Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/26447
CG Water n n n n while at sea. “It was a huge consideration,” Bickerton says. “Walden Me- dia and the producers researched previous films, and everyone reported that if you want to shoot at sea, you have to kiss your schedule good-bye because it is so arduous and technically difficult. So, the big decision we made when I came on board was that we would never go to sea.” Instead, mounted on a gigantic motion base was a full-scale version of the “Dawn Treader,” a boat that was 120 feet from stem to stern. “We were going to build the motion base in the sea, fly in a bluescreen with a crane, and shoot scenes there,” Bickerton says. “But, the logistics of getting people, lights, scaffolding towers, and the bluescreen were too complex. So, production found a promontory on dry land at Cleveland Point near Brisbane [Australia] that they could use to shoot from deck and see the sea beyond. Tat gave them the real, natural sunlight, the real wind, and the feeling that they were shooting at sea.” But, it also meant the postproduction crews would need to fix or enhance every shot filmed on the “Dawn Treader.” When the camera pointed seaward, it often caught ships and other water traffic—even water-skiers—in the background. When the camera pointed inland, the background was a 60- by 30-foot bluescreen built in a solid frame and moved by crane into position. “So, we hunted around Queensland for a vessel the same dimensions as the ‘Dawn Treader’ and found a Belgian icebreaker that we used as a camera platform for the second unit,” Bickerton says. Bickerton and his crew worked out what positions they needed to match the camera on the motion-based ship, and then shot “clean” sea plates to match from the icebreaker. In addition, they shot plates from a helicopter of a ship plowing through the sea, to capture a real wake onto which they could float a CG “Dawn Treader.” “My basic philosophy is that I wanted all the sea plates to be real wher- ever possible,” Bickerton says. MPC and an in-house team composited the CG or scale-model boat into the real seas for approximately the first 80 percent of the film, according to Bickerton. “But in the climax, we had to go all-CG for the sheer amount of interaction,” he adds. At Sail Adam Valdez was the visual effects supervisor for MPC’s 700 shots; Kevin Hahn was CG supervisor. CG water flowed into Hahn’s domain. “On the 2D side, we had a lot of raw material, so most of the shots prior to the climax used plate water,” Hahn says. “But for the battle at the end, plates would dictate editing and style more than we wanted. We wanted