POTC: At World's End ILM Visit By George 'El Guapo' Roush on May 29, 2007 Recently Disney invited me and a few other journalists (I laugh when I put ‘I’ and ‘journalist’ in the same sentence) to the beautiful city of San Francisco to visit Industrial Light and Magic’s new offices. For those interested, it’s an amazing complex. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take any pictures inside except for the lobby and one of the guys we interviewed. It was a fascinating look at just how complex and involved visual effects are when it comes to finishing a big budget movie. This trip’s main focus was about Disney’s upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and the talented people used to make these movies come to life. They have 3 buildings I believe. It’s like a college campus. They even have a giant playground area so employees can bring their kids to work. I believe they also have a secret room for youngsters where chips are implanted into their heads so at a young age they are being manipulated into believing that the last three Star Wars movies from Lucas are masterpieces. This is to help keep future generations from writing “WTF?” on Star Wars message boards when they get older. Here are some pictures I took while I was there. Note the fantastic way I am able to properly capture shadows in their natural habitat. A Yoda fountain. I couldn’t believe it either. Some of the many awards won by ILM on display for everyone to geek over. Yes, this article is about Pirates of the Caribbean. But a giant Darth Vader standing in your lobby probably makes for a wonderful conversation piece. It would be awesome if Jimmy Hoffa’s skeleton was inside of it. Ok, enough of the pictures. This isn’t a 3-D Pop-Up book, although I’m sure it would be more fascinating if it were. We now departed on our tour where we visited the art department and spoke with Aaron McBride who is the Visual Effects Art Director for Pirates 3. Please pretend you didn’t see those conceptual drawings. If Aaron gets fired because of this picture it’s your fault for having looked at it. Aaron talks a bit about creating new Dutchman characters for Pirates 3. “We did a bunch of concepts that we put together and put in front of Gore. Gore chose about six hero guys out of the designs that were put in front of him. We filled out about 4 more background guys to fill out the ten that we needed. A lot of the characters were derived from underwater deep sea creatures. We have Manray, after a Manta Ray; Jelly, modeled after a jellyfish with kind of a mucus all over him; Finnigan has these serrated fins surrounding his head; Piper has a lot of coral head shapes.” One character that did not make it in the final movie was one composed of driftwood. “One of Gore’s comments when we were working on the Dutchman for Pirates 2 was that they didn’t all have to be comprised of sea life, they could be of driftwood, rotted pieces of plank, things that were from The Flying Dutchman itself. Maybe some ornate pieces of ship that had fallen off and rotted could be what make up these characters.” Guess that didn’t matter since they didn’t use firewood boy. We then checked out the image capturing stage where they put actors in suits, motion capture them and insert the CGI over their movements. They’ve used this technology for quite a while in video games, movies and whenever Jesus needs to make special appearances at The Vatican. I don’t have a picture of the stage because if I had taken out my camera, hundreds of Stormtroopers would have rushed into the room firing their blasters at me. Every shot would have missed me of course. R&D Engineer Kevin Wooley showed us a scene with Bill Nighy who plays Davy Jones. They were shooting him walking down a small flight of stairs on his ship, turning and saying his lines.  Kevin explains how they used a portable camera and computer system to capture the actor’s performances on set rather than have them come to the soundstage and attempt to recreate the movements. Using two portable cameras they were able to shoot the scene alongside Gore, get the footage they needed, run it through their software a few times and get the skeleton needed for animation. It’s so complex, that they can even swap body parts from other scenes to fill in. Kevin explains further: “They wanted to use a different line from a different take. They didn’t like his head position so the head was actually lifted from a separate performance. So they combined two of his performances into one single performance of the character. And then you give it to animation and they do tons of work on the face, figuring how what Bill does becomes what Davy Jones does. Davy Jones doesn’t have a nose, he doesn’t have a chin, so they had to do a lot of trying figure out and translate the expressions.” “We’re working on making it (The on set method of motion capture) better and faster so the time and labor is competitive with standard motion capture. And we have some longer term ideas of how to get the real time performance actually working on set. We’re still a little ways out. So instead of the director watching Bill’s performance, he’d be watching Davy Jones’ performance. He’d see a representation of Davy Jones moving around on the set.” Kind of makes you think as you’re watching the film, if