High Seas Filmmaking

Master and Commander On Set and In Post

Director Peter Weir (left) and director of photography Russell Boyd on the set of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Photo: Stephen Vaughan

To work as envisioned by director Peter Weir, Master and
Commander: The Far Side of the World required a particularly
grueling production by any standard. Weir's insistence on historical
accuracy bordered on the near maniacal, according to his
collaborators.

The job required DP Russell Boyd to undertake an extremely
complicated seven-month shoot in Mexico and the Galapagos Islands,
filming on both real and mocked-up versions of an 18th century
schooner, as well as on several sound stages. His imagery was then
turned over to a digital effects team that grew throughout the
production, evolving from a single effects facility to four major
vendors: Asylum, Santa Monica; ILM, San Rafael, Calif.; Computer
Café, Santa Monica; and Pacific Title, Hollywood. Completion of
some 700 digital effects shots designed to illustrate a cat-and-mouse
game on the high seas between the British vessel, H.M.S. Surprise, and
the French schooner, the Acheron, was then supervised by ILM's Stefan
Fangmeier. Weir added Fangmeier to the project at midstream because of
Fangmeier's experience supervising aquatic effects on The Perfect
Storm, and because the project's visual effects needs proved to be
far more extensive than initially visualized.

Since all but a few scenes take place on the Surprise, the job
required Boyd's camera team to film scenes on a 60-ton replica of an
1800's-era British Royal Navy ship situated on a giant gimbel in the 6
1/2-acre water tank at Fox Studios Baja. (A few additional scenes were
shot onboard an actual ship, an American vessel called the Rose, but
the bulk of the scenes involving the Surprise were shot at the Baja
tank.)

Tank Shoot

Boyd says the tank shoot, which took about 5 1/2 months, was "among
the most complex things I have ever shot." Early on, his camera team
had to get used to the fact that the ship was constantly being rocked
around by the gimbel in order to create realistic sea movement. Boyd
utilized a technocrane with a three-axis Libra head to stabilize his
Panavision Platinum camera package, permitting pan-and-tilt and
left-right control on the rolling set. Pointing the boat in the right
direction was, in and of itself, a huge undertaking.

"We built a rotating set to move the ship around, in order to get
reverse angles for the same scene, with different sides of the ship
facing out to the ocean from the tank," Boyd explains. "It wasn't until
production started, though, that we found out it would take five to six
hours to rotate the set 180 degrees, not the 45-minutes to an hour we
had been told initially. Therefore, we had to plan very carefully each
day's shoot and which way we wanted the stage rotated, and we often had
to shoot facing the sound stages on land, leaving it up to the post
people to rotoscope the buildings out and replace them with sky, since
the scale was too large to erect blue screens. That was also a
difficult job for them because the ship is rigged with hundreds of
ropes of varying sizes all over the mast and sails."

Shooting extensively outside in Baja, Boyd also battled to put
consistent skies into his shots. "I was afraid going in that we would
get a lot of summer sunshine in the Baja area, but we were fortunate to
get a lot of cloudy days," says Boyd. "This let us shoot a lot of dawn
sequences that were correct for the day the sequence was taking place
and have them relatively consistent. On the occasions when we got big
sunshine, my key grip [Chris Centrella] used two very large metal
cylinders mounted on cranes in the water—we had a big, permanent
construction crane there, and a number of amphibious cranes that we
brought for the effects people. Using those cranes, we could move the
cylinders into position so that they were almost over the entire set,
putting it under a shadow. I also used the ship's sails to shadow
sunlight off the actors. All that helped with the muted sort of feeling
we wanted for this film."

Boyd's other problem involved figuring out how to film sequences on
sets built to replicate the lower decks of the Surprise. Lighting in
such cramped quarters proved to be a major challenge for him.

"Lighting below decks was definitely one of the most difficult parts
of this job," Boyd says. "For one thing, we had to project beams of
light down onto the set to emulate beams of lighting shining through
the hatches from the deck above. That required us to hide lights behind
deck beams, and position others through hatches above us, built into
the set. With these lights coming down, we had to duck our heads and be
very careful in maneuvering, since they were easy to bang into. We had
no choice, because of the authentic design of the set, but to keep the
camera low, and that meant we could often see the ceiling of the deck
above the actors. That prevented me from removing most of the ceilings
in-camera. Therefore, I had to light quite low, at about eye height for
the actors, when normally, I'd prefer to light above that. By hiding
lights behind deck beams, I could get away with it, but it was very
cramped quarters. We also had dozens of extras down there during
production, and often, someone would stick his head in front of a light
and create shadows that we didn't want. For the most part, except for
the deck beam lights, we just used candle lanterns and things to
simulate a low, warm light, creating that sort of period feel in this
little wooden world."

Weather and Battles

Then, of course, there was the film's big storm sequence, memories
of which elicit chuckles from Boyd. The scene was augmented with
numerous elements in post, but simulating and filming a driving
rainstorm at the Baja tank was, Boyd says, "a very wet experience."

"Needless to say, all our camera equipment had to be housed in
HydroFlex underwater marine housings during those scenes," says Boyd.
"They used three huge dump tanks to toss around thousands of gallons of
water. Those tanks could be rotated to drop that amount of water on any
given cue. So the camera crew was blasted, along with the actors. We
also used two jet engines with water hoses on them to blast more water,
and the effects guys had four aircraft propeller blades blowing water
on us."

Asylum Inferno artists then combined the plates captured at the tank
with miniature elements of the ship and additional plates of real storm
footage shot at sea by a camera crew hired by Weir. This gave the
effects team "a virtual water library," as Boyd called it, to help
during the compositing phase on the storm.

"Most of the shots for the storm in this movie were made up of real
elements, making it a big compositing job mainly," says Fangmeier.
"That is different from how we built the storm in The Perfect
Storm—that was a heavily CG storm. Here, we had great, real
elements from the shoot at the tank and from the storm footage Peter's
camera crew captured. It was a big job to take those real elements and
organically blend them together. Asylum did some really great
composites for this sequence."

The film's climactic battle between Surprise and Acheron were also
heavily effects intensive. Inserting realistic smoke elements into the
battle scenes as cannonballs fly and chaos ensues on the Surprise was
particularly complicated, and according to Fangmeier, it was "among the
most complex compositing work I have ever been around." For the most
part, ILM used its proprietary, inhouse compositing system CompTime to
insert dozens of pieces to make the shots whole.

"In the wide shots, older movies never show crewmen scrambling
around on the deck of these ships during these battles," says
Fangmeier. "For this project, though, we included CG people on deck
running around, smoke layers, cannonfire, and gunfire. They shot lots
of smoke elements during production, both first and second unit, but we
also added additional CG smoke after filming smoke elements over the
course of about two weeks at our stages at ILM. The benefit of using
elements we create ourselves in post, beyond what they collect in
principal photography, is that we know the context and angles and
lighting needed for the elements to fit the composite afterward. We
also grabbed elements from our [ILM] library, including bits we created
for Pearl Harbor and other movies. The point was to create a sense of
scale for the smoke. Layers of smoke were necessary to create
volumetric effects, and to be able to integrate them in terms of
articulation. In other words, smoke that flows behind something has to
flow back out in front. That is why this was such a big compositing
job."

To read more on Stefan Fangmeier check out
these Millimeter stories:
The Perfect Storm: Gimbal
Madness