The small suburban town of Queenstin, Vancouver, Canada, is backed by a large redwood forest in the north. These maple forests are affiliated to the local forest park. Forest parks like this are vast and sparsely populated Canada, with each one of them beautifully landscaped. The Queenstin Forest Park selected by the crew of "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" have particularly tall and ancient trees.

The park allowed the crew to open a trail, enter the depths of the park, and build a rocker arm.

During the day, Wan Xiaohu brought the crew here and used his rocker to take a look at the forest and take a detailed shot. A helicopter was also on standby at any time to prepare for high-altitude scenery.

In the movie, Wan Xiaohu designed the plot, including the happy run of the chimpanzee "Caesar" when he first came to the forest, and the ending leading the orangutans to settle their homes, all of which require a large amount of orangutans running in the book. The most difficult shot was tried several times but failed to complete it.

This shot is taken from the bottom of the big tree, all the way up until it rises to the same height as the uncle. This material is used to create the shot of Caesar standing on the top of the big tree overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Learning from the lessons learned from the previous few times, the mechanics of the crew specially designed a steel wire vertical uplift system. This system is similar to an elevator. Two steel cables are fixed on the ground at one end and the other at the treetops. The camera is hung along the steel cable. As long as the wind is not strong and the speed is controlled well, the effect Wan Xiaohu can theoretically achieve.

After the mechanic reported everything, Wan Xiaohu held the horn and shouted loudly: "All-right, On-your-marks, We-try-again (Let's try again)!"

“Come-on (Hurry up), Come-on!”

"Control the speed!"

"Turn the generator's power to the maximum!"

"Measure the wind speed and stay alert!"

"Okay! Everything is ready, director!"

Wan Xiaohu looked at the monitor and everything was normal. So he picked up the speaker and shouted: "Action!"

Hula, the camera was hung up. From slow to fast shooting.

"Precautions to adjust the angle! Photographer, I want to go down the lens!"

"OK, Good, adjust and adjust, look at the above!"

"Okay, very good, slow down. Yes, slower, slower, OK, the effect is very good, keep it!"

"Turn the camera, right. That's it. OK, we're at the top!"

It was said that it was slow and fast at that time. This was a big tree 200 meters high. In less than a minute, the shot from bottom to top was perfectly shot under the command of Wan Xiaohu and the dispatch of the photographer.

Play back the camera just now on the monitor, then automatically modify it in your mind, adding the gorilla's movements, Wan Xiaohu smiled: "This one is perfectly completed!"

"Haha, I finally passed the test." The photographer sighed.

"I've been struggling for several days, and finally I've never had to feed bugs here anymore." The crew members were all happy. Shooting in the forest is naturally no more comfortable than in the studio.

Called the deputy director, Wan Xiaohu ordered: "Take someone to clean up the place, we will arrange aerial photography tomorrow, and we will try to complete it in one day."

"OK."

"Well, you can take someone to do things. I'll go back to the studio first."

The studio of "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is located in the open space east of Queenstin town. It is a huge temporary studio that looks huge. In fact, the interior is very simple. The entire studio is divided into two parts, one is the office area and the other is the inner shooting area of ​​the Golden Gate Bridge.

In the movie, orangutans and humans will stage a decisive battle in the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco's landmark building, but the Golden Gate Bridge is very busy, and vehicles are constantly shuttled. Wan Xiaohu has no chance to destroy the real Golden Gate Bridge, so he can only build a model indoor shooting.

The same effect of indoor shots is as good as outdoors, which can test the talent of Vita Digital Studios.

Fortunately, the script designed by Wan Xiaohu was in a decisive battle with the Kinmen Bridge, which saved a lot of trouble for the production of special effects. All the more than the camera can be covered with fog. Now the decisive battle with the Kinmen Bridge, the deputy director is still leading the special effects group and the actor group to rehearse. Wan Xiaohu turned around here and left.

I went to the office area next door, Vita Digital's work hall.

“Hi, Tiger.”

"Hi, Dan. How about it, can you deal with the plan I brought yesterday?"

As soon as Wan Xiaohu came in, he met Dan Lemmon, the visual effects director of the crew. His visual effects director is second only to Wan Xiaohu in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes". All the scenes require his coordination.

Dan shrugged: "Although it's a bit troublesome, it's not in the unsolvable range. We have already chosen the criteria for the number of orangutans. Have you seen the shelves of this wall? Wow, you have to choose these suitable criteria, thanks to Wellington Zoo."

