 Pirates of the Caribbean Posters
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 Chapter 14 - Special Effects: Squid-Faced Captains... Special Effects: Maelstroms, Squid-Faced Captains and Blue Balls…were all, and much more, within the domain of visual effects supervisors John Knoll of Industrial Light + Magic and Charles Gibson, both of whom shared an Academy Award for their ground-breaking, widely acclaimed work on `Dead Man's Chest' with animation supervisor Hal Hickel. For `At World's End,” another previous Academy Award winner, John Frazier, also handled many of the film's massive special physical effects. Knoll, Gibson and Hickel had little time to rest on their Oscar laurels. That was just the eye of the hurricane, for the early morning after accepting their honors for “Dead Man's Chest” at the Academy Awards® podium, the trio were right back at work at the approximately 2000 visual effects shots required for “At World's End.”
Even in today's digital universe, in which every other feature film seems to have complex CGI effects, audiences and critics alike praised the film's effects as a genuine, quantum leap in what can be accomplished on screen using state-of-the-art technology.
As always, though, Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer fully expected Knoll and Gibson to raise the bar a little higher for `At World's End.' “This is a very large show for us,” Knoll admits. “There will be many more visual effects shots than `Dead Man's Chest,' and because of the extremely short post-production schedule, I'm supervising some, Charlie Gibson is supervising others, and the rest are distributed among a number of visual effects facilities.
“Usually, when a challenge like that is thrown down,” continues Knoll, “you think about `Well, how are we going to execute this, and is there any aspect of that that we can't do with our current toolset? And if there is, I have to talk to research and development about getting some modifications so that we can do these shots. And that's a situation that happens pretty often. On almost every film, we do something that's new, or tools that need to be modified.”
The massive setpieces in which Knoll and Gibson needed to make mighty contributions-Davy Jones' Locker, Singapore, the Green Flash and of course, the gigantic Maelstrom which climaxes the film-always combined visual with mechanical and “in-camera” effects. Explains Knoll, “Gore feels very strongly, and I agree with him, that it's important to have real elements in there. As much as you can do real, the more plausible and realistic the final results will be. Gore's a strong proponent of trying to get practical elements on set, to get these as much on camera as you can and then use visual effects where you really need them. And also, not to rely too much on one technique. So in one shot, for example, you'll have a background extension that's a miniature, and in another shot we're doing something with computer graphics. As long as you're switching things around a little bit, the audience doesn't key into being able to see the artifice of one particular technique, and we end up with a better looking result.”
One aspect of “At World's End” which was not particularly worrying Knoll was Davy Jones, which, as portrayed by Bill Nighy and brought to life by the supervisor and his ILM team of artists, had amazed the world in “Dead Man's Chest.” For that film, Knoll and ILM created a new motion-capture system which they called Imocap, drastically simplifying what was previously required for such techniques. Rather than needing 16 cameras, Knoll and his team invented a system that was completely mobile, requiring just three cameras and sensor-embedded suits for the actors, without the cumbersome separate sound stage and blue screens that had been the mainstay of the system before their innovations.
“Davy was our big focus in the second film, and I think we have all the look and rendering technology down at this point. Hal Hickel, our animation supervisor, and his team are familiar with the character now, so we've got a good repertoire to work from for Davy and his Flying Dutchman crew. In fact, the 16 primary Dutchman crew members created for “Dead Man's Chest” was increased in “At World's End,” particularly for the Maelstrom sequence. Says Knoll, “We definitely take some of the characters that were more background in the second film, and shuffle them around to the front to get a little mileage out of them.”
Knoll admits that “of all three pictures, probably the most fun aspect of any of them has been our involvement in the creation of Davy Jones. That was a really great partnership with Bill Nighy, who gave a fantastic performance on set, and all that without any real proof of concept. You know, we asked him to wear the unsettling computer gray `pajamas' on set, and we couldn't really show him what it was going to look like when it was done, but he dove right in there and delivered these great performances, created an amazing character and gave us fantastic material to work with. The artists back at ILM did a fantastic job modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering, just beautiful animation. I think Davy Jones is a really special character in every way.”
