“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” | Anatomy of a scene

I'm Wes Ball, director of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. This is slightly sequence on the very starting of the film, after our trio of monkeys here, Noa, Soona and Anaya, have just had slightly adventure and are on their way back to their village, where we get to know the lifetime of the Eagle Clan and where Noa and his family live, this small isolated existence. And we will see how the monkeys live on this world with their eagles. And how this ritual of collecting their eggs, which they may raise as mates, is an element of the best way the Eagle Clan functions of their culture. And the goal was really simply to create a beautiful world that will ultimately be modified eternally when the course of events results in most of Noa's village being attacked. Everything you see here was actually shot with the actors. We shoot it twice, we shoot it once with the actors and all their little performance things and the camera movement and all the pieces. So we’re making a daily film. It's just that these guys are wearing these weird suits, together with the cameras and the dots on their faces that capture the entire performance. And then I even have to go in and redo those shots without the monkeys, which is what I need. Whichever performance I select now will likely be inserted into the scene itself. So it's not about animating the characters afterwards. We're actually on location and so they're there of their digital costumes, principally reenacting all the pieces you see on camera except, for instance, the background actions; In the background a gaggle of monkeys are playing what we called “Monkey Ball,” and we just did all of it on stage. So the great thing about the facility of this process is that we will populate this whole scene with lots of of monkeys. But we only needed a handful of monkeys on set. This is Dar, Noa's mother, a implausible character played by Sara Wiseman, who did an important job. “I knew you would climb well.” “He's waiting.” And this character of Noa here is starting to understand the connection that he has together with his father. That's an interesting sort of relationship that I feel plenty of people could relate to. They don't really know the way to communicate with one another, but there's obviously still love there. It's an interesting process where I can take all these different little elements and layer all of them on top of one another and stack them into this – what you see here is the top result, this little idyllic community.

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