At this very moment Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End has raked in at the domestic box-office and over $401 million worldwide. Taking those numbers into consideration I am going to assume that many of you have seen the film and I am now going to take you on part one of my journey to the home of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) as the visual effects wizards took me and some fellow onliners on a trip around their house and showed us how some of it was done.
NOTE: The images featured in this article are shots chosen by Disney to showcase the work done by ILM. These images are exclusive only to the limited sites that visited ILM. You can click on each one for a larger version, including the image above.
Arriving at ILM it is a bit unassuming, especially since they now inhabit a one-time military location and even informed us that if you get caught speeding on the massive campus you aren’t getting just a regular ticket, it is an actual federal offense. Then, you walk inside and are greeted with so much Star Wars memorabilia it is insane. Remember, this is the house that Lucas built and not only does ILM do visual effects for hundreds of movies, but the campus also plays home to StarWars.com and LucasArts.com and everything Lucas related.
Aside from screening rooms and workstations there is a strange force running in the background and feeding that force is a server farm like you wouldn’t believe. This place has 6,500 processors doing about 70,000 processor hours every night, which if we compared that to your desktop it means it would take your computer 8 years to do what their facility does in one night. How else would they get the effects done on not only Pirates 3, but Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Transformers, Evan Almighty and The Spiderwick Chronicles? Feeding this beast is 1,900 miles of copper wire and 700 miles of fiber. By a quick count I would say that is a lot of miles and a lot of wire.
When we spoke with Kevin Clark, the Director of IT Operations, he compared his work to a car race saying that if something goes wrong they are essentially changing the tires with the car still racing around the track.
However, enough of the technical mumbo-jumbo (although there is likely to be more), we also spoke with Pirates 3 Visual Effects Supervisor Jon Knoll and Animation Supervisor Hal Hickel. Knoll was the visual effects supervisor on all three Pirates films, all three Star Wars prequels and Mission: Impossible while Hickel was the animation supervisor on Pirates 1 and 2 as well as Star Wars: Episode II.
When we visited the facility, Pirates 3 was actually still incomplete as Knoll told us, “At this very moment we still have six shots that we’re struggling with and hopefully will have done later today.”
The shots they were struggling on you are probably already familiar with, they would be the shots that take place during the 20-minute maelstrom at the end of the film, a scene in which more visual effects are found than in many FX-driven feature films in their entirety. How many effects are in most films I have no idea, but Pirates 3 is estimated out at 2,000 and ILM was responsible for about one-third of that number.
Water was certainly the major thorn in their paw and the maelstrom scene was one they worked on for nearly six months and Knoll even told us, “Two months ago I was convinced that it was impossible to get this done in time. We were working around the clock and nothing can be done to really speed this stuff up. We’re cutting as many corners as we can. We’re trying to be as efficient as we can and push the stuff forward and the shots just weren’t happening at a rate that was fast enough to get done in time.”
As we all know they did get it done and three weeks later I was able to see the fruits of their labors, but it wasn’t just the water effects that stood in their way, there is a whole lot more. Knoll goes on to say, “Out of the 750 shots that we did on [Pirates 3] we have some sort of environmental component. Either we’re making the whole maelstrom behind the background or behind the foreground we’re doing some other augmentation or replacement.”
In Pirates 2 it was bringing the vast island landscapes to life and adding more greenery or making canyons where there were none.
“We’ve had physical miniatures with pyro and really fantastic environments that had to be created, to flesh out Cannibal Island or Tortuga or any of the different locations in the film.” Hickel said, “We had CG ships, our creators, our Kraken – every department. Our simulation for water, cloth, exploding things, all of that stuff has been pushed and pushed and pushed on these three films. On Pirates 1 we had all that ragged and torn cloth on the characters which was a really big challenge for us in our cloth simulation and then on two the bar was upped because their costumes were crusted and sort of ratty and then all the sea life that’s all over them with Davy Jones tentacle beard and the sales on the ships. We did a lot more simulation of the sails on ships and particularly with the Flying Dutchman with its ragged sort of seaweed sails. That was an enormous challenge for simulation. So every department got a work out and really rose to the challenge and so that’s been very, very satisfying.”
Speaking of Davy Jones’ ship, The Flying Dutchman, I am sure many of you noticed he had a few new crew members in Pirates 3, ten to be exact. This can cause a few problems as well.
“On Pirates 2 there was quite a long design process of figuring out Davy’s main crew members and sort of figuring out what looked good, what sea life to use, what kinds of mussels and clams and barnacles and sort of how to put them together on these guys to make it read and feel like what we wanted it to feel like and not just look like a mess. So there were a lot of iterations and decisions to make about that.” Hickel continued, “Well, this time around we had kind of already been through that and we sort of knew what looked good. We were able to turn these characters around really fast and the other thing is that we knew none of them were going to have any lines in the film or have to deliver a big performance, but we did need to be able to bring them close to camera and so they had to be highly detailed.”
Detailed is right, and Crash McCreary, director Gore Verbinski’s concept and storyboard artist Jim Burkett and ILM’s Visual Effects Art Director Aaron McBride set out to create some cool new characters. These characters included the jellyfish laden Jelly, the urchin-like man Quill and the interesting coral infested Piper.
Lucky for you this takes us to part two of our little journey as Aaron McBride himself went over his new creations and not only do we have what he said, but we also have it accompanied with images.
To read on and meet Aaron and all the new characters that you may or may not have seen in Pirates 3 CLICK HERE, it is well worth it.
Below are the rest of the featured images provided to us by Disney. Enjoy!
