12/14/01 Shake Rings in at WETA

Nothing Real, a leading high-end compositing software provider to the digital content creation market, announced that WETA Digital, the New Zealand visual effects facility, is using its Shake software as a primary film compositing system to handle the enormous visual effects requirements for New Line Cinema's and Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy. WETA is producing all three films in the trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, simultaneously (see our print article on the making-of in our December issue out now). To date, Shake has been used to tackle more than 1,000 compositing intensive effects shots on the projects. WETA has installed more than 52 GUI and 100 render-only Shake software licenses since it began building its new state-of-the-art studio and model post-production environment, nearly three years ago. WETA faced a number of compositing challenges in the creation of more than 570 shots for the first film in the trilogy. The casting of actors of normal stature as hobbits and dwarves required the development of scale compositing techniques to seamlessly integrate them with the larger races on the screen. Thousands of CG elements, including crowds, creatures, environments, digital matte paintings and digital stunt doubles were also created by WETA for integration by the 27 members of the compositing team. Motion control photography was used extensively on both the live-action and miniature stages. A typical shot might depend on twin backgrounds, a digital matte object, multiple blue/greenscreen and CG smoke and creature elements and miniatures. The most complex shot had over 300 input layers of various types, thousands of operations in the final compositing script and was nearly 1500 frames in length. Since the beginning of the films' production, a team of Nothing Real engineering and customer support staff has been working with the WETA production to extend and customize the Shake's functionality for efficient and seamless integration throughout the facility.