Our Work on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

The seventh film in the Transformers franchise takes place in 1994. Unicron, the planet-sized sometimes-associate of the Decepticons destroys the Maximals’ home planet in an intense feast of grand-scale world-ending FX.

Scourge is honour-bound to reunite the two halves of the trans-warp key that would give Unicron access to seal a similar fate for planet Earth.

Enter the Autobots.

Over a period of five months, Wētā FX created 460 shots for this film, predominantly for the 3rd act battle inside the volcano.

The vast majority of the shots are fully digital and minimal plate photography of human characters was used.

The concept artists in our Design team received an open brief to create the planet where the Maximals dwell in exile. Descendants from the Autobots as forces of good, they inhabit a lush and rich planet that our matte painters brought to life as the backdrop for the finished frames.

Our animators aided in the pre-visualisation and visual story-telling of the sequences in our brief.

As they started working with the transformer character puppets, they had to understand and resolve the mechanical principles of a rigid machine in motion.  This meant learning to ignore or work around the flexibility, as well as the limitations, inherent in biological flesh and bones.

Wētā artists modelled and animated the Maximals character Apelinq – the albino gorilla who makes the ultimate sacrifice to hold off Scourge so that Optimus Primal can take the trans-warp key to extra-planetary safety.

In order to support believable dialog and interaction between robots, Wētā applied proprietary facial animation techniques to the extent allowed by the limitations imposed by a mechanical visage.