Phillip Leonhardt

Phil Leonhardt joined Wētā FX in 2005 to work as a Senior Compositor on Peter Jackson’s King Kong.

He subsequently worked on a swathe of films, such as X-Men: The Last Stand, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, The Water Horse, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Lovely Bones, as well as working as a Lighting TD on James Cameron’s Avatar. 

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus saw Phil take on supervisory responsibilities, and he led CG and VFX teams to deliver Man of Steel, The Wolverine and Furious 7. In addition to his work on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Phil led the VES Award-nominated Prison Camp sequence for War for the Planet of the Apes.

Phil led the Iron City team on Alita: Battle Angel before joining the other VFX Supervisors on Avengers: Endgame. Most recently, Phil has been one of Wētā FX’s Visual Effects Supervisors on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

Alongside the film projects, Phil has led a Research & Development team building paint, roto and comp tools to manipulate and re-create plate photography. He helped design in-house FX library tools, lighting tools for our Physlight pipeline, and deep compositing workflows, particularly in volumetrics.

Phil has won an HPA award for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and has been nominated for two previous HPA awards for Maze Runner: The Death Cure and Man of Steel. 

Before joining Wētā FX, Phil worked in London at Cinesite on the first three Harry Potter films, at MPC on Tomb Raider II and Troy, and at Dneg on Chronicles of Riddick.

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