This summer’s Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes arguably represents a further jump in CG quality. Taking place ten years after the events of the first film, at which point a simian flu outbreak has all but wiped out human life on the planet, Dawn again catches up with Caesar, now the leader of a community of intelligent apes. Life seems idyllic in the wilds surrounding the ruins of San Francisco. But when the apes come face to face with a band of human survivors, peace is threatened when old animal instincts roil up on both sides.

Under the guidance of director Matt Reeves, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes reconnects us to Caesar’s character; proud, noble compassionate. But in the film’s opening scenes, he establishes something else: a sense of realism that is beyond what we saw in 2011’s Rise. A group of apes are hunting deer in the gloom of a forest, and the sequence is so realistic that our eyes simply surrender to it.

Part of this realism is thanks to Matt Reeves’ brave decision to move much of Dawn’s production from the relatively safe confines of a sound stage to a location on Vancouver Island. Several scenes were shot in exterior locations in Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, but the extent of location-based performance capture in Dawn was unprecedented.

“I wanted to push the photoreality further,” Reeves recently told us. “They shot 75 percent of [Rise] on a stage […] So we took the performance capture cameras and the 3D cameras, which are really heavy, up into the woods in the freezing cold and the rain and the mud, and it was the hardest shoot most of us had ever been on. But then when the shots started come in from Weta, it was exciting to see that the theory was actually right.”

In the period of time between Rise in 2011 and the start of production on Dawn, Weta had also been working hard on a new set of character models for Caesar and the numerous other apes and animals the sequel would require. The simulation of flesh and fur was given even greater detail, while yet more work went on beneath the skin: the movement and consistency of muscles and even fat were more accurately recreated inside a computer.