Dean Wright of Frozen Lake singled out the ape’s acting during close-ups in King Kong — it was full of feeling and resonated emotionally with viewers. All King Kong images: Weta Digital Ltd./Universal Studios.

DW: It was a great spectacle. They made huge advances in creating digital environments. New York — both nighttime and daytime — set a new standard for creating digital cities. And, some of the acting in close ups with Kong is truly remarkable — you really feel and believe those moments. And in the end battle, you get both. The CG camera work at the end make you feel like you’re flying with the biplanes on their strafing runs, like you’re on a camera mount on the plane coming toward the Empire State Building. The lighting — the dawn — going from predawn to dawn and seeing it changing across the cityscape was so well executed.

JL: With the original Kong, [the filmmakers] were asking the audience for suspension of disbelief. We weren’t asking them to suspend disbelief. We wanted to say, “Just watch. It’s real. You don’t have to think about it any more.” With the scenery, 1933 New York was really important to the story. If we had used modern day New York, it would have taken you out of the moment because everyone knows it, and knows you could just shoot the gorilla with a tranquilizer dart. But, if we could bring them back to 1933… In 1933, people hadn’t been to the top of the Empire State Building. They hadn’t seen gorillas in zoos; they’d only read about them. That’s why the film had the impact it did when it first came out. That’s what we were trying to recapture. We could have taken short cuts, but we didn’t know when they might lead to something that would cause people to drop out of the film. So, we put a lot of effort into getting the details of New York correct.

Joe Letteri and his team at Weta Digital put a lot of effort into getting the details of 1933 New York correctly. If they took short cuts, viewers would not have accepted the film’s premise so readily.

BR: And Narnia?

DM: I like the variation and scale of the work. The thing about Kong was the stylized look, but Narnia was the opposite. They went with photoreal with armies of thousands of characters. The lion looked really good. Animals have been acting with people since way back, but, again, the director [Andrew Adamson] gave them enough shots for us to know what the characters are thinking. And, the animation and rendering were good enough that we didn’t think about technique.

JL: Aslan looked like a real lion. The beavers were great characters with terrific personalities. Mr. Tumnus’ integration with goat legs. I loved the film. The battle scenes were terrific; they did a great job with the armies. There were so many individual characters, so many different types of creatures. And, the effects were so much a part of the story — that’s what we were trying to do, make the effects as integrated as possible. Lots of scenes had multiple characters with speaking parts that had to be built up. To do so much and get it done on time —that’s important, too.

The beavers and the battle scenes were among the vfx in Chronicles of Narnia that impressed Joe Letteri. He found the effects were well integrated into the story.