ILM enhances the ocean's fury in THE PERFECT STORM.
I saw The Perfect Storm as an enormous challenge, because like Das Boot, reality is the headline above everything," says director Wolfgang Petersen, who maintains that his latest project was just as daunting to make as his seminal World War II U-boat thriller. Based on Sebastian Junger’s best-selling book of the same name, The Perfect Storm is about a crew of longline fishermen who head out from the small town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to catch swordfish on the Grand Banks. On their way back to port, they find themselves caught in the middle of the legendary October storm of 1991. Described by meteorologists as "the perfect storm," a true freak of nature that develops maybe once in 100 years, the deadly storm resulted from the collision of three major weather systems.
The challenge for Petersen was to prevent Mother Nature from overwhelming the real-life saga of the men aboard the fishing trawler Andrea Gail, which disappeared amid the ferocious storm. As he was putting the finishing touches on the film, Petersen observed, "It’s an enormous human drama, very moving, and in order to create all of that, you need a lot of effects. I’m working very closely with Industrial Light & Magic not to create effects, but to create reality."
To bring the supernatural storm at the heart of the film to life, real water-on-water photography was combined with literally tons of practical effects, plus the most advanced digital techniques. "We used all of the tools available, including massive stage work on Stage 16 at Warner Bros.," Petersen says. "The only thing we didn’t use were conventional miniature models." The result is not only the most important development in visual effects this year, but arguably the most dramatic.
Petersen’s expert visual-effects commandant, fellow German Stefen Fangmeier (who earned an Academy Award nomination for his work on Twister’s killer tornadoes), acknowledges the difficulty of re-creating water, which has traditionally been one of the hardest things to do in visual effects. "It’s definitely the most challenging thing I’ve ever attempted," he asserts. "Of course, it’s not a calm sea, so aside from the big, rolling waves, we had to create the little capillaries, the 2- to 3-foot waves that build on top of those 80-foot waves, and beyond that, all of the white [froth] had to be simulated. We couldn’t just take static textures and slap them on our waves. Everything had to move with the ocean, which made it very difficult. It was a very heavy-duty technology show [that required] an incredibly large crew. The film is extremely detail-oriented. "
Because Petersen demanded reality, Fangmeier and company began by studying reference footage of real storms, which they found somewhat underwhelming "especially looking down on the ocean," Fangmeier says. "We looked at a lot of documentary footage shot from helicopters of 60-foot waves, and they don’t look like anything! You’re kind of wondering, ’Why are these people trying to get rescued off their sailboat?’ We realized that to give the impression of those raging seas in every shot, our digital waves would have to be a bit over-the-top."
Enter John Anderson, a former professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has become ILM’s resident mad scientist in the areas of procedural effects and simulations, which he calls "sims." Anderson might have felt like a fish out of water when he helped create the layers of interrelating geometry that brought The Mummy to life, but on The Perfect Storm, he was truly in his element. "I’ve been doing computational oceanography and computational meteorology since 1980," he says. "[Back then] I was learning a lot about ocean dynamics using simulations that looked pretty much like a lava lamp! But for The Perfect Storm, we needed to provide a flow that looked good, which gave me an opportunity to go back and look at some numerical methods I’d never used. I thought they had limitations for scientific uses, but they were always interesting visually."
Anderson’s familiarity with computational fluid dynamics, a numerical weather-forecasting technology, led to a fascinating paradigm on The Perfect Storm, where the weather-predicting system evolved into weather-creating effects protocols. "Fortunately, we are just getting into the era of being able to create 3-D simulation that you might confuse with reality," he says. "We then had to figure out how to control those sims and make 300 shots, which is always the trick."
Fortunately, fluid dynamics would become a huge time-saving device, because ILM’s artists wouldn’t need to animate waves by hand, which would have taken forever and would never look quite as right as a good simulation. "With fluid dynamics, we didn’t have to spend any time animating base water," Anderson says. "Instead, we ran a whole bunch of oceans, quasi-physically, to make different-height waves, different-spaced waves, things like that. We made about 60 large-scale water sims, but we probably used 15 or 20. Then the animation crew did what we called ocean scouting, where they looked through the simulations we’d run, trying to find a good one to put into a particular shot."
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