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14 cgw m a r c h . a p r i l 2 0 1 6 MONKEY BUSINESS Artists at Weta Digital creat- ed one main sequence in the film. The sequence begins in the forest. Mowgli is on a perch, until, suddenly, he's captured by monkeys that drag him to the temple of King Louie and his minions. A confrontation there leads to a song and dance moment. Mowgli escapes. And King Louie comes to his demise as the temple falls to ruins. Dan Lemmon was visual effects supervisor when Weta Digital joined the production in early-fall 2014. Keith Miller took over as supervisor a year later, as Lemmon moved on to preproduction for the third Planet of the Apes film. "On most shows," Miller says, "we integrate a CG character into a live-action environment. This show was unusual. We have a single live-action element, Mowgli, that we integrate into a full- CG world." The kidnap moment is a perfect example. "It's fun to look at the plates," Miller says. "It's a bluescreen environment with 20 or more stagehands in bluescreen suits passing Mowgli overhead like a rock star who's crowd surfing." To create the final shots, Weta Digital artists and animators replaced the blue-suited stagehands with monkeys and added a CG jungle with vegetation. The vegetation interacted with Mowgli and with the fire brigade of monkeys passing him along overhead. "We made minor improve- ments in our Lumberjack program in terms of the tree dynamics to give animators more control so they could drive the primary interac- tions," Miller says. "Then the effects team managed the simulations. We also added instancing to our proprietary renderer, Manuka, to handle the large numbers of heavily detailed trees." The monkeys – King Lou- ie's minions – were species specific to India: pig-tailed and lion-tailed macaques, zippy langurs, and gibbons. In Disney's 1967 film, King Louie was an orangutan. In this film, he is an orang- utan-like prehistoric ape called a Gigantopithecus, which, unlike orangutans, might have lived in India. "We didn't have a lot of information about it," Miller says. "Fossil records don't tell us whether the Giganto- pithecus was a quadruped or biped, but it was probably 10 feet tall. We received con- cept art and previs models, and then went through our design process." Because Christopher Walken would provide King Louie's voice, Weta Digital artists sculpted a facial model with geometry matching Walken. Then, us- ing their experience in incor- porating Andy Serkis's facial shapes to create Planet of the Apes' Caesar, a tech- nique honed in other films as well, they began modifying forms to roughly match the volume and shapes of an orangutan's face. "We studied photography, video reference of Walken performing his lines in the sound booth," Miller says. "We tried to incorporate corners of his mouth. His signature wrinkles. The line above the ball of his chin. It's an iterative process. You always run the danger of anthropomorphizing to such a degree that you lose the feel of the character and what you would expect an ape to do." Animators had video of Walken voicing the dialog for reference, but because he had read the lines in the recording booth, they also turned to reference of the actor in other movies. "Sometimes Jon [Fav- reau] would send selections from films, moments we could use as a template for shots," Miller says. For King Louie's body performance, the crew motion-captured Director Favreau playing the part, but the combination of Favreau's body performance and Walken's facial perfor- mance didn't, as Miller puts it, "play nicely together." "We tried to find pieces that worked to cra a new performance," Miller says. "Jon [Favreau] gave us a run-though of the scenes to establish a tone, so we could pick out actions here and there. But, this was used only as reference for anima- tors. Any pieces we wanted to use were more easily keyframed." S O N G A N D D A N C E Animators also used key- framing rather than motion capture for King Louie's minions. As it turns out, the motion-capture techniques the crew had used for Planet of the Apes were not appro- priate for the monkeys in this film. "The chimpanzees in Apes do knuckle walking that you can mimic with humans," Miller says. "But shapes of the plants, though, meant modelers sculpted those by hand working in Autodesk's Maya, SpeedTree's vegetation soware, and Pixologic's ZBrush. "The challenge was to glue all those assets together," Ferrara says. "You can't just place one tree on one rock on one piece of ground. We had to add details to glue all the components together. Dead leaves, moss, dust, pebbles in the little cracks between a root and a rock." Although artists placed most of the assets by hand, a custom procedural tool helped scatter small elements, like twigs and