Director Tim Johnson (left) explained the monkey on his back while Boyd Shermis received shining accolades for his visual effects work.

Weta's Latest Projects
Aitken also disclosed that now, after The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, there is more room for Weta Digital to branch out and work on a number of external projects. Weta has been busy with Eragon, The Waterhorse and Bridge to Terabithia, movies all based on best-selling children's fantasy novels.

Weta Digital will be creating visual effects, creatures and digital environments for James Cameron's (Titanic, Terminator, Aliens) upcoming movie Avatar. This movie will be largely digital, in 3-D and intended for release in 2008. Weta is also in preparation for Jackson's next producing project, Dambusters, a remake of the World War II classic.

Visual Effects for Poseidon -- Not an Easy Cruise
The bar for visual effects in movie making is continually being raised in order to impress an increasingly sophisticated audience. Realizing complex visions for visual effects often requires groundbreaking development of software systems and sometimes even computer hardware. This necessitates work on vfx to begin even before the script has been written.

The movie Poseidon, based on 1972's The Poseidon Adventure, was released in May earlier this year and received shining accolades for its visual effects work. In a seminar presented by Boyd Shermis, overall vfx supervisor for Poseidon, the audience was treated to an in-depth view of how key challenges in visual effects were tackled.

Among the main challenges that attracted him to this movie, was the creation of the intro shot, the ship itself and...the water.

In his seminar on Poseidon, Shermis explained that the intro shot, the ship, the water and the chance to "'out-storm' The Perfect Storm and 'out-Titanic' the Titanic" attracted him to the project. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

The Intro Shot
Director Wolfgang Petersen, responsible for movies such as The Perfect Storm, Troy and the German classic Das Boot, has described Poseidon's intro shot as "the most complicated, challenging, costly, longest, continuous two-and-half-minute shot in the history of motion pictures." Lasting almost 4,500 frames, the intro shot for Poseidon took a staggering eight months to complete.

Apart from a lone actor, the whole shot is computer-generated. Beginning under water, the camera moves below the ship, up through a complex sea surface, taking in the view of an enormous cruise liner. A jogger, one of the main characters played by Josh Lucas, is spotted on deck in the early morning hours. The camera overtakes him, circles around the ship before it sweeps in on a close-up shot of Lucas looking out into the ocean.

Combining the live-action element, the actor running on a facsimile of the ship, with a CG vessel at sea, was one of the key challenges. During his presentation, Shermis explained how the computer-controlled camera filming Lucas was suspended from a rig of four towers, connected by wires, at the San Fernando Valley's Sepulveda Dam. The towers spanned an area of 64,000 square feet.

As the camera sweeps over, passes and dollies around the running actor, grips move greenscreens in order to mask the background accordingly.