| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Visual effects, CGI animation |
| Founded | 1993 |
| Headquarters | Wellington, New Zealand |
| Key people | Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, Joe Letteri, Eileen Moran |
| Website | www.wetafx.co.nz |
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 several Academy Awards and BAFTAs.[1]
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.
Weta Digital is named after the weta. Weta are some of the largest insects in the world, prevalent in New Zealand.
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To date, Weta Digital has won five Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects: 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[2] (2003), King Kong[3] (2005), and Avatar (2009).[4]
Weta Digital has developed several proprietary software packages 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.[5] 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.[6]
Kong’s fur also required the development of new simulation and modelling 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 in with scars, blood, and the mud of Skull Island. Each frame of fur took 2 gigabytes of data.[7]
For James Cameron's "Avatar" Weta modified MASSIVE to give life to the flora and fauna on Pandora, for which the company did most of the visual effects with the 4 time Academy Award winner visual effects guru, Joe Letteri.[8] Recently the company has evolved their motion capture technique to be able to leave studio for shooting on location, as utilized on the Rise of the Planet of the Apes. [9]
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