Master and Commander: Sailing the High—and Real—Seas

”Man overboard” is a frightening cry to hear, and seeinga sailor adrift in stormy seas marks one of the most emotional scenesin Twentieth Century Fox's Master and Commander: The Far Side of theWorld. For director Peter Weir, “the storm sequence was verypersonal,” recalls visual effects supervisor Nathan McGuinness ofAsylum Visual Effects in Santa Monica, Calif. “From thebeginning, Peter had a reference for the look he wanted that was like aTurner painting. The painting that was his ‘template’ wasJohn Chancellor's ‘The Perfect Hurricane’ and it was agreat place to kick off our design work.”

Weir wanted to avoid a “toy boat” look for his hero shipthe H.M.S. Surprise, and Fox obliged by purchasing a full-scale replicaof an 18th century sailing vessel. That ship was then duplicated— also full size — and mounted on a hydraulic gimbal in theBaja tank that Fox had built for Titanic. This allowed Weir tophotograph star Russell Crowe and his fellow actors on deck as the shippitched and rolled. “He shot a series of takes where the shipwould be listing and the dump tanks would fire off,” saysMcGuinness.

Unlike many effects sequences today that are digitallyprevisualized, Weir's storm sequence was shot and edited and thenturned over to Asylum. The challenge was to take this footage —often shot under clear skies — and add all the waves, rain, andfog to make this ship appear to be actually at sea.

The toughest task was creating waves that would appear as real aseverything else. “Asylum wanted to do this as organically aspossible,” says McGuinness. “We weren't interested in doingCG water, and Peter was against anything that ‘lookedCG.’” Their plan was to assemble various chunks of oceanfootage like puzzle pieces, and composite them with the tankphotography. Asylum shot its own ocean footage and also got storm shotsfrom a documentary that Fox commissioned, eventually amassing about anhour's worth of material. “We basically cut the shots into piecesand sculpted them to work the way we needed,” McGuinnessexplains. “We had to do this for over 100 shots. Our compositingsupervisor Phil Brennan was the maestro who handpicked every piece ofwater and orchestrated ways to put those pieces together.”

“The good thing about shooting live action waves is that thescale was halfway there,” observes Brennan.“The stuff thatwas shot at 48fps — which seems to be about the limit of what youcan get away with before it starts to look like slow motion —does give you roughly twice the scale. Shooting 20ft. to 30ft. waves at48fps builds them up to be about 30ft. to 40ft. waves, which is what wewere looking for.”

After choosing appropriate water footage, Brennan recalls, the nextbiggest thing was tracking. “These plates were shot from movingships on high seas, so they weren't very stable. We had to apply thecamera move from the plates, layer them all together, and then apply anew camera move to them. It took a lot of experimenting and hard workto find techniques that would actually do that. We basically used theInferno tracker, as well as Boujou and the tracker in 3ds Max,”he says. Asylum also used Combustion for rotoscoping whennecessary.

The huge compositing job was handled with Discreet compositingsoftware running on SGI Onyx machines. These composites often hadbetween 60 and 100 layers, including both real and digital atmosphericelements. “We had lots of plates of rain and fog shot at variousdistances from the camera, and we had our own archives of mist andwater,” Brennan recalls. “Most of the time, rain is prettyforgiving as far as camera moves go. But in certain cases we needed itto do something specific. You can screw up the story by having a biggust of rain come in and obscure a piece of action. So even the rainhad to be quite carefully choreographed to make sure you saw everythingyou were supposed to see.”

That sometimes meant generating atmospheric particle effects in3D-CG, for which Asylum typically used Houdini. The only other CGelements in the storm sequence were set extensions of the CG ship,notes Brennan. “The ship in the tank in Baja — for centerof gravity reasons — didn't have the top piece of the mast. Soanytime you could see beyond a certain height on the ship, we had toadd a CG mast and sails at the top, and ropes flying around.”This CG was done mainly with Maya, Houdini, and a bit of 3ds Max.Rendering was done with RenderMan running on Linux-based hardware.

The final challenge, remarks McGuinness, “was a massiveundertaking to keep the color and look consistent. Out of about 150shots in the sequence, 130 were effects shots. So we color correctedeverything to be consistent from start to finish. Since we had about 15artists working on it, there was no way we could be consistent withoutthat. Once Phil achieved a look that Peter loved and it was graded, webasically loaded every shot as a 2k scan into Discreet's Lustre. We hadLustre set up in our theater and we had the whole cut loaded, almostlike it was a 2k Avid system. It was timed at Asylum before it evenwent to film.”

“It was hard initially to convince people that our‘organic water’ approach would be successful,” saysMcGuinness. “There's too much focus on CG and not enough on whatwe can shoot and put together in combinations. The technology that wentinto building these plates was probably just as tricky as CG — itwas just different!” When it comes to using in-camera techniquesin innovative ways, he concludes, “There's still a lot to belearned.”

To see “The Perfect Hurricane”, the painting thatinspired director Peter Weir, visit http://www.tritongalleries.co.uk/marine_images/a_perfect_hurricane.htm.

Peter Weir - Director
Russell Boyd - Director of Photography
Nathan McGuinness - Visual Effects Supervisor
Marc Varisco - Location Visual Effects Supervisor
Phil Brennan - Compositing Supervisor
Mitch Drain - CG ship
Greg Stuhl - Lead Modeller
Michael “Fish” Hemschoot - Lead Animator
Tommy Hooper - Colorist
Kathy Chasen-Hay - Visual Effects Producer