the performance you’re watching is the performance actually shot for that scene, doesn’t it? I know whenever I see Orlando Bloom on camera, I always wonder which of his performances are real and which ones were substituted with a motion captured vagina. But all of this motion capturing and visual effects don’t get thrown onto your average PC to render. ILM has a server system so massive, that what they can render in one night for a Pirates scene, it would take six years to do on your average desktop. Macintosh owners will of course argue this point saying that their precious Macs can easily render the entire Pirates series in two hours while you’re able to watch episodes of Lost off of iTunes. ILM’s systems compose of 4,300 processors and 250 terabytes of usable production hard drive space. That, my friend, is a shitload of porn storage.   We actually saw a scene from At World’s End before our tour, but for article purposes, had I put that and the interview with Visual Effects Supervisor Jon Knoll and Animation Supervisor Hal Hickel first, none of you would have read this far. Jon and Hal talk a bit before starting their Pirates clips. Jon Knoll: …I really loved the idea of these characters that as they pass through the moon light and become skeletons and what the challenges would be in making that happen. Generally, I have a philosophy that I try and put into practice as much as possible which is that the visual FX can control the production process. We want to be as friendly to the filmmakers as possible. We want to place as few constraints on the shooting as we can, and it did seem that in discussing this with Hal that the right way to shoot all of this stuff, since these characters start and end as live action and they become skeletons just when they pass through the moon light – really, the only sensible way to shoot this was to shoot it like it was any other live action. We wanted to shoot it with the characters and then we'll get a clean plate to help us paint out the live action character when he's CG and then the rest is kind of hand matching. We'll match the performances as closely as we can and we'll make these transitions as seamless as we can make them. A lot of really good things came from that, just doing it onsite like any other live action. We got the benefit of the director being able to work with the actors in the same way he's used to working and the actors kind of being able to play their performances off of each other in the same way that they were used to doing. The DP has someone to light just like he's used to. The operator has someone to frame up on and the editor has a performance to cut. All of these things sort of combined to give it the exact same energy, the same vibe as all of the rest of the movie and there was no stylistic difference when you go into the visual FX scenes. It just sort of happens. So often when you're doing visual FX it's a very complex process. It's expensive and because of that it's often very carefully planned. So, the angles are all very carefully storyboarded and thought out. Then you try and shoot just those pieces so that you're as efficient as you can be. There is frequently a stylistic change when you get to those scenes. You just feel that there is something more deliberate and planned about it and this shooting methodology kind of gave this nice sort of seamless thing where it just fit into the rest of the movie nicely. So then as we went into 'Pirates II' we had this new challenge where we had a whole series of characters that were fully CG all the way through. So they didn't need to make these transitions, but we were pretty happy with the production methodology of just shooting it on set like it's any other live action and we'll figure out how to make that all work because it has all these benefits that I previously mentioned. Hal started with a concern of, 'Well, if they don't have make transitions can we dress them in something that lets us match that animation more faithfully, that lets us get a more accurate representation of what they were doing on set?' We had this issue on 'Pirates I' where were just matching by eye and we had all these characters with these long flowing cloaks that to some extent make it harder to see where the joint positions really are. It's a little ambiguous. There was also some dramatic lighting that sometimes lengths and shadows and so you weren't quite sure what was going on there, and so it was a priority for Hal to be like, 'Well, what can do to let us match that stuff better so that we can get a higher quality performance out of it?' So we got together with R&D and said, 'Can we do something that would get us ideally what you get out of a full on motion capture session, but it's got to be something that we can do the same way that we did before. It's got to be on set. It can't be anything that slows down the production. We can't put any constraints on the shooting.' For example, we couldn't say, 'We can't use a steady-cam. We have to use handheld cameras.' There couldn't any of those kinds of constraints. We couldn't do anything that took a long time to setup. It's got to be something that we just bring on set and shoot with and there couldn't be any restrictions on the lighting and what sort of weather conditions that this was going to