Fifty years ago, John Chambers so revolutionized movie makeup with his groundbreaking work on 1968’s Planet of the Apes that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him a Special Achievement Oscar, even though the makeup category was not yet recognized alongside its behind-the-scenes peers.

Chambers, who engineered prosthetic body parts and limbs for injured World War II veterans before transferring to Hollywood, was uniquely qualified to tackle Planet of the Apes—where he designed, sculpted, tested, and manufactured the prosthetics for more than 200 ape characters on a budget of reportedly less than a million dollars. Tom Burman, who started his own 50-year makeup career assisting on the film, has said Planet of the Apes “was the turning point for makeup. The studios didn’t realize you could make a movie around wonderful characters, and put makeup on big actors like this. It changed the telling of the stories.”

Five decades later, the franchise continues to break ground in the art of character transformation and storytelling, this time courtesy of the War for the Planet of the Apes visual-effects team Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon, Daniel Barrett, and Joel Whist, who go into next month’s Oscars with the film’s lone nomination.

“I remember being so blown away by the original movie,” said Andy Serkis,__ who plays Caesar in the newer Planet of the Apes trilogy. “Before I started work on Planet of the Apes, I looked at some documentary footage of the original’s actors, Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall, talking about what it was like to work with prosthetic makeup. I remember them specifically talking about how they had to just keep their faces moving so the amount of rubber and latex looked alive on their faces. They had to put so much energy into that. With performance capture, these head-mounted cameras can pick up very subtle and internalized thoughts and feelings and emotions without you having to do anything. You’re just being the character without having to move an artifact around your face.”

Considered to be the world’s leading motion-caption performer, Serkis has been watching the evolution of visual effects since 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, where he portrayed Gollum, courtesy of motion-capture technology. Since then, he has continued to work alongside Weta Digital and its senior visual effects supervisor Letteri on the rest of the Lord of the Rings films, King Kong, The Jungle Book—all of which won visual-effects Oscars—as well as on Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, and the Apes films.