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www.postmagazine.com 27 POST JUNE 2017 Landlubbers at Sea In Helensvale (Queensland), Australia, a massive 150-foot-long (on each side) and 70-foot-tall bluescreen surrounded the practical ship sets. The extension was so big it would block the sun and shorten the shooting day. So, the crew devised a system that would let the sun shine in. "We had containers with inflatable bluescreens mounted on top," Brozenich explains. "We mounted these air walls in 20- and 40-foot sections that we lowered and raised proportionally to allow the sun to creep in. By deflating them, we extended the shooting day by three hours." Because the on-set ships sailed on turntables, and because the weather was unpredictable, the crew decided it would have been too difficult to do data capture of actors playing the ghostly pirate hunters during filming. "It was a huge disappointment," Brozenich says. "Giant [Studios] had come up with some amazing ideas on ways to create a capture vol- ume, but the logistics became too much. It just didn't make financial sense." Instead, the crew installed an extensive network of witness cameras: eight Sony a7s because of those cameras' low light capability, and two Canon 5Ds that moved around the principal camera. "We had four quadrants on each ship and moved the cameras to the quadrant where the action was taking place," Brozenich says. "Later, we did hand tracking [of the actors]." To have live-action plates of the water for refer- ence and to use in the film, Brozenich shot footage in Australia and Key West, FL. "The benefit of Key West is that it's at the tip of Florida, so you can get a clear horizon at sunrise and sunset," Brozenich says. "We used some of the water plates throughout the film with live-action skies comp'd behind, but direct- ly cut those plates with CG water and skies. We hoped that if we kept mixing between them, no one would know." Creating environments for the ships on the bluescreen stage comprised the nuts and bolts of the water work for the film, but for some shots, the visual effects team needed to be able to direct the water. The director might want a big wave to hit a particular point, or want a certain quality of water, for example. "We tried to base everything on the Beaufort scale to keep things as real as we could," Brozenich says, referring to a measurement system that relates wind speed to ocean or land conditions. Rather than saying, for example, "strong wind and big seas," the filmmakers and visual effects artists could be specific by using the Beaufort scale. To create the digital water, the MPC artists used a combination of techniques and software pack- ages, including Side Effects' Houdini, Scanline's FlowLine, Autodesk's Bifrost within Maya, and Dr. Jerry Tessendorf's algorithms. "Water simulation software typically produces a bit of a look and feel that audiences have be- come familiar with," Brozenich says. "So, we took an approach to break that curse and went into it with more of an open mind." Undead Pirates Sailing Salazar's ship is a crew of 50 ghost pirate hunters, some of whom are live-action actors augmented with digital and prosthetic makeup, and some, CG characters. "Salazar and his key officers all have damage that looks like they were hit with one cannonball," Brozenich says. "One has his right side damaged, Salazar's left side is damaged, one guy has the bottom half and front ripped out. When you look at the ghosts on the ship, there's a narrative structure — one that we just made up." Other ghosts were missing so much of their bodies that they became full-CG characters. SUMMER MOVIES Armando Salazar (actor Javier Bardem) was a pirate hunter for the Spanish Royal Navy until he met Jack Sparrow. Sparrow led him into the Devil's Triangle, where he was cursed, his ship was destroyed and he and his crew became ghosts. But, he still hunts Sparrow. The battle with Sparrow left Salazar with a hole in his head, a situation that artists at MPC produced on Bardem's image. Apart from a flashback scene in which a younger Salazar is human, his damaged, ghostly look in the film was largely the result of those artists' skills. "We replaced the vast majority of Javier's face," says MPC visual effects supervisor Patrick Ledda. "We removed a chunk of his skull, aug- mented his practical makeup and blended it into the hole in the back of his head, replaced his eyes to give him a dead look with cracked pupils and replaced all his hair. We had to do digital hair for every shot." Thanks to the curse, Salazar and his crew look as if they are still underwater. Their hair flows about them, as do their clothes. For ref- erence, the artists looked at concept work created in pre-production, images of damaged hair and video footage of people underwater. "Typically, we put hair in a neutral pose based on the character's look and run simulations that interact with the character," Ledda ex- plains. "But underwater hair moves in ways you don't want it to. The majority of our work was in designing the hair so that when it covered Javier's face, it did so in an elegant way, not contrived." MPC's proprietary software Furtility managed the grooming and simulation, as it has on the studio's previous films, including, most recently, The Jungle Book. For this film, the team modified Furtility to handle more hair and to give animators tools they could use to control the simulation with keyframes. "Imagine these keyframes as magnets that gently attract the hair," Ledda says. "So, if the director wanted the hair to be in front of the eyes in a shot, we could use the keyframes to pose it and then run a physically-correct simulation that would be attracted by these key- frames. This is something we had never done before." Low-res approximations made it possible to get initial approvals, but the final simulations showed finer details. "We might see one or two hairs moving across the eyes," Ledda says. "It was a time-consuming process. It was more of a creative challenge than a technical challenge." — By Barbara Robertson Salazar