by Ron Magid

To a great extent, Peter Jackson’s lavish remake of King Kong depends on the performance of its titular character, the 24'-tall simian that rules Skull Island. Whereas the original King Kong’s eye-popping visuals were a groundbreaking mix of full-scale props and stop-motion puppet animation, Jackson and his collaborators at Weta Digital decided to bring his Kong to life with a blend of digital animation, live performance capture, and miniature environments enhanced with computer-generated (CG) matte paintings.

A vast crew was needed to pull off the creation of Kong. Starting at Weta Workshop, under the art direction of Richard Taylor, the original design was illustrated by Gus Hunter, then sculpted as a 3-D form by Weta sculptors. Gino Acevedo then designed and supervised Kong’s skin and fur texture and color.

Providing the basis for the project’s performance capture was actor Andy Serkis, who performed similar duties in enacting Gollum for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Serkis recalls that as The Return of the King was winding down, “Peter [Jackson] and Fran [Walsh] invited me to dinner and started showing me pictures of a famous albino gorilla called Snowflake. It gradually dawned on me that they were offering me the romantic lead in a movie! I went through hundreds of hours of [gorilla] footage, volunteered at the London Zoo, and went to Rwanda to study them in the wild. It was quite humbling to see how sociable they are, and that helped me understand why Kong feels so isolated.”

Serkis’ experience on set echoed that sense of isolation: while wearing a gorilla muscle suit (created by Howard Berger of KNB EFX Group), he was positioned high above his fellow actors. “To create Kong’s presence, I spent a lot of time up ladders or on top of scissorlifts and platforms in the gorilla suit,” recalls Serkis. “Naomi [Watts] always had my eyes, so every scene was a response between one of us towards the other in the moment. Sometimes we could be up close beside the camera, and Naomi could touch my face if she needed to.”

This live interaction was mostly about aiding the actors’ performances, but an unexpected byproduct of Serkis’ on-set work was that it greatly enhanced the motion-capture material. “It kept Andy in the performance,” says visual-effects supervisor Joe Letteri. “When we motion-captured [Kong], he knew how he’d played each beat, what the reactions were and which way to move, which kept the whole thing organic.”

Motion-capture supervisor Dejan Momcilovic oversaw Serkis’ body capture using Giant Studios’ Motion Capture System, bouncing light off reflective markers on the gorilla muscle suit, as well as the occasional arm extensions, which gave the actor more apelike proportions. Momcilovic also devised a system for translating Serkis’ human proportions into Kong’s simian dimensions. To create the ape’s distinctive knuckle walk, Serkis locomoted on parallel risers elevated above the 39'x26' capture-stage floor to the height of his knees. “For the digital Kong model to work in real time on the motion-capture stage, [the data] was 1:1 from my waist up, but they shortened the distance from my waist down so that Kong’s feet ended at my knees, meaning I was resting my hands on those benches while my feet were on the floor. [Kong] had to be able accelerate from zero to 60, so we had long runs of benches and plotted out the journey.”

For certain actions, such as when Kong picks up Ann, Serkis wielded many different dolls that were suitably dressed for each moment, including a rag doll filled with lead balls to give an appropriate sense of weight and resistance. He also interacted with a variety of other props and setpieces. “On the motion-capture stage, we’d set up props built specifically for the action of the shots,” says visual-effects producer Eileen Moran. “Also, terrain was built to match the set so that Andy’s movements and travel would suggest the ‘real’ terrain. For the log chasm scene, the mo-cap team built a scaled log for Andy to interact with so that his performance carried the full weight of the log.”

Although the live-action sets were sometimes rigged to move for later interaction with the CG Kong, most interaction was later added digitally, “either by compositing in filmed elements such as splashes and dirt kicks, or by creating wholly digital aspects of the environment,” says Matt Aitken, preproduction CG supervisor. “The latter technique was used extensively — on Skull Island with digital trees, vines, water and village elements, and in New York with digital vehicles and buildings.”

Weta’s mo-cap technique relied on a new facial system from Motion Analysis (designed by Mark Sagar) that used 132 reflective markers, which were attached to Serkis by hand. Facial capture demands a much smaller stage than full-body capture. “Luckily,” says Rivers, “when Kong is really emoting, he’s usually sitting down or fairly stationary.”

Once the motion was captured, the data was exported into Alias Maya for further animation and then rendered via RenderMan as an “Eye of God” master, with a gray-shaded puppet against blue. Letteri explains, “Peter would then cut the shots together so we’d have an idea of what he wanted for Kong. Once we had that, we’d motion-edit that data and send it through into animation. We treated the editing and animation as sort of an initial layout, because we were sometimes culling the performance from several takes. Then we laid it out on the [set] geometry, found camera angles that looked like they would work, and presented those choices to Peter. We tried to do everything in parallel as much as possible, so once we had the animation blocked out, we blocked out the lighting. When Peter approved final animation, he was often already seeing Kong with fur.”

Weta Digital used a variety of reference materials and technologies, including mirror balls and gray balls shot on set, to light Kong for integration into plates. “Weta has a highly sophisticated digital-lighting pipeline,” says Aitken, “but it is ultimately the eyes of the artists and supervisors at Weta who ensure that Kong looks like he belongs in his surroundings.”

“Kong had to become a character in his own right and play against Naomi’s great acting skills with equal, if not greater, presence and ability,” notes Taylor. “I think he is a testament to the collaborative nature of a very large community of filmmakers that have focused on creating a tangible, believable, invigorating and character-filled creature.”