the Helm's Deep battle sequence in The Two Towers, and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King, and in other recent films. While in the first film mainly background shots were possible, later developments allowed the generation of foreground shots using much higher detail 3-D models.

Another significant contribution to the Tolkien trilogy was the effort and technology applied to render Gollum, a hobbit corrupted and deformed by the power of the One Ring, very realistically using a combination of motion capture from actor Andy Serkis, key frame animation and subsurface scattering rendering technique which enabled the first completely convincing portrayal of an animated human-like being (a hobbit, to be exact) in a feature film. This process has also been utilized in King Kong.

Other movies that were worked on by WETA Digital were Robert Zemeckis's Contact (1997), starring Jodie Foster, and Alex Proyas's I, Robot (2004), starring Will Smith.

WETA's latest project was the visual effects for Peter Jackson's King Kong. It was released in December 2005, and also won the Academy Awards for visual effects.

WETA Digital will also be working on the live action adaptations of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Halo.

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Special Effects Filmography

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See also

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External links

fr:Weta Digital ja:WETAデジタル

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