have you ever wondered why some of the effects in older movies like for example this shot in
Pirates of the Caribbean 3 look far better than the ones in newer more modern movies
like for example this one in black panther even despite the technology being a lot
more advanced nowadays we still often see big Hollywood movies with crummy looking CGI that
almost seems as though it's been stuck on with an old piece of duct tape as an afterthought
but VFX companies aren't actually the ones to blame for this cack-handed looking wonkiness you
see of course VFX technology has its limitations and any director or VFX supervisor who respects
this also knows that the best visual effects happen when you use practical effects as a base
and digital effects to enhance and augment that bass and this is true for three main
reasons which was beautifully demonstrated in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 at the world's end
foreign
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grounding
if we see something in a shot that is obviously real it makes it easier for us to accept something
within that same shot that may not be so for example before the Endeavor gets destroyed this
shot makes us believe that it's being sandwiched between the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman
but in reality the only ship that was real here was the Black Pearl the Endeavor was actually a
16-foot miniature that was shot in front of a blue screen Sound Stage and the Pyro elements
were shot on a larger miniature on a separate plate however the Flying Dutchman that was 100
CGI the other two ships here were used to help frame the shots and to create realistic water
interactions for the Endeavor miniature model and the Flying Dutchman CG asset thus making
us believe that they were really sat on the same ocean and so after cleverly tricking us
into believing that the Endeavor was really getting shot from both sides they now had to
make us believe it was really exploding all around Cutler Beckett and this again was done by selling
us one reality and then adding to it so first on a practical set of the deck they shot the actors and
stuntman abandoning ship then explosions and air cannons full of debris were carefully positioned
and choreographed to follow the action and filmed on a separate plate then they did a
motion control shot of Beckett going down the stairs and that motion control shot was used
to time all the Pyro elements so that when both shots were composited they would follow Beckett
precisely as he descended the stairs these shots were then all composited along with
the backgrounds CG debris dust smoke additional digital explosions and fire and of course the
digital replacement of the banister and its subsequent destruction completing the illusion
number two better acting [Music]
the second reason for using practical effects as a base is to give the actors something physical
to work with so their interactions are more realistic and therefore make us believe that what
we're seeing on the screen was actually really happening in front of the actor for example in
this sequence a mini Jack Sparrow is hanging from one of Big Jack's Barrow's dreadlocks now in order
to give Johnny Depp something to interact with they actually built a huge set of dreadlocks for
him to hang from and even raised one dreadlock in the air in order to give it some movement
another example is the crab scene that was filmed out on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah obviously
for this scene they couldn't just hold the Black Pearl all the way out there but Johnny still had
to be able to interact with something physical so they gave him a rope to interact with fun fact it
was actually tied to one of these things a cherry picker this importance that the filmmakers give
to these physical interactions really shows best in the Maelstrom battle scene because even though
the scene would require dozens of actors and stunt people to interact with dozens of CG characters in
a fight scene with explosions and rain and people swinging to and fro from two different ships
inside a massive Whirlpool of CG water they still try to do as much as they could practically and
so they built two full-size ships which took 600 pupils three months to build and required nearly
500 tons of steel that's about the weight of two statues of Liberty and in order to get the ships
to rise and tilt they put them on the biggest hydraulic gimbals ever used in filmmaking these
gimbals required 600 meters of hydraulic hoses pumping nearly 4 000 liters of fluid then to
be able to light the scene properly they built the biggest concentration of Lights ever used
in the industry in Total 1 400 space lights were needed to cover 45 000 square meters of space and
nine ten thousand amp generators were needed to power it all along with Miles and Miles of cable
but even after having a location for the sea to take place and a way of lighting it they still
needed to create the ambience and so they added huge amounts of rain Ocean Spray smoke explosions
wind and flying debris interestingly what this really achieved was a harsh reality that pirates
in this situation would have actually felt the actors were wet and cold so they were really
feeling miserable their costumes were heavy and sticking to them making their movements slower and
harder they were really getting splashed by spray and trying to avoid being hit by flying debris
and now instead of just acting they were also reacting they weren't just pretending to be on a
moving ship but instead were trying very hard not to slip and fall and they weren't just imagining
that they were pirates in a storm but instead fighting to survive it number three footage
the last reason for using practical effects as a base is just simply that the more you
can do practically in camera the more reference material you're going to have and the less you
end up having to do digitally and this becomes perhaps most apparent in the fight scene between
Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones obviously David Jones is a fully CG character and had to be
done digitally and obviously they can't really fight up on the yardarm if only just for safety
reasons and obviously big swooping shots like this one are too long and extensive to do practically
and so better to do digitally but animating a fully digital Johnny Depp would have been
complicated time consuming and less convincing and it would have also meant that there would
have been nothing real left in the scene to convince us of what we were watching was real
so Johnny learned the fight choreography on a yardarm on set then they filmed him and a stuntman
in a mocap suit fighting in the rain then they captured all the close-up shots and Camera moves
so now even though the backgrounds Davey Jones himself the masked the sails and the yardarm
ended up being recreated digitally Johnny Depp's performance anchors them all to reality you can
see this actually happen in the initial swooping shot if we play it slowly right up until this
point here this shot is 100 CGI even Jack Sparrow is a digitable but then they use this piece of
rigging to cross in front of them so they could transition to the live action Johnny fighting
on set even though some people think that at the World's End wasn't as good as the first two films
and others claimed they made it a bit too long or that they rushed it they did manage to make
us believe some pretty incredible things they made us believe that stone were crabs that there were
multiple Jack sparrows and that you can tip over a ship by running from side to side but best of all
they made us believe in an epic swashbuckling pirate tale without ever setting sail