Star Wars, Star Trek, Avatar — no, nope, not my thing.

But recently I was taken on a behind the scenes tour of the making of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in New Zealand’s windy capital, Wellington.

Given the film (which old me would have referred to as ‘the monkey movie’) was one of the year’s top-grossing blockbusters — $707 million at the global box office, to be exact — I figured all the hype had to be about something. And I was determined to find out what it was.

So, after 48 hours poking around Weta’s motion-capture facility, chatting to the visual effects wizards and watching the human-apes in action, I can actually say — I get it.

Here’s what I learnt:

Motion capture technology (Mo-cap) has come a long way since actor Andy Serkis played Gollum in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in 2002. He returns in Dawn of to play Caesar, leader of the apes, but this time, the visual effects team animated each ape, hair by hair, tear by tear, to transform the actors into primates.

Not only did the actors spent endless hours at the local zoo and online watching chimps in action, they learnt to move like apes, think like apes, sound like apes and make facial expressions like apes.

On set, the actors were dressed in grey suits covered in strategically placed dots. The dots are picked up by cameras beaming out invisible infra-red light, recording their movements in 3D. The actors also had dots painted on their faces, which allowed animators to capture even the most intricate facial movements. On top of this, the ‘hero actors’ wore special helmets with mounted cameras to record every single expression.

Of all of the facial expressions, the physicality of the eyes and the movement around the eyelids — capturing the softness of the skin and the iris colour — is the most essential detail to humanise the apes.

This is where Weta Digital’s software and the team of facial modellers come into play. For Caesar, state of the art software meant the team could control more than 240 muscles in the ape’s face. This was then skilfully matched to Andy Serkis’ own facial movements.

The comprehensive stream of data, along with the vision captured from facial expressions allowed the animators to take the traits of each actor and their individual performance to transform them into apes with their very own personality.

From here, the magic of performance-capture animation becomes apparent. With Caesar in particular, they needed to elicit plenty of empathy and emotion, right down to the redness in his eyes during intimate scenes.

The other big challenge was trying to make the apes cry. Apparently real apes don’t cry, who knew?

Given that much of Dawn of was shot in a Canadian forest in the pouring rain, Weta animators were faced with the task of trying to make the digital apes look natural in the wet environment. To this end, they plotted the path of the raindrops and then toyed with the digital fur where the droplets landed.

Watching the film while considering all of these incredible visual effects and it’s easy to see why there’s already plenty of Oscar buzz surrounding Andy Serkis in the lead role as Caesar. If he takes out the golden statuette he will become the first actor to win an Oscar for a ‘motion capture’ role.

It certainly makes one wonder just how far performance capture as an animated craft can go from here.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which also stars Gary Oldman, Jason Clarke and Keri Russell, is available on Blu-ray and digital now.