Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/834195
10 cgw m ay . j u n e 2 0 1 7 Lola Visual Effects took Jack Sparrow [Johnny Depp] back to age 18. Rodeo FX composited around 400 shots, bringing them to life with added textures. CoSA VFX provided matte paintings. A small in-house team worked on the film, as well. "And ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] contributed some bonus work on the film," Brozenich teased. "You'll see." Brozenich cites the water as the biggest technical challenge. "The volume of water work we needed to do, the challenge of en- suring that it blended well with live-action plates and real water, and having it perform as needed for the film," he points out. "When you see ships in the film, they're typically surrounded by CG water and an environment created for them." L A N D L U B B E R S A T S E A In Helensvale (Queensland), Australia, a massive bluescreen 150 feet long on each side and 70 foot tall 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 had come up with some amazing ideas on ways to create a capture volume, 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 capabil- ity, 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 reference and to use in the film, Brozenich shot footage in Australia and Key West, Florida. "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 directly 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 SALAZAR 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 le Sala- zar with a hole in his head, a situation that artists at MPC produced on Bardem's im- age. 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, augmented 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 reference, 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 explains. "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 soware 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 THE GHOSTLY PIRATE HUNTERS ALWAYS LOOK AS IF THEY ARE UNDERWATER.