VFX Movie Breakdown Post

The VFX high movie I wanted to look at was the 2005 version of "King Kong", especially since the movie production had production diaries to help. Most of the extra VFX were done by WETA digital (found by Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk). They have also done work on Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, Lord of the Rings Trilogy, X-men First Class, Avatar and Godzilla(2014).

Firstly, so much of the movie is animation because, as well as the basic VFX (adding background extras and vehicles, the creatures and some of the particle effects), all the actors had double cg counterparts, (to deal with all of the action scenes) and a lot of the sets were half animation or all animation.

The main piece of VFX is Kong himself. To deal with this WETA had Andy Serkis to do all of the motion capture for the creature. The basic motion suit had 20 markers on the suit to show the points of motion and an extra 50 on his face to get Kong's expressions.  Andy was forced to work with a few odd extrudes for the motion capture because the proportions from Andy to Kong were very different. To ensure this went well the first model of Kong was then placed on the capture to immediately after the shot was taken to see if the shot needed change. None of the shots with Kong are practical effects.

Next up are the extra background objects, some were models but most were VFX. The most diverse was the model of the "Venture" (the ship that takes the crew to Skull Island). They were 3 different versions: the small miniature used for long shots, the 12 foot model and the full to scale back deck based on another ship, the "Manuia". All of the side/low angle shots of the ship were made in VFX, as well as all of the skylines and All of the particles effects in the shots were all done in real-time and rendered in particle effects after the shot was completed. This also carried in most of the particle effects including, falling rocks, dust blowing and crushing rock.
Other major shots of extras was the city (taking place in 1933). The crew had a basic idea of some of the vehicle style and the lights on Broadway at the ending. However most of all of the shots had rotoscoping(animators trace over all of the frames in a shot so it can be altered to use in live action scenes) done to the shots. Also the main production was banking on the fact that if any bad shots came up the "Roto" crew could fix the shot later. Issues included removing unwanted items in the shot, such as safety cables and reflections from the equipment.  

All of the creatures on skull island(the v-rex, carnictis,foetodon,etc.) were done in post VFX. Their movements were based on real life animals that were then motion captured in action. Even shots when the actors are interacting with the creatures, it was mostly a digital copy of the actor from a certain distance. All actors faces were fully copied into digital from the beginning, something that was very new at the time. It allowed some shots to be very easy and allowed the actors more time with their performances while the VFX crew could alter their appearance, movements and more freedom for put the actors in unreasonalbe senario sets to work better with the CGI creatures (such as the canyon scene and the tree trunk shot out scene between the crew and Kong).