Weta Digital
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1993 |
| Headquarters | Wellington, New Zealand |
| Key people | Peter Jackson, Joe Letteri, Eileen Moran |
| Industry | Visual Effects, CGI animation |
| Website | www.wetadigital.com |
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Weta Digital is a digital visual effects company based in Wellington, New Zealand. It was founded by Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk in 1993 to produce the digital special effects for Heavenly Creatures. In 2007 Weta Digital’s Senior Visual Effects Supervisor, Joe Letteri, was also appointed as a Director of the company. Weta Digital has won Academy Awards and BAFTAs.
Weta Digital is part of a number of Peter Jackson co-owned companies in Wellington which includes Weta Workshop, Weta Productions, Weta Collectibles and Park Road Post Production.
[edit] Achievements
Weta Digital won awards for its visual effects for Peter Jackson’s film trilogy based on The Lord of the Rings, including an Academy Award for Visual Effects for its work on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Two years later, Weta Digital won another Academy Award for King Kong.
Weta Digital has created a number of custom made in-house proprietary software to enable them to achieve groundbreaking visual effects. The scale of the battles required for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy led to the creation of MASSIVE, a program which allows the animation of huge numbers of agents: independent characters acting according to pre-set rules. In King Kong there was a need to generate 1933 New York which led to the creation of CityBot, an application which was able to ‘build’ New York city to meet these requirements on a shot by shot basis.
Kong’s fur also required the development of new simulation and modeling software. A set of tools that combined procedural and interactive techniques were generated, which allowed deformers to be built for adding wind to the 460 billion individual strands of fur and solving interaction with other surfaces. New shaders were written that accounted for the scattering of light from within each hair that added to the volumetric quality of the fur. Large chunks of his fur were ripped out and filled it with scars, blood, and the mud of Skull Island. Each frame of fur took 2 gigabytes of data.
[edit] Film visual effects filmography
- The Hobbit (Part 2) - in development (2012)
- The Hobbit (Part 1) - in development (2011)
- Dam Busters - in development
- The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn - in production (2011)
- Avatar - in production (2009)
- The Lovely Bones - in production (2009)
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
- The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)
- Jumper (2008)
- 30 Days of Night (2007)
- The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (2007)
- Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)
- Bridge to Terabithia (2007)
- Eragon (2006)
- X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
- King Kong (2005)
- I, Robot (2004)
- Van Helsing (2004)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
- Contact (1997)
- The Frighteners (1996/I)
- Forgotten Silver (1995) (TV)
- Heavenly Creatures (1994)
