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Recreating 1930's New
York.
 Much as in the creation of Skull Island, it would need a team of accomplished artists to produce the other major setting (and one no less legendary) of King Kong: the New York City of 1933. Taking the advanced computer technology developed for The Lord of the Rings to the next level, digital artists were able to turn back the clock and literally rebuild a city that no longer exists. As it has changed so radically in the last 72 years, it was impossible to transform modern New York, so the entire place had to be built from the ground up. And unlike the totally invented environment of Skull Island, this city has a real-world counterpart and, therefore, had to be constructed within certain confines (What buildings still exist? What is known of the city at that time?). Existing aerial and ground-view photographs from the period provided key reference for artists. These shots were then cross-referenced with a low-resolution digital dataset of present-day New York.
Any buildings constructed post 1933 were stripped out, leaving a huge amount of structures to be replaced with data correct for 1933. Since the period photos were black and white, an initial color palette had to be determined by cross-referencing the hues of buildings that still exist from the time. From this starting place, proprietary computer programs began to rebuild the city, adding intricate detail to the low-resolution dataset. These programs were governed by a strict set of guidelines (period appropriate building styles on everything from doorframes to materials and trim
color).
Visual effects producer Eileen Moran comments, “Watching 1930s New York being built was truly amazing. We were able to build the entire city in 3-D. CG supervisor Chris White created what he called ‘CityBot,’ which created whole city blocks with correct architecture for each area. We had great aerial reference photographs taken in the 1930s, and we matched our 3-D city exactly to the photographs.”
The results, which took over one year to complete, show just how advanced the process was:
o 57,468 unique Manhattan buildings were created, which were constructed using 22,011,949 components/cells. Add to that another 32,839 buildings for Queens, Brooklyn and New Jersey, plus 51 “hero” (or starring) buildings, which makes for a total of 90,358 buildings. These structures cover an area stretching more than 26 miles.
o All of these are 3-D constructions, and newly created software allows an artist (or a film director) to take a camera and fly practically anywhere in the virtual city.
o Of particular import were the rooftops, as they have changed considerably since the ’30s—so even existing period structures could not appear “as is.” The roofs are all visible during the film’s climactic moments when Kong scales the Empire State Building.
o Weta Digital also developed a unique weathering software designed to digitally cover the whole of Manhattan in snow and rain.
o The city was designed to function in the daytime or at night. When lights are turned on inside one of the buildings, full virtual interiors are visible.
o When superimposed on top of one another, the virtual skyline and the 1933 photographs align almost identically.
According to CG supervisor White, “We built over 90,000 buildings, nearly 60,000 of which are unique down to the finest level of detail. Each building is constructed of windows, doors and ledges, doorknobs, steps, anything that you would expect to see on a building—there are also thousands of smoking chimneys, water towers, fire escapes. All of these details have been created to match the style of the time, and they’re all things that make the city feel alive. This is a view of New York that we haven’t seen in any other films.”
Jackson adds, “It’s like bringing New York to life in a way that’s historically very accurate, but it could never be photographed for real. It simply doesn’t exist anymore.”
Next: Filming Kong
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