The very different anatomies of humans and apes often made it impossible to exactly translate those acting choices one-for-one in dialogue scenes. Weta's animators then had to map those performances onto the digital ape models, making the apes deliver their lines and emote in ways that stayed true to the actors' choices without feeling too human. Narrator: Human actors not only voiced but actually played the apes, filming in motion-capture suits that tracked their movements.
Mike was one of the lead animators on "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," where the chimpanzee Caesar slowly learns to converse with humans. Over the years, studios like Weta have mastered the art of creating fully digital creatures that speak and express themselves in naturalistic ways. When the whole CG-talking-animal genre was born in the '90s, filmmakers faced one overarching challenge: how do you make a fundamentally unbelievable thing believable? Before, movies would just dub over the mouth movements of live animal actors or animatronic puppets and later moved to compositing footage of live animals with 3D digital models of the animals' mouths. And if you look at Weta's talking fox from the 2021 movie "The Green Knight," you can see just how far we've come. It's a challenge effects studio Weta Digital has taken on. Narrator: One of the hardest jobs in visual effects is making animals look realistic when they talk. Horse: Ugh, would you calm down? Now read my lips.