Fangmeier understood that the whitecaps coming off the digital waves were the key to creating believable stormy seas. "From the beginning, I knew those whitecaps would be the accent that would give audiences the feeling of how rough it really was out there," he says. "It’s hard to tell how big the waves are until you see whitecaps, so the most important thing and the most difficult was getting that white stuff to look right. To get the whitecaps going, we emitted millions of particles on top of the water and made it fall along that deforming geometry."
Another key artifact was the way the wind ripped across the water, tossing spray in the air. "That kind of thing had to look very natural, because it’s what gives the storm its character," Fangmeier notes. "It’s like being in a canyon where 100 mile-per-hour winds come ripping through you see some incredibly turbulent airflow behavior from the winds ripping across the bigger waves. Again, we used particle systems to create that effect. We’d look at the wave simulation for the shot and say, ’Okay, let’s decide what kind of curvature this wave should have, and only emit particles from a certain portion of that curvature, since we only want the mist to blow off the top of the wave.’ We’d add some random factors so the mist didn’t emit evenly, then set the wind direction and the wind speed, perhaps adding some turbulence so the wind didn’t just blow straight. It took a great number of iterations to get it to look right. Sometimes the particles coming off the waves would hang in the air too long, and instead of looking like mist or water getting ripped off, it began to look like smoke. The margin of error was so small!"
Once all the layers of wind, turbulence, mist, spray and foam effects were created, they had to be combined over one another and blended with the live-action plate. "They all had to live within the same environment," Fangmeier explains, "which meant that they had to interact with one another." Anderson emphasizes, "It looks so good because of the incredibly talented handcrafting done on top of the sims by our technical directors. We hung out a lot of physically based, underlying animation, but there’s an awful lot of TD skill involved to make it all look right. It’s very much a matter of building it up in layers."
One surprise was just how much work had to go into every shot, despite the procedural nature of the wave effects. "Everything was rather finicky," Fangmeier recalls. "We thought we’d invest a lot up front in doing research and developing the technology, and that after a while, it would become easier because we’d be doing the same ocean over and over. But every shot was quite a bit different. The ocean was a very difficult subject to photograph because it looked very different from every camera angle. Even the same parameters, from a different camera angle, didn’t give us the same sense of scale and speed of the wind and mist. We usually struggled quite a bit and had to rely on the Maya software to get that consistent feeling of huge waves across all the shots."
As difficult as it was to match CG water to live-action plates, the hardest shots in The Perfect Storm were actually those in which everything the sea, the ship and the sky was digital. "When the third act starts, the storm is at its full capacity," Petersen states. "It’s apocalyptic, and it doesn’t let go anymore." The same can be said for the director, who took full advantage of ILM’s digital arsenal to create heretofore impossible shots in which the virtual camera literally rides the CG waves like a demon surfer amid the watery holocaust. "I told them, ’Let’s give the audience the experience of what it means to ride these waves, and not just have static shots where you see the boat rise up,’" the director remembers. "’Let’s move the camera. Let’s ride the waves and just go with it.’"
But how could ILM balance that aspect of the work with the absolute reality of the true story being retold in Petersen’s film? Anyone who has seen the film’s poster art, wherein the Andrea Gail is dwarfed by a wave of biblical proportions, knows the answer: sometimes epic imagination is more real than reality. "We’re taking a lot of artistic license, just as we did with the tornadoes [in Twister]," Fangmeier admits. "The storm is a significant character in the story, and its character is defined by what it’s tossing around, and how it’s treating the boats. Because of the scale of those scenes, we did quite a number of entirely CG shots, and we built a range of digital models and integrated them into different situations.
"We must have built half a dozen CG ships everything from a sailboat to a 200-foot Coast Guard cutter to a cargo ship to show how even big boats were in peril. Plus, [let’s not forget] the refueling plane and, of course, the Andrea Gail. We also made at least a dozen digital stunt guys for all of the characters on the boat, as well as the helicopter pilots and rescue swimmers. When we’re dealing with these epic shots, we’ll occasionally break some rules to come up with an exciting shot."
That strategy paid off brilliantly. "I knew when I read the script that the barrage of being in that storm would make this a stressful movie to watch," Fangmeier says, "I don’t think Wolfgang left anything to chance in terms of how something was going to be perceived and how it would work. Because the reality the film needed was very minutely crafted, he certainly challenged us. He said, ’I know that this is very hard, but I think the film needs it!’ So we went for it!"