For the extraordinarily challenging post-production process, Knoll explains that “because of the size of the show and the number of shots we have to finish per week, we need to have regular feedback from Gore. So, given that he's just as busy as we are in post-production, when he's editing the movie, working on sound, ADR, all of those finishing touches to get the movie done, it's not convenient for him to fly up to ILM in San Francisco from Los Angeles. And it would be a big imposition on my time to be flying down regularly when I really need to be with my crew at ILM. So we do these video conferences twice a week, at least up until the final weeks. Then, when we get into the final weeks, we do them every day!
“We go over all of our work in progress on a two-way video conference so that Gore can see both the shot that we're working on. Because a lot of what we do involves hand gestures and that sort of thing, it's important to actually see each other while we're doing that.”
Of all the bizarre sights that the “Pirates” company was privy to-and heaven knows, there were many-perhaps one of the strangest was the dumping of some 175,000 lightweight, plastic, blue balls from two nets high above the Site 9 hangar floor in Palmdale, and onto the deck of the gimbal-mounted Black Pearl. The truth is, they only looked like blue balls, but they were, in fact, thousands of skittering, jittery, watery crabs. Or at least, they would be by the time John Knoll and ILM got finished with them.
Explains Knoll, “There's an important scene during the Maelstrom sequence that involves a hundred thousand crabs which rain over the whole deck of the Black Pearl and sweep away everybody in their path like some kind of crustacean avalanche. Gore came up with the idea of using the blue plastic balls, just like the ones that are in the ball pits of children's amusement areas. He thought that the balls would literally knock everybody off their feet without doing any real damage because of their light weight.
“I might have been inclined to try and accomplish that effect with digital doubles,” Knoll continues, “and maybe use some sort of wire rig to show the pirates being knocked down. But Gore is a strong proponent of trying to get practical elements on set, to get as much into the camera as you can, and then use visual effects where you really need them.”
“The crabs themselves are computer generated models. We built one detailed version of the crab, and then several variations on it.”
When the balls rained down upon the company from the netting, crew members' maturity levels seemed to drop to the equivalent, say, of a five or six year old, as they merrily began to pitch the balls at each other in all directions on the Black Pearl…Gore Verbinski perhaps most enthusiastically of all. And considering the fact that it was an exhausting day #252 of the combined shoot, it's understandable that about three hundred cases of blue balls could be such an instant morale booster. “It's amazing to see a bunch of grown men and women turn into three-year-olds,” laughs stunt coordinator George Marshall Ruge. “You know, seeing Orlando Bloom fling a blue ball at Geoffrey Rush…that's unique. It was, like, is it time for the parents to come and pick up the kids?”
Ultimately, Verbinski sought to combine the best of the old with a walloping dollop of the new. Profers executive producer Mike Stenson, “'Pirates' is a unique combination of the `Lawrence of Arabia' days, where you go out there and shoot everything in camera, and the most state-of-the-art technology. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much longer the industry will be able to support that. I think it would be sad if, at the end of the day, we ended up shooting everything on sound stages with green screens and digital effects, as opposed to actually being able to go out and shoot practical material all over the Caribbean. But then again, something like the Maelstrom is so technically difficult, that you couldn't have shot it on location no matter what amount of money you had. It had to be done on an effects stage.”
In addition to his tremendous work designing and constructing the motion base gimbals for the Palmdale hangar, John Frazier and his team of longtime collaborators were responsible for a bewildering number of other physical effects. “Our function as special effects men as, if it moves or it's in the atmosphere, we do it,” says the multiple Academy Award winning artist. “It could be smoke in the air, or coming up with the concept for the right kind of rain that Gore wants, or wind, or cannon fire.” In fact, Frazier's pyro unit provided no less than 982 pounds of black powder for the Maelstrom battle, and fired off the cannons some 1200 times, and the ringing ears of the cast and crew are living proof of the physical effects wizards' high decibel output!
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