Oscar FX: Creating the 'Perfect Storm'

March 21 -- "Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break, So from that spring whence comfort seem'd to come,Discomfort swells."— MacBeth

For The Perfect Storm the visual effects artists of George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic had to depict the "storm of the century," when three storm systems collided off the coast of New England. In the story based on Sebastian Junger's best seller, the crew of a swordfishing boat named the Andrea Gail is caught off the Grand Banks in a tempest, ripping with winds of up to 80 mph and waves that reached the height of 100 feet.

Even though some location shooting was to be done at Gloucester, Mass., the port from which the ill-fated Andrea Gail departed, it was accepted from the beginning that the filmmakers would not try to duplicate or fake the story's storm conditions on the open sea.

"Because it is difficult to wait for the right weather conditions, and to take a camera crew out there and submit them to these kinds of conditions, most people just get seasick pretty quickly at 7-, 8-, 10-foot swells," said visual effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier. "It becomes really difficult to film, and also dangerous out at sea."

In the past, special effects or FX artists would film miniature ships in water. That takes a lot of time, and besides, water droplets cannot be reduced in scale — consequently giving away the true size of a 6-foot model battleship. Audiences who watched newsreels of World War II naval actions could tell instantly that the Hollywood sea battles that followed were fake, when a drop of water was the size of an F6F Hellcat.

Instead, The Perfect Storm artists created all the elements of a raging ocean on software that generated an ocean surface with fluid dynamics. The spray of an ocean wind, the foam of a rough sea, were at their disposal, and there were no sacrifices to scale and motion that come with using models.

The FX artists began by looking at reference footage of real storms at sea, to better understand the visual dimensions of a "perfect storm" — how torrential does a sea with 50-foot waves look? How do meteorological conditions affect the dynamics and lighting of water?