Wētā FX, formerly known as Weta Digital, is a New Zealand–based digital visual effects and animation company based in Miramar, Wellington. It was founded by Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk in 1993 to produce the digital special effects for Heavenly Creatures. The company went on to produce some of the highest-grossing films ever made, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Avatar series. Considered one of the most influential film companies of the 21st century, Wētā FX has won several Academy Awards and BAFTAs.[5] The company is named after the New Zealand wētā, one of the world's largest insects, which was historically featured in the company logo.[6]
The studio has developed several proprietary software packages 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 can animate huge numbers of agents: independent characters acting according to pre-set rules.[9][10]
To recreate 1933 New York for King Kong, the company created CityBot, an application which could "build" the city on a shot by shot basis.[11] Kong's fur also required the development of new simulation and modeling software.[12] A set of tools that combined procedural and interactive techniques added wind to the five million individual strands of fur and modeled 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 fur were ripped out and filled in with scars, blood, and the mud of Skull Island. Each frame of fur took two gigabytes of data.[13]
For James Cameron's Avatar, Weta Digital modified MASSIVE to give life to the flora and fauna on Pandora, for which the company did most of the visual effects with Joe Letteri,[14] under a team led by executive and producer Eileen Moran.[15][16] The film is regarded as a landmark for visual effects.[17][18][19][20] By 2017, Weta Digital had started visual effects development for the sequels.[21][22][23][24]
In 2010, a texture painting application developed by the studio for Avatar called Mari has been bought by The Foundry Visionmongers.[25] For The Adventures of Tintin and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the studio developed a new grooming system called Barbershop where users can interactively manipulate digital hair. This tool received a Sci-tech award in 2015.[26]The Adventures of Tintin was Weta Digital's first fully animated feature film.[27]
On June 19, 2020, Weta Digital announced that it would be producing original animation content under the name Weta Animated.[38][39][40] The company also announced a new chief executive Prem Akkaraju, who comes from Los Angeles.[41][42][43] In September 2020, Weta was able to secure a multi-year deal with Amazon Web Services to use the Amazon cloud to forward its VFX and animation production.[44][45]
On June 17, 2021, Weta Digital announced they have partnered with Autodesk to productize Weta's proprietary tools based in Autodesk Maya for a cloud service called WetaM.[47] It will first be released in Q4 as a private beta.[48]
On August 23, 2021, Weta Digital announced a collaboration with SideFX for a cloud service combining the studio's proprietary tools within SideFX's Houdini called WetaH.[49][50]
On November 9, 2021, Jackson sold the company's VFX tools development division to video games software company Unity Technologies for US$1.625 billion.[51][52][53] Unity's acquired tech assets of Weta will be called Weta Digital, while the visual effects company remained separate and renamed as Wētā FX.[54][55] The acquisition was completed in December 2021.[56] In April 2022, Wētā FX opened a new studio in Vancouver. It is the company's first dedicated VFX studio outside New Zealand.[57][58]
For Avatar: The Way of Water in 2022, Wētā worked on 3,240 visual effects shots, 2,225 of which involved water.[59] The studio developed new performance capture technology for the film's underwater sequences.[60][61][62] The digital water in the film was created by artists using Wētā's latest Loki simulation software.[63] Wētā also refined their Facial Action Coding System (FACS) from Alita: Battle Angel for its use in Avatar: The Way of Water.[64][65][66][67] The company eventually ended up rendering close to 3.3 billion thread hours.[68] Letteri won his fifth Academy Award for his work on the film.[69]
On November 25,, 2023, Unity and Wētā FX mutually agreed to terminate Unity’s service agreement with Wētā FX effective December 10, 2023; this comes after Unity laying off the entire Wētā Digital staff in a "company reset".[70][71] Unity will continue to own the software from the Wētā Digital acquisition (with Wētā FX being able to continue using them), but the Wētā Digital name and related intellectual property will be transferred back to Wētā FX with no current plans to use the old Wētā Digital name. Wētā FX will be extending offers to as many of the Digital team as possible "as it looks to expand its research, development and support functions".[71]
Workplace culture
An investigation into Wētā's workplace culture by Kiwi public TV broadcaster 1News, begun in June 2020 following a social media post by former Wētā Workshop employee Layna Lazar, resulted in more than 40 current and former Weta Digital employees anonymously sharing accounts of "sexism, bullying and harassment" in September 2020.[72][73][74]
In their testimonies, workers identified the existence of a male-only pornographic mailing list called "Caveman", which originated in 2002 following a company-wide tradition known as Porn Friday, and continued to circulate until 2015.[72] Several reports also alleged that the company's IT systems required upgrades in order to accommodate the volume of pornographic content hosted on the company intranet, in addition to numerous allegations of sexual harassment, bullying, intimidation, misogyny and homophobia.[72][75]
In response to these allegations, Wētā owners, including Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and chief executive officer Prem Akkaraju, commissioned an independent review from barrister Miriam Dean, who stated in her report that she received 80 complaints of bullying behavior, 120 complaints of inappropriate conduct and 19 complaints of sexual harassment from amongst the company's 1,500 employees.[76][77][78]
Dean put forward 17 recommendations for internal reform, including the establishment of a code of conduct, restricting the executive team, expanding the diversity and inclusion program, and reviewing the company's pay structure.[76][79] Her review also stated that the existing management systems were not sufficient to protect workers "from bullying, sexual harassment, sex discrimination and other inappropriate conduct".[76][80][81]
Framestore is a British visual effects and computer animation studio based on Chancery Lane in London, England. The company was founded in 1986. Framestore specializes in visual effects for film and prestige TV, advertising, rides, and immersive experiences. It is the largest production house in Europe, employing roughly 3,000 staff, including 1,000 in London, and 1,500 across studios in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Melbourne and Mumbai.
