Weta Digital

"'Infobox_Company
company_name = Weta Digital
company_
company_type = Privately Held Company
company_slogan =
foundation = 1993
location = Wellington, New Zealand
key_people = Peter Jackson, Joe Letteri, Eileen Moran
industry = Visual Effects, CGI animation
products = | revenue =
operating profit =
homepage = [http://www.wetadigital.com/ www.wetadigital.com]

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’s creative excellence has been recognized with a number of prestigious awards, including Academy Awards® and BAFTAs®.

Weta Digital is part of a neighborhood of creative companies, including Weta Workshop (design and manufacture of armour, weapons, miniatures and special makeups), Weta Productions (production company for children's television), Weta Collectibles [http://www.wetanz.com/collectibles] (high end film related collectible merchandise), Stone Street Studios (studio complex based in Wellington, NZ), Park Road Post Production (full post production services) and Portsmouth Hire (production equipment hire).

Achievements

The American film industry recognized Weta Digital for its outstanding effects for 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 ' (2001), ' (2002), "" (2003). Two years later, Weta Digital won another Academy Award for "King Kong".

Weta Digital has created a number of custom made in-house proprietary software to enable them 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 allows the animation of huge numbers of agents: independent characters acting according to pre-set rules. In King Kong there was a need to generate 1933 New York which led to the creation of CityBot, an application which was able to ‘build’ New York city to meet these requirements 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 were generated, which allowed deformers to be built for adding wind to the 460 billion individual strands of fur and solving 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 his fur were ripped out and filled it with scars, blood, and the mud of Skull Island. Each frame of fur took 2 gigabytes of data.

Film visual effects filmography

*"The Hobbit"(2011)
*"Dam Busters" - in development
*"Tintin" - in production
*"Avatar" - in production (2009)
*"The Lovely Bones" - in production (2009)
*"The Day the Earth Stood Still" - in production (2008)
*"" (2008)
*"Jumper" (2008)
*"30 Days of Night" (2007)
*"" (2007)
*"" (2007)
*"Bridge to Terabithia" (2007)
*"Eragon" (2006)
*"" (2006)
*"King Kong" (2005)
*"I, Robot" (2004)
*"Van Helsing" (2004)
*"" (2003)
*"" (2002)
*"" (2001)
*"Contact" (1997)
*"The Frighteners" (1996/I)
*"Forgotten Silver" (1995) (TV)
*"Heavenly Creatures" (1994)

Commercials visual effects filmography

*"Powershares: Tony meet your ideas" (2008) Agency: Euro RSCG, Director: Dante Ariola
*"Farmers: Drowned Circus" (2008) Agency: Campbell-Elward, Director: Dante Ariola
*"Nike: Long Time Coming" (2008) Agency: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Director: Samuel Bayer
*"Travelers Insurance: Snowball" (2006) Agency: Fallon, Director: Dante Ariola
*"Tourism New Zealand: 100% Pure New Zealand (Maui)" (2007) Agency: JWT & Assignment, Director: Gregor Nicholas
*"Volkswagen: Doughnut" (2005) Agency: Grabarz & Partner, Director: Carolynne Cunningham
*"CK One: Rooms - You’re the One" Agency: CRK Advertising, Director: Fabian Baron

External links

* [http://www.wetadigital.com/ Official site]
* [http://www.massivesoftware.com/ Massive]
*imdb company|id=0005031|company=PAGENAME