Director Wes Ball and visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist discuss how Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes presented unique new challenges for the film’s VFX team. Watch above.

“We had a dozen new heroes that we had to build and make talk that necessitated finding efficiencies on the facial animation,” says Winquist. “Previously [in the franchise] those apes were using sign languages… but here was more dialogue than the previous three films combined.”

Ball added how the VFX team helped bail out the production team - when a specially planted field of grass failed to grow more than six inches - by surreptitiously added background forests to a new, grassier location. “That’s the kind of thing that no-one would ever know if they saw this movie, but it shows how the VFX team saved us from a production issue that we couldn’t pull off,” says Ball.

He also revealed that there is an extra Blu-ray version of the entire film in its raw form (before VFX), with the finished version at the top in one frame. “You can see the actor doing his thing and it looks exactly like the ape doing his thing,” says Ball.

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes was released via 20th Century Studios in May, making almost $400m at the worldwide box office. It stars Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, and William H. Macy.

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