happen under. Reading through the script we knew that these characters appeared standing in knee deep water in the lagoon, that we were in the jungle in Dominica and that we were going to be on the deck of a ship out on the ocean with the pouring rain. So whatever we came up with had to be indestructible. It had to be robust and be able to take that kind of abuse. So, R&D scratched their heads for a little bit and they came back with this idea of this camera and you've seen it – that's the stuff with the guys in the gray suits. So they're wearing a relatively tight fitting suit so that we can very clearly see where the body really is and we have a series of markers that help us determine exactly where the joint positions are inside there. So in the end we get the equivalent of what you get on a motion capture stage, but without all the junk that goes along with it. I think that translated pretty directly into getting some better performances. Hal Hickel: One of the things that's been really cool from an animation standpoint over all three of these films, I'm not one of these people who is dying to do a super photo-realistic human being in a movie - that's just not interesting to me. I really like it when we create things that couldn't possibly be real, but then we try to make them look as real as possible. That's more interesting to me. But frequently that's creatures that are twenty feet high or two feet tall. What was fun in these films was that all of the creatures we were doing whether it was the skeletons in one or Davy and his crew in two and three, they're all human sized. They're all human scale characters. They're human beings, but they're mutated by the Aztec curse or by being on Davy Jones' ship for too long. The design challenges were really unique and interesting because you want to push the design to the point where the audience doesn't say, 'Oh, well that's just a guy in makeup -' if you've done your job right, but at the same time you don't want it to be so out there that they just kind of look at it and say, 'Oh, well, that's CG.' Even if an audience looks at something and says, 'That's great CG –' to me that's a little bit of a failure. You kind of want them instead to be confused by what they're seeing and not quite get what you put in front of them which I think is a lot more interesting for the audience and it's a lot more fun for us. So that was really cool in these films, both with skeleton characters that we did, making Barbossa's skeleton self really look and feel like Geoffrey Rush and the same with Johnny Depp. His Captain Jack skeleton really felt like him. So, the audience's reaction wasn't to say, 'Oh, look at the cool CG skeleton –' but instead was to say, 'Wow, look what they did to Geoffrey Rush –' which I think is a different reaction and a much better one. Likewise with Davy Jones and his crew. It was a little different because you don't see the transition from Bill Nighy to Davy Jones. He's always Davy Jones, but we really wanted people to look at the character and not say, 'Wow, that's some great CG –' but instead to go, 'Well, is that a guy in makeup? Those tentacles couldn't be makeup? Are they animatronics or maybe that's CG –' and just be completely mixed up by what the technique and hopefully just let loose of it and just accept the character. That's if we did our jobs right, and so to me that was really, really fun. It was sort of nudged towards creating realistic CG humans, but not to the point of absurdity which I kind of find boring, the pursuit of an absolutely normal real human. Yet that kept the other foot in doing these really fantastic creatures, and then on top of which we got to do fun things in all of the movies that were purely animated like the skeletal monkey or the Kraken which was a huge undertaking in itself and trying to figure out how that should move in a way that's like an octopus, but is much larger, or a giant squid rather, than anything that exists and has that sense of mass and dangerousness and the whole thing. So that's been a lot of fun and we've had that continuing in three. We have Davy and his crew and then we also have some other new challenges and some new critters and some new characters to create and some new transformations for some of the characters. So that's all been very exciting. Plus we have some new emotional territory for Davy and he also gets to do some bit of action which I think is great this time around. We didn't see him swordfight or anything in two. So that's really been the animator's journey on this film, doing these characters that people have to buy as human beings and seeing the pathos in their curse and buy it the same way that they buy Geoffrey Rush or Johnny or any of the other great actors in the movie. Jon Knoll: One thing that I'll add is that almost every show we do there is a development process where you kind of figure out what you're doing and kind of work out the technical hurdles and get to a point where everything is running smoothly. That's usually towards the final weeks of the show and you finally have all of the bugs worked out and the machine is efficient and then the show is over. You don't really get to reap the benefits of it. You've struggled the whole way and then finally you've got it working in time for the end. The