Image Credit: © ElectroLeague
“WAR IS OVER! Wētā FX Gets Animated” captivated the audience at SIGGRAPH 2024 by bringing a classic John Lennon and Yoko Ono song to life in a highly stylized animated film. We connected with Wētā FX Visual Effects Supervisor Keith Miller to learn more about this collaborative creative process that led to an Academy Award®-winning animated film.
SIGGRAPH: Your project “WAR IS OVER! Wētā FX Gets Animated” spotlights an Academy Award®-winning animated film. Can you speak to the early creative process of working with Brad Booker, the producer, and Dave Mullins, the writer and director?
Keith Miller (KM): We’d been exploring animated shorts in the real-time space all the way back to “Meerkat” in 2020. That and a couple other experimental projects we did around that time really resonated for Brad and Dave, and being a smaller, independent filmmaking team, they were quite keen to understand our process and workflows and try to leverage real-time as much as possible in their own day-to-day work.
As soon as we came on board, we established a very collaborative creative process where we would just rapidly iterate together, often during a live session where we would screenshare from Unreal. That just set the stage for fast feedback and a willingness to share early work and just enlighten everyone as to what was possible.
SIGGRAPH: Early in the process, your team identified some of the anticipated challenges with the project. What were some of those challenges, and how valuable was it to identify them early in the process?
KM: THE key challenge was 100% the development of the painterly visual style and figuring out a way to marry the 2D look from Production Designer Zac Retz with a three-dimensional world with moving cameras and characters. I spoke a little during the Production Session about the way I like to use a discovery phase early in a project and how this worked during that visual discovery. This is a period of blue-sky ideation where we try and tackle the earliest known challenges from different angles without constraint. We had so many little wins and discoveries from that period and came away with a number of techniques and processes that were actually used all the way through production.
SIGGRAPH: The story of “WAR IS OVER!” is rather emotional. How did using Epic Games’s Unreal Engine help convey or express the emotional narrative in a visual way?
KM: Real-time workflows are really about efficiency and immediacy. The ability to rapidly iterate while giving yourself the maximum context around what you’re looking at and trying to solve means you can make those reads immediately. You don’t have to wait and see what downstream processes are doing that may affect the way your characters read and the emotions you’re trying to draw out.
SIGGRAPH: Can you speak to some of the insight you learned about yourself, your creative approach, or maybe some of your workflow processes during the creation of this piece?
KM: I often start a project with a mixture of excitement and mild terror about the magnitude of the work and what we ultimately need to achieve. Over time, that balance swings heavily positive once we settle into a rhythm and start achieving some early wins. And eventually, the thrill of the work dominates and I reach the finish line completely amazed with what the team has pulled off. This project, more than any, really reminded me to just trust the creative process and the exceptional talent here at Wētā FX and to just enjoy the ride, because I know at some point I’ll look back at the whole thing and be sad that it’s over.
SIGGRAPH: Lastly, I am sure this was a fun project to work on and many memories were made. Can you tell our audience what your favorite part about working on this project was?
KM: When I take on a project, I’m always looking at the Venn diagram of how the Wētā FX team overlaps both the client personalities and the overall creative vision. There’s a somewhat rare trifecta that happens, where all three of those elements are extremely elevated and everyone is in perfect sync and truly inspired by what you’re creating. We knew this project was going to be something special from the very beginning, and so everyone really just brought their best work and felt enabled to contribute to the creative process. For me, that’s pure joy and makes the work absolutely rewarding. And then to top it all off by being able to represent the amazingly talented team at Wētā FX and celebrate the Academy Award win with Brad and Dave at the ceremony was really the icing on the cake!
This contribution captivated the audience at SIGGRAPH 2024, and there will be many more presentations that share that sentiment at SIGGRAPH 2025. Don’t miss out on an opportunity to co-create our collective future. Register for SIGGRAPH 2025 by 30 May to secure discounted rates.
Keith joined Wētā FX in 2005 to work on Peter Jackson’s King Kong. He currently works as Wētā FX’s Special
Projects Creative Director, leveraging his experience as an award-winning Visual Effects Supervisor along with his
expertise in developing interactive/immersive content for real-time systems. Having developed VR content for CAVE systems in the early 2000s, Keith’s passion for real-time spans more than two decades. Keith has recently wrapped on the Oscar-winning animated short WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko. In 2021 he was awarded the SIGGRAPH Jury Prize for Wētā’s Meerkat. Keith additionally lends his expertise to the virtual production team, developing XR filmmaking tools and processes alongside LED wall content for in-camera visual effects on film and streaming.
Keith was Visual Effects Supervisor for Grammy® Award winner Childish Gambino’s 2018 ‘Pharos’ concert and received a VES Award for the creation of the 360° real-time animated visuals and the VR prototyping tools for the show. Other memorable experiential and interactive projects include The Matrix Awakens (2021) video game
and his work with Director Jon Favreau on King Louie: Cold Lairs (2016), a 360° VR experience.
Highlights as a Visual Effects Supervisor include the Academy award nominated films Jungle Book (2016) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). Other highlights include DC Extended Universe projects Wonder Woman (2017), Batman v Superman (2016) and Man of Steel (2013). Keith was nominated for a BAFTA for The Adventures of Tintin
(2011).
