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. 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.
The company is named after the New Zealand weta, one of the world's largest
insects. Achievements
To date, Weta Digital has won five Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects:
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Two
Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, King Kong, and
Avatar. Weta Digital 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. To recreate 1933 New
York for King Kong, Weta created CityBot, an application which could
"build" the city on a shot by shot basis.
Kong’s fur also required the development of new simulation and modeling software.
A set of tools that combined procedural and interactive techniques added wind to
the 460 billion 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 2 gigabytes of data.
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 four-time Academy Award winner visual effects guru, Joe Letteri,
under a team led by the late Weta Digital executive and producer, Eileen
Moran. Recently the company has developed their motion capture technique
to be able to leave studio for shooting on location, as utilized on the film
Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its sequel Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Film and television visual effects filmography
Heavenly Creatures Forgotten Silver
The Frighteners Contact
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King Van Helsing
I, Robot King Kong
X-Men: The Last Stand Eragon
Bridge to Terabithia Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver
Surfer The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep
30 Days of Night Jumper
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian The Day the Earth Stood Still
District 9 The Lovely Bones
Avatar The A-Team
Predators Gulliver's Travels
X-Men: First Class Rise of the Planet of the Apes
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
The Avengers Prometheus
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Man of Steel Iron Man 3
The Wolverine The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Godzilla
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five
Armies Chappie
Furious 7 Fantastic Four
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
The Jungle Book The BFG
Pete's Dragon See also
Industrial Light & Magic Framestore
References External links
Official website Massive
Weta Digital at the Internet Movie Database
Official Facebook page