In keeping with his epic tale of man’s hubris in the face of nature’s wrath, Petersen very deliberately invoked an Old Testament spirit in his characterization of The Perfect Storm. "It’s kind of like there’s an angry God up there, getting back at mankind," Petersen says. "The story has a very biblical feel." The director wanted the storm to develop like any good villain throughout the course of the film, showing audiences more colors and nuances as its wrath grows. "About 35 minutes into the movie, we introduce the storm, which comes creeping up in the sky over Sable Island, behind our Andrea Gail," Petersen relates. "It’s a bit like the first time you see the shark in Jaws, and it even has a special musical theme. From then on, it’s a constant build of the storm’s size and sound. As Junger describes in his book, based on [the 13-point Beaufort Scale, which ranges from 0-12], the storm starts at a 7, which is a moan; it next goes to an 8, which sounds like a shriek, then a 9, which is a scream, and so on, right off the scale. Twelve is the highest storm, which sounds like a thousand church organs. As you can imagine, the sound design works a lot to create the character, along with the growing knots of the wind and the musical theme; visually, of course, it’s a constant build from the first 20-foot waves all the way up to waves in excess of 100 feet."
Of course, keeping sight of that goal would be a challenge for any filmmaker. "Like every director, Wolfgang has a tendency to want every shot to be bigger and scarier!" relates Fangmeier, who sometimes had to remind Petersen not to head too quickly into Stephen King territory. "I would say, ’Wait a minute, it can’t be Jack Nicholson enraged right off the bat! Remember, it’s still early on and we don’t want to quite go for that character yet.’ It’s hard not to try and make every shot that we do as impressive as possible."
Directing the ocean was not only a huge challenge for Petersen, but also for ILM’s artists. While the underlying water motion was essentially a free effect, altering the digital wave simulations even slightly on ILM’s Silicon Graphics hard drives could cost a lot. "Fine-tuning the effects could be very challenging, and controlling them could sometimes be a struggle," Fangmeier admits. "If Wolfgang asked, ’Can you make the wave move a little slower?’ or ’I want the wave to break on this frame,’ that messed with the computational complexities of the simulation. The rules at work within the sim were not necessarily that interruptible or controllable. If we were lighting a creature, we could look at virtual lights around [it] and see 30 or 40 updates of the image a day. But with a sim that takes two or three hours to run, we could make maybe two or three takes a day, and then we’d have to nail it. We hoped that by the last take, the simulation would give us something that was workable."
Once Fangmeier’s team had captured the proper character of the ocean for a given shot, they often faced the challenge of combining digital elements with live-action footage of the 72’ Andrea Gail rolling on a giant gimbal surrounded by bluescreens in the 95-square-foot water tank that was modified for the production on Stage 16 at Warner Bros. "We had a fair number of shots where we had to integrate that boat and replace the water around it with CG water, because they couldn’t really go very wide on either side of the boat in the tank, and the wave machines couldn’t make more than two- or three-foot waves in there," Fangmeier states. "In order to expand it overall, we contributed a lot of those elements with our CG water and added a lot of background waves. Our shots created the opportunity to make the audience believe that the boat is out there on the ocean, and to provide that character with a scale."
Key to creating a believable ocean was the intense layering of ripples and other kinds of effects over the original, simulated base motion. "Once our ocean scouts found the proper, large-scale wave motion, the technical directors would layer another medium-scale sim on top of that simple, plastic surface," Anderson says. "They’d also add a bunch of little ripple fields, which were also physical simulations. On top of that, they’d add capillary ripples, which were procedural." Adds Fangmeier, "We used different procedural sculpting devices to get a sub-level of deformation in the ocean geometry, and we applied a lot of tricks to make the water look like it was moving at the right speed. Again, it was all very mathematically based. We were not in there tweaking stuff by hand."
Although the animation of the waves was fairly procedural, the look of the ocean itself its color, the whitecaps, and the way the briny foam creates a spiderweb-like texture was created through a series of complex shaders and particle work. The challenge became much greater when ILM’s artists had to match their work to real water in the live-action plates shot on Stage 16. Fangmeier explains, "The big drawback with the live-action water was that it was not as foamy as real salt water, which actually foams up because of the salt content; that foam turns white, which really gives seawater a distinctive character. Unfortunately, to create that effect in the tank, the practical-effects guys would have needed to add a foaming agent, which would have become a nightmare biologically, because they had to keep the water very clean and filtered so it wouldn’t become a health hazard. Because the water was not as foamy as we would have liked, we had to walk a fine line in terms of matching the foam in the foreground elements, or often entirely replacing it. We used particle simulations to create the foamy splashes around the boat, as well as the boat’s wake. We ended up using five or six different levels of particle simulations routinely, in almost every shot, to create the dynamics of everything coming off the water and ripping off the boat."
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