“Ten” has a nice ring to it. Top 10 lists, 10 drummers drumming, 10 Oscar nominations … That last one can be claimed by a select few, including Aliquippa native Joe Letteri, the VFX guru. He received No.10 when the nominees were announced Tuesday for the 90th annual Academy Awards.
As if for special effect, he got to hear his name called by Andy Serkis, who served as co-host of the nominations announcement.
The Academy Awards nod was for the third movie in the “War for the Planet of the Apes” trilogy. Mr. Serkis, the premiere performance-capture artist on any screen, has portrayed the ape leader Caesar throughout the films, all of which have brought nominations for Mr. Letteri and his WETA Digital team.
Mr. Letteri, who made his annual holiday visit to Aliquppa in December, was on the phone from London Tuesday, within a couple of hours of the early-morning nomination announcements. If he had been at WETA’s New Zealand headquarters, it would have been the wee hours of Wednesday morning as the names were read. Instead, “It was mid-afternoon, so this time I was awake!” he said.
He also was alone, traveling to the Paris Digital Images Summit, where last year he received their lifetime achievement award but was ill and unable to attend.
“I’m fine — excited, but fine,” he said by way of greetings on Tuesday. “I am so glad the Academy has recognized these films, and it was great because Andy was reading off the names.”
The idea of 10 Academy Award nominations had yet to sink in as he spoke. “I can’t get over that, really,” he said.
The director of WETA Digital has won four Oscars -- for “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King,” part of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy; “King Kong”; and “Avatar.” He also has a special Academy Award in technical achievement for “groundbreaking implementations of practical methods for rendering skin and other translucent materials” that he traces to the creation of Gollum, also in collaboration with Mr. Serkis.
Every primate in the “War for the Planet of the Apes” started as performance capture, and was then layered in special effects wizardry. With each project, there is a breakthrough or an advancement that takes the aesthetic truth of the character to the next level.
“Technically, it is much more complex now. What we did for Gollum, the sci-tech award I got back then, was the very first time we even cracked the problem,” he said of WETA’s first fully realized performance-capture character. “Now we are doing something called spectral rendering to get skin to look correct. That was a first for us on this film. We are always trying to learn more about the science, and to put it to use to create these films.”
Mr. Letteri’s competition on Oscars night, March 4, includes colleagues at WETA who worked on “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” plus “Blade Runner 2049,” “Kong: Skull Island” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”
For Marvel’s “Guardians,” “We did most of the third-act battle, the creation of planet Ego, all the work at the end involving Kurt Russell. And there’s a lot of Rocket and Groot animation in those scenes as well,” he said of WETA’s contributions.
“War for the Planet of the Apes” is the last of a planned trilogy, but the marriage of performance and VFX is not slowing down any time soon. For example, Mr. Serkis has been working on a live-action “Jungle Book” film, independent of Jon Favreau’s award-winning movie of 2016.
The technique is not a replacement for actors but rather a tool “to expand the range of characters directors can use in their storytelling,” Mr. Letteri said. “A lot of fables and folktales throughout history have used animals as their protagonists. This allows us to take that idea and bring it to modern-day films.”
He has been working on “Avatar” for the past six months, but the WETA team has a half-dozen other films in the works. Up next in theaters for Mr. Letteri’s team is “Maze Runner: The Death Cure,” due in theaters Jan. 26, and the Dwayne Johnson action-adventure “Rampage” — based on the 1980s video game featuring apes and monsters destroying cities — in the spring.
As visual effects continue to take new strides in an effort to dazzle audiences and draw them to movie theaters, Mr. Letteri isn’t worried that moviegoers will become jaded.
Can interplanetary battles or characters such as Gollum and Caesar ever seem ho-hum?
“To me it first the story that allows you to see something in a new and interesting way,” Mr. Letteri said. “And I don’t think audiences are jaded because movies keep pushing for new ways to tell stories and audiences keep responding to it.”
Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.
First Published: January 24, 2018, 12:04 a.m.
