Director Wes Ball’s upcoming film, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, is generating excitement among cinema enthusiasts as its release date approaches. With each passing day, the filmmakers are dropping intriguing details about the upcoming trilogy, sparking excitement among the audience. While it’s obvious from the trailer and previous instalments that the film will heavily rely on CGI to transform actors into apes, however, what’s surprising is that the rest of the world shown in the movie will be real. In a recent interview with Collider, Ball disclosed that they used minimal blue screen backgrounds during filming. The team was determined to enhance authenticity, so they decided to shoot in real locations.
Ball explained, “We probably had one blue screen set on the movie. For the most part, we’re out in real locations shooting with real actors. They happen to be in these funny dots with this stupid camera in their face everywhere, which they eventually kind of forget about, but you make it like a live-action movie. You just have to imagine that, ‘Oh, that’s going to be an ape doing that in a year.’ That’s the whole thing. How do you give the spontaneity? That’s the thing for me. The challenge on this movie was, ‘How do you make a movie that’s so technically…?’ I kind of liken it to you’re building a jigsaw puzzle, all in separate pieces, its own piece individually and you gotta carve it just right way over here in these different kinds of arrangements.”
Using ‘spontaneous cameras’ and ‘complicated moves’, Wes Ball wanted to enhance the performances of the actors, who, despite wearing motion capture suits with tracking dots, provided the essential material for transforming into apes in the post-production process. He claimed that the team used multiple cameras which captured every expression and movement of the actors. Infrared cameras were also cleverly placed in the surroundings, which played a crucial role in capturing detailed information necessary for the CGI process.
The filmmaker explains that despite certain scenes being entirely CGI, viewers won’t be able to easily distinguish them from real footage. He reveals that approximately 30 to 40 minutes of the film features full CGI scenes.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was originally set to release on May 24, 2024, but to avoid a clash with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and The Garfield Movie, the release date was pre-poned to May 10. The film is set 300 years after the events of the Caesar’s Trilogy. While Freya Allan will star as the human lead, the voices for the apes have been provided by William H. Macy, Eka Darville, Travis Jeffery, Neil Sandilands, Sara Wiseman, Lydia Peckham, Ras-Samuel Weld A’abzgi and Dichen Lachman.
Comments
0 comment