Weta Digital

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Weta Digital
Type Subsidiary
Founded 1993
Headquarters Wellington, New Zealand
Key people Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor
Industry Visual Effects, CGI animation
Parent Weta Workshop
Website www.wetadigital.com

Weta Digital is a digital visual effects company based in Wellington, New Zealand, an offshoot of the Weta Workshop physical effects company. Director Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, Jame Selkirk, Jim Booth and others founded Weta Digital in 1993 to produce the digital special effects for Heavenly Creatures, working with just one computer on that film. The company has grown immensely in size and complexity since then. Their most powerful computer is listed at #157 at TOP500 for June 2006 [1]. It is a popular visual effects house due to its popular films that achieve cult status.

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The American film industry recognised Weta Digital for its outstanding effects for the Peter Jackson's film trilogy based on The Lord of the Rings by presenting it with Academy Awards for visual effects for its work on 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 (2003). Two years later, Weta Digital confirmed its leading position in the field by winning another Academy Award for King Kong.

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. MASSiVE can be seen in action in the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring, the Helm's Deep battle sequence in The Two Towers, and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King, and in other recent films. While in the first film mainly background shots were possible, later developments allowed the generation of foreground shots using much higher detail 3-D models.

Another significant contribution to the Tolkien-based films was the effort and technology applied to render Gollum, a hobbit-like creature corrupted and deformed by the power of the One Ring, very realistically using a combination of motion capture from actor Andy Serkis, key frame animation and subsurface scattering rendering technique which enabled the first completely convincing portrayal of an animated humanoid in a feature film. This process has also been utilized in King Kong.

Since November 2003, Weta Digital's Supercomputers have been listed on every Top500 list of the fastest computers in the world (Weta sometimes appearing as many as 4 times on a single list [2]). Weta's Supercomputers are IBM BladeCenter clusters, each blade server with 2 Xeon CPUs and most of them running Linux. They are housed at the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre in central Wellington [3].

Other movies that were worked on by Weta Digital were Robert Zemeckis's Contact (1997), starring Jodie Foster, Alex Proyas's I, Robot (2004), starring Will Smith and Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand, which had one of the largest budgets in movie history.

Weta Digital will also be working on the live action adaptations of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Halo.

The new Walt Disney Pictures logo that premiered with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was animated by Weta Digital. [4], [5]

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