MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — A troop of men in skin-tight motion-capture suits darted across a sparse set inside a Manhattan Beach studio on a late October morning. A grid of more than 50 cameras recorded their movements as they grunted and screeched their way toward a gray platform where Andy Serkis crouched. The 49-year-old actor snarled and flared his nostrils, stretching the white markers painted on his face.
Anyone watching the scene unfold on the bank of computer monitors tended by the Weta Digital visual effects team, however, would have seen not weirdly attired actors but a tribe of chimpanzees scampering by.
“Good, OK, let’s keep rolling, and let’s do one more even more territorial,” called out director Matt Reeves as he worked on “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.” “Just a little harder, a little louder.”
When it comes to helming the sequel to 2011’s breakout hit “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” Reeves’ mission is to raise the stakes for the next installment in the Fox franchise, due in theaters Friday.
Set 10 years after the earlier movie, a reboot of the sci-fi franchise inspired by Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel that brought in more than $480 million at the worldwide box office, the new film posits a world in which apes have now developed their own civilization and human sightings are rare.
Several survivors — including Jason Clarke’s Malcolm, a single father and former architect; Keri Russell’s Ellie, a nurse; and Gary Oldman’s Dreyfus, the leader of the human colony in the ruins of San Francisco — seek to restore electrical power to San Francisco. There, they come into conflict with the rapidly expanding tribe of apes, led by Serkis’ Caesar, the orphaned offspring of a laboratory chimp who has evolved into the leader of his own expanding tribe that includes wife Cornelia (Judy Greer), teenage son River (Nick Thurston) and a council of close friends.
“Caesar’s created a society in which there is complete equality between orangutans and chimpanzees and gorillas,” Serkis said. “There are a set of beliefs that they’ve collectively imposed, and there are strict tenets of what they should and shouldn’t do. He’s an egalitarian leader.”
“It’s an ape-point-of-view movie,” added Reeves (“Cloverfield,” “Let Me In”). “The apes are still coming into being, so it has a kind of majestic but also primitive, tribal aspect to it. … Once you kind of get into that world, then all of a sudden you realize, ‘Oh, there are some humans left.’ The story really is about who will inherit the Earth. This is the one moment where it could have been ‘Planet of the Humans and the Apes.’”
To immerse audiences in the ape-centric world, Reeves pushed performance-capture technology to new terrain. Traditionally, motion-capture movies are filmed in a studio on a stage called a “volume,” with actors’ performances digitally enhanced by animators and visual effects technicians. “Dawn,” however, was filmed almost entirely on location, with cast and crew trudging through the sweltering humidity of New Orleans and the freezing forests of Vancouver, Canada, lighting gear and enormous 3-D cameras in tow.
“We’re in the woods; we’re not creating the woods,” said Reeves, who takes over the franchise from “Rise” director Rupert Wyatt. “It was crazy hard, but what’s going to be cool about the aesthetic is that you’re going to feel very grounded in the real world, so just the one fantasy is that they’re intelligent apes. No one has done that yet to the level that we did, so it should have a really distinctive feel and look.”
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