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32 cgw j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 6 n the Heart of the Sea is a literal whale of a tale. The story is inspired by the 1851 classic novel "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville, which recounts the ob- sessive quest of a sea captain hell-bent on revenge aer losing his leg in a previous struggle with a huge white whale. The movie, though, is based on the 2000 non-fiction book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathan- iel Philbrick, about the sinking of the "Essex" by a vengeful mammoth white whale that turns the tables so the hunters become the hunted, and proceeds to stalk the survivors during the ill-fated voyage. This is the true life-and-death strug- gle recounted by survivors that formed the basis for Melville's book many decades ago. The movie's drama, naturally, takes place on the high seas. A good deal of Sea was filmed practically, offshore in the Ca- nary Islands and at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in the UK. According to Double Negative's David Hyde, effects supervisor for Sea, filmmakers sailed a tall ship similar to "Essex" to the Canary Islands, enabling the visual effects department to shoot oceanscape plates from the deck en route that they later augmented with CG for panoramic seagoing scenes. At Leavesden, meanwhile, an exterior bluescreen was constructed for the harbor shots at Nantucket's port, along with an "Essex" deck atop a hydraulic gimbal system used to mimic the pitch of the stormy seas. An interior water tank was constructed from shipping containers to house the smaller whaling boat rigs, also on a hydraulic puppetry system. The hydraulic rig was used to shoot close-ups of the so-called Nantucket sleigh rides – when the smaller whaling boats launched during a hunt were subsequently dragged across the water by a harpooned whale. "A substantial amount of the water was caught on film, which was very good for us," says Hyde, noting that in some cases the practical water was then augmented with CG, while in others it was all-digital. "When we had a whale breaching or a dolphin breaking the surface, we would have to simulate that," says Hyde. "And sometimes, particularly when using the interior tank, we would have to replace the water around the whale boats, to make them look like they were traveling at 17 to 20 knots while being dragged by a harpooned whale." There were four main areas when CG water was required: for ©2015 Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.