Art Of VFX sat down with Matt Aitken, Mike Perry, and Kevin Estey of Weta FX for a lengthy interview regarding their work on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.
How did you and Weta FX get involved on this show?
Matt Aitken: Weta FX’s opportunity to get involved with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts came up quite late in the movie’s production schedule – the production was looking for a facility to work alongside MPC, who was the main vendor on the show. We came on board in August 2022, after principal photography had wrapped. We did get the opportunity to go on set in November 2022 for a week of additional photography on the Paramount backlot.
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How did you use Weta FX’s experience with apes for Apelinq and Optimus Primal?
Kevin Estey: Having an extensive history of working with primates of all shapes and sizes, from King Kong to The Jungle Book, the Planet of the Apes trilogy, and The Umbrella Academy, Weta is the perfect place to bring giant robotic apes to life. The principals are the same but the mechanics, quite literally, of a robotic ape are much trickier. Gorillas, which Apelinq and Primal most closely resemble in physical stature, are bulky but very agile and flexible. One main challenge about robotic creatures is that flexibility is tricky, particularly due to the rigidity of their surfaces.
The most challenging aspects of these two primate characters were their shoulders and their faces. Their shoulders are the most prominent feature of their bodies and are visible in most shots, whether they are talking, reaching, running, swinging, or fighting. Because the shoulders were formed from single rigid metallic domes, there was no room for faking malleability. As a result, we had to essentially disconnect them from the arms and neck to manipulate them appropriately, given each type of action. We had to pay particular attention to them in every shot and treat each shot as a bespoke situation so the shoulders would appear to behave in conjunction with the character’s action. In many situations, this was a cheat to give the impression of them being “fleshy” when in fact they were largely disconnected from the surrounding appendages.
Likewise, Apelinq and Primal’s faces needed to emote in ways that were at times extreme, and at others emotionally subtle – many of these moments were in very featured close-ups, including a scene that is arguably one of the film’s most emotionally powerful moments. Weta has some of the most talented facial animators in the world, so there was no doubt in my mind we could achieve that level of performance, but the challenge was that we almost always work with fleshy faces. In this instance, we had to treat hard surfaces like flesh. As a result, we leaned heavily on our existing FACs pipeline and used our GENMAN human face as an underlying driver for the rigid primate faces. Imagine a human face, morphed to fit within the inner envelope of a giant robot ape’s face, painted a dark metallic colour (to help hide it), then covered in hundreds of individual pieces that form the exterior face of Apelinq and Primal. And believe me, when you catch this morphed human face without a rigid exterior, you may have trouble sleeping for a few days.
You can read the full interview at Art Of VFX.