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Mortal Engines: Weta Digital
creates hell on wheels
By Karen Moltenbrey
Over the years, Weta Digital has made a name for itself creating vast imaginative worlds for highly acclaimed feature film franchises such as The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. However, for the recently released Mortal Engines, not only did the studio have to construct wide swaths of land the size of countries, but the crew also had to build supercities that move at head-spinning speed.
Mortal Engines, produced by Universal Pictures and MRC, takes place centuries after a cataclysmic event known as the Sixty Minute War destroys civilization as we know it, leaving behind few resources. Eventually, survivors learn to adapt, and a deadly, mobile society emerges whereby gigantic moving cities roam the earth, preying on smaller towns they hunt down across a landscape called the Great Hunting Ground, basically the size of Europe. It is now a period of pre-revival, as the earth begins to renew itself, and the survivors become nomads on wheels.
Eventually, London, a traction city, emerges at the top of this vicious food chain, consuming resources from other cities and towns it devours, including fuel, food and human labor. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. But there are those who want to end this vicious cycle; they are members of the Anti-Traction League, who advocate for static, self-sustaining homelands.
Based on a book by Philip Reeve, the film is directed by Oscar-winning visual effects artist Christian Rivers (King Kong). Simon Raby (Elysium, District 9) served as cinematographer, while Weta created the visual effects, led by Ken McGaugh, Kevin Andrew Smith and Luke Millar, with Dennis Yoo as animation supervisor.
A New World Order
In all, Weta delivered 1,682 VFX shots for the feature film, most of which pertained to the environments. How did this work compare to some of Weta’s other world builds? “I can’t speak as to The Hobbit because I didn’t work on that. But on The Lord of the Rings, New Zealand’s landscape was used for Middle-earth, so there was a lot of location work, and most of the world building was all in camera,” says McGaugh. “On Mortal Engines, because earth has been destroyed and manipulated by these giant cities moving over it, there’s nothing left that resembles the earth that we know. So, there was no location for us to shoot; we had to build it from scratch.”
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