SDCC 2024: Activations, Apes and Other Animals | Festivals & Awards

Owen Teague commented it was “the most deeply wonderful experience I’ve ever had making a film” and it “recalibrated the way that I think about acting as a craft.”

Freya Allan, who didn’t play an ape, noted, “I really didn’t have to imagine that there were apes in front of me because they’re so ridiculously good at it and still are. They can’t let go of it.” More seriously, she added, it was “incredible getting to see them go through that process.”

Winquist, who was nominated for a 2015 Oscar (Best Achievement in Visual Effects for “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”) explained one aspect saying “the camera operators really needed to memorize the beats of the camera and be able to reproduce that because we would get the performance of these guys” and then “we would ask them to step out and then in shots where say Mae (Freya Allan) was by herself, having to pretend to play the same shot over again to nobody, sometimes like dragging herself around the room as she being you know tugged by a gorilla.”

He also noted, “having the experience from the previous movies really kind informed what parts of that process were the most important and allowed me to make a video of how we make these movies.” That video was used to “instantly calibrate the entire crew and the cast for what the process was about to be that we were all heading into together.”

Yet the actors can change the process and plans. In one specific scene Kevin Durand’s performance as Proximus Caesar stunned the production team and changed how the movie was originally storyboarded. Hearing him switch from his normal talking voice to the deep, menacing growly voice of Proximus Caesar was impressive. 

The VFX magic of the Planet of the Apes franchise was mentioned in another animal-related panel: “Animals on Screen” which mostly looked at exotic animals and a means for promoting the work of the non-profit Lions, Tigers and Bears. The panel featured Lion, Tigers and Bears founder and director Bobbi Brink and included Emmy Award-winning VFX Supervisor Mark A.J. Nazal (“Gotham and “Westworld”) and producers PJ Haarsma (“Con Man”) and Drew Lewis (“Couch Soup”) of Redbear Films.

This panel was basically the same as this year’s Wonder-Con panel under the same name with a few tweaks such as Haarsma and Lewis recounting how problems on a commercial that used a monkey and a dog were resolved by using computer-generated images.