Oscar FX: Creating the 'Perfect Storm'
March 21, 2001 -- "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?
"Unfortunately, there is not really a whole lot of reference footage of these type of things," said Fangmeier, whose credits at ILM include Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Small Soldiers and Twister.
Most people in those weather conditions "don't have video cameras handy, or a lot of people don't come back from that kind of situation. There was a lot more available for Twister," he said.
"So it was very difficult to figure out what such a big wave would be like. In essence you try to give a sense of scale into it. We did some actual fluid dynamics calculations to get a sense of how water moves, and then for every shot you have a subjective take on it: 'Does this look right, does this feel right?'"
Selling the Shot
Rough drafts of shots, or animatics, would be created to get the angles, framing and timing of elements right. Several artists or teams of artists would be responsible for separate elements in a given shot: the waves, the boat, the lighting on the boat, foam, spray, rain, lightning and reflections on the surface.
What sells the shots is not just the attention to details in specific elements but how they interact with each other, such as the wind blowing spray off the crest of a wave. When a Coast Guard helicopter hovers over the stranded crew of a sinking sailboat, the turbulence caused by its rotor blades sends a fine mist kicking up from the surface of the ocean. To have left out that small effect would signal to the viewer that something was not real about the shot, which was almost entirely computer-generated.
Video: Click Here to see an animatic of the ocean rescue, including helicopter and splashes; live action shots of actors in the blue-screen water tank; computer-generated waves, crests, mists and splashes; and the final composite shot.
For closeups of the boat involving the actors, a set was constructed in a 22-foot deep water tank on Stage 16 of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank (where, among others, The Old Man and the Sea was shot). Mounted on a gimbal, the stagebound Andrea Gail could rotate and tilt to bow, stern, port or starboard approximately 15 degrees. The set was surrounded with blue screen, the color of which could be erased in post-production and replaced with background images of waves and wind. "In this tank you could maybe get 2-, 3-foot waves at most, so we put in those 20-, 30-, 40-, 50-foot waves behind the boat, to give it that sense of scale," Fangmeier said.
But that didn't mean the actors were let off easy — wind machines, dump tanks and hoses tossed thousands of gallons of water onto the set, drenching the cast. Some things, like a dripping George Clooney, can't be faked.