Joe Letteri was joined by a surprise “second speaker” – Andy Serkis. The lecture lasted about an hour including an introduction, an AutoDesk showreel, the talk with demos itself and Q&A from the floor at the end, with about 200 attendees. I’d provide a report but in all honesty there’s very little to report.

There were some very cool demos of how New York was digitally built and lots of “this was the real set and what we filmed” pieces morphing into the scenes as shown in the film that were very impressive, and a lot of discussion about Andy’s work with gorillas and on set with Naomi Watts. Andy is always good value of course but there was really nothing new here that the average DVD viewer or KongIsKing.net reader wouldn’t already know.

The audience seemed to be made up mainly of those working with 3D software tools rather than fans like myself, but the talk given would have gone down much better at your average RingCon or Convention event. “Halo” was mentioned as one of the big projects that Weta are currently working on, as was Cameron’s “Avatar” but there are other projects that Letteri said he couldn’t talk about. When someone said Weta Digital must have faced all the major challenges by now after perfecting Gollum and then solving the “fur” problem, Letteri simply replied that this wasn’t true and that he couldn’t talk about the specific new challenges but that people would “be able to see the results in 2008”.