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects, computer animation and stereo conversion digital studio that was founded on May 26, 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began production on the original Star Wars, now the fourth episode of the Skywalker Saga.
Visual effects is the process by which imagery is created or manipulated outside the context of a live-action shot in filmmaking and video production. The integration of live-action footage and other live-action footage or CGI elements to create realistic imagery is called VFX.
Digital Domain is a global visual effects and digital production company headquartered in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California.
MASSIVE is a high-end computer animation and artificial intelligence software package used for generating crowd-related visual effects for film and television.
Rhythm & Hues Studios was an American visual effects and animation company that received the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1995 for Babe, in 2007 for The Golden Compass, and in 2012 for Life of Pi. It also received four Scientific and Technical Academy Awards.
DNEG is a British-Indian visual effects, computer animation and 3-D conversion studio that was founded in 1998 in London, and rebranded as DNEG in 2014 after a merger with Indian VFX company Prime Focus; it was named after the letters "D" and "Neg" from their former name.
Boris FX is a visual effects and video editing software plug-in developer based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The developer is known for its flagship products, Continuum, Sapphire, Mocha, and Silhouette.
Joseph Bruce Letteri is a senior visual effects artist, winner of five Academy Awards, four BAFTA awards and four VES awards. He is the current Senior Visual Effects Supervisor of the Academy Award-winning Wētā FX having joined the company in 2001. He has received several awards and nominations as visual effects supervisor, the latest being Avatar: The Way of Water, and previously for War for the Planet of the Apes. He attended Center High School (Pennsylvania) in 1975 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He gave the keynote address at UC Berkeley's December Convocation on 19 December 2010.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a 2011 American science fiction action film directed by Rupert Wyatt and written by the writing team of Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. It is a reboot of the Planet of the Apes film series and is the seventh installment overall and the first in the reboot series. The film stars James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, Brian Cox, Tom Felton, and Andy Serkis. In the film, Caesar (Serkis), a chimpanzee genetically enhanced and raised by chemist Will Rodman (Franco), goes from living in captivity to eventually leading an ape uprising against the humanity.
Dan Lemmon is a New Zealand visual effects supervisor. In 2012, he was nominated for an Academy Award for the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes. This was in the category of Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, his nomination was shared with Daniel Barrett, Joe Letteri and R. Christopher White.
Daniel Barrett is an animation supervisor.
Eileen Moran was an American visual effects producer and former executive producer at Weta Digital.
SilhouetteFX began as a rotoscoping tool for the visual effects industry. SilhouetteFX has been expanded to include capabilities facilitating paint, warping and morphing, 2D to 3D conversion and alternative matting methods. As of V6, SilhouetteFX retains all of the aforementioned capabilities now embedded in a node-based digital compositing application.
Erik Winquist is an American New Zealander visual effects supervisor. He is best known for his work on three prominent film franchises featuring large computer generated animal effects: Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005), Planet of the Apes prequel films, and Rampage (2018).
Prem Akkaraju is the founder of Weta Cloud – which sold to Unity Software on November 9, 2021, for $1.625 billion – and ex-CEO of Wētā FX.
The Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in a CG Project is one of the annual awards given by the Visual Effects Society. The award goes to artists whose work in virtual cinematography. It was first awarded in 2003 and 2004 for, under the title "Best Visual Effects Photography in a Motion Picture", before being scrapped from the ceremony. The award was given separately to artists in live-action film, animated film, and commercials/television. These categories were first awarded in 2012. The following year, the category specifically awarding animated film was dropped, with only live-action film and commercial/television being awarded. In 2015, only live-action films were awarded. The following year, the category's title changed to "Outstanding Virtual Cinematography in a Photoreal Project". It has held its current title since 2020.
The Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Compositing in a Photoreal Feature is one of the annual awards given by the Visual Effects Society, starting in 2002. It is awarded to visual effects artists for their work in compositing.
The Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Compositing in a Photoreal Feature is one of the annual awards given by the Visual Effects Society, starting in 2012. It is awarded to visual effects artists for their work in effects simulations.
The Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Episode, Commercial, or Real-Time Project is one of the annual awards given by the Visual Effects Society, starting in 2012. It is awarded to visual effects artists for their work in effects simulations.
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