Following Dan's finger, Wan Xiaohu saw a shelf against the wall, with various models placed densely on it.

In order to create the living habits of the orangutans more convincing, Vita Digital went to the Wellington Zoo in New Zealand and tried its best to take photos of the chimpanzee gate. And when the injured orangutans were anesthetized and treated, the special effects team also participated two or three times to make foot molds, hand molds and face molds for the orangutans.

Using these models as the basis, apply and peel off a layer of silicon film, place it in mineral oil for scanning by a desktop scanner, and rely on this precise physical casting to create truly high-fidelity orangutans.

Whether it is the old version of "Planet of the Apes" or Tim Bolton's "Planet of the Apes", they all interpret the role of apes through makeup. However, the effect of makeup cannot be interpreted in detail, so from the beginning, Wan Xiaohu told Vita Digital that he directed "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" to not put on makeup!

Compared with previous versions, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" pays more attention to the portrayal of the inner drama of the apes.

"It's very good. It must ensure the effect of orangutans. Without realistic orangutans, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" cannot surpass the height of the old version. By the way, where is Kevin.Romond?" Wan Xiaohu asked.

“He is laying out the motion capture block of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

"OK, you guys are busy first, I'll go there and take a look."

Kevin Romond is the special effects director, responsible for special effects shots. The part where the crew needs special effects shots the most is motion capture technology. In the studio in Queenstin Town, the crew has two shooting locations: interior and exterior locations, and the interior is the details of the Golden Gate Bridge and the zoo scene.

Although interior shooting is troublesome, it is not very difficult. The real difficulty is exterior motion capture.

This will be the first time in history for a motion capture shooting in broad daylight.

Motion capture indoors. Because the light is fixed, actors can easily capture reflected light by the camera when wearing reflective suits. Outdoors, there is too much mixed light, and even an unexpected beam of light can erase the captured data. Glossy objects, such as cars and light holders, and even reflective strips on shoes in crowds, may cause devastating damage to the motion capture system.

Vita Digital's improvement is to replace the motion capture marks attached to the actors from traditional reflective balls to active infrared LEDs. These LED strings are wired to the controller, and then loaded into the Vinylon jacket and fixed to the actors.

The LED coordinates with the camera shutter of the motion capture system and will flash short and strong infrared rays. Combining these strong light with infrared filters and extremely short shutter time on the camera can penetrate the background light in the environment and pick up a good, clean marking signal for the system.

Moreover, experiments have proved that the infrared rays of LED are invisible to Kodak film in use, which eliminates the concerns of this light pollution of film.

The exterior view capture area of ​​the Kinmen Bridge is about 100 meters long and 18 meters wide, surrounded by 6 meters high green reflectors on three sides.

This is also the largest motion capture area in the world. If you can declare the Guinness World Record.

More than 80 scrapped cars were modified and scattered throughout the set area.

Basically, it can be said that the magic of the special effects is fully reflected here.

Including the orangutans attacking in groups, the destruction of bridges, the explosion of cars, the impact of planes, and the shots of falling into the sea, they are all fake, and they are special effects made by CG.

"Kevin, how are you doing?" Wan Xiaohu easily found it. Kevin Romond, who directed employees to place cameras in the crowd, was a middle-aged engineer wearing glasses, the technical director of Vita's digital motion capture technology, and outdoor motion capture. He led the team to develop it.

"It will take a little more time if the weather is good enough."

“Is two days enough?”

"No surprise, yes."

"That's good. Twentieth Century Fox is already complaining that our progress is slow. Everyone is cheering up. Let's hurry up and return to the shed to shoot early." Wan Xiaohu clapped his hands to boost morale.

As a director, he doesn't need to go into the details personally, he mainly supervises and commands.

The most important thing in managing a team of hundreds of people is coordination and letting the teams be organically combined, rather than being in a group of individuals, a bunch of scattered sand, each doing its own thing, without a unified progress. It is precisely because of the filming of small-scale movies that Wan Xiaohu has accumulated enough team command capabilities.

The crew was commanded in an orderly manner.

To be a big director, it doesn’t mean that you can label yourself after making two classic movies and winning a few awards. Whether you can direct the crew and run the entire team according to your own intentions is the standard for measuring the director’s ability. Some directors can win awards, but they can never be an A-level director or a A-level big-production movie.

Can command a company and command a division be the same?

If you can't make blockbusters, where do you brag about it and say you're awesome?
Chapter completed!