big technological push for us on 'Pirates II' was getting Davy and his crew working and getting that whole motion-capture thing working, getting Davy's beard control system working and all of that stuff and debugging the characters to really make them look very realistic in an environment and that happened for us with about six weeks to go. We finally had everything completely working and looking really good and then the show was over. So it's actually been a very rare pleasure now to then go immediately into another production where we have a bunch of the same characters and now, you know what, the crew is all really good at it and it all proceeded very smoothly. Hal Hickel: The other thing that I would like to mention about these three films that has been great fun for us is that they're not just creature shows. We do get some shows in house that really don't have any creature animation. They're about action and environments or they might be about a very specific thing. But these movies have covered every department. We've had physical miniatures with pyro and really fantastic environments that had to be created, to flesh out Cannibal Island or Tortuga or any of the different locations in the film. We had CG ships, our creators, our Kraken – every department. Our simulation for water, cloth, exploding things, all of that stuff has been pushed and pushed and pushed on these three films. On 'Pirates I' we had all that ragged and torn cloth on the characters which was a really big challenge for us in our cloth simulation and then on two the bar was upped because their costumes were crusted and sort of ratty and then all the sea life that's all over them with Davy Jones tentacle beard and the sales on the ships. We did a lot more simulation of the sails on ships and particularly with the Flying Dutchman with its ragged sort of seaweed sails. That was an enormous challenge for simulation. So every department got a work out and really rose to the challenge and so that's been very, very satisfying. Jon Knoll: A variety of material is a lot of fun on a show. Then we went into three with – on one hand we had a body of work that's Davy and his crew. We have that story to wrap up, but then there are some entirely new challenges for us that have meant some very long hours in the last few months. At this very moment we still have six shots that we're struggling with and hopefully will have done later today.   Are they water related? Jon Knoll: Yes. Aside from the trailer that you've seen there's this big storm sequence which has been a big focus for us in the last six months or so. Hal Hickel: Maybe we can show you the clip and then talk a little bit about that. What we saw on screen was actually the biggest disappointment of the entire trip. We saw clips from the first two Pirates then what was pretty much the trailer clip shown on the internet for Pirates 3 minus the sound. A couple of seconds were new, like Jack Sparrow swiping at Davy Jones and cutting off one of the tentacles on his face. But other than that, I didn’t see anything new. I was hoping they would show us a scene never before shown to the public and then we would learn how the visual effects process is used to make said scene, but we weren’t. I guess that would be too much ask, but I’m grateful to Disney anyway for at least flying me out to San Fran to check out the more technical side of how the Pirates films are made. After the short scenes, we had a Q&A with Jon and Hal. Jon Knoll: So, that sequence, if you remember from 'Pirates II,' while we had a couple of big action sequences that was actually more of a character show. There was a lot of exposition that needed to be gone through to sort of set up three and there was not really a whole lot of battling going on in 'Pirates II.' There wasn't big ship to ship battling that we were addressing in 'Pirates I.' I think that now that we've seen CG water before – we did CG water in 'Perfect Storm,' we did CG water in 'Poseidon' last year as well – it's always really, really hard. It's extremely difficult to make it look good. It's very labor intensive and very expensive in terms of computationally. It takes forever to render. It takes forever to run the simulations. It takes huge resources, disk space and memory. So that means that it's very difficult to do iterations very quickly, to do new versions of it. So we're always kind of fighting against the clock and what resources you have available to make that stuff look good. This was especially challenging for us because we had to do it in very large quantity. It's a very long and intricate scene where we look in all directions and so it's in all different scales and types of shots to deal with. It was really, really hard. We're not quite done yet either, and so we have a couple that we still have in the hopper. What else can I say about that. Hal Hickel:  This goes back again to what Jon was saying about not encumbering the production with the apparatus of visual FX and saying, 'Well, lets sort of limit the shots and sort of shoot on the decks of the ships as much as possible so that we don't see out into the maelstrom. Lets try and limit the maelstrom shots.' There was no such constraint. Gore [Verbinski] put his camera where he wanted to and whether it was handheld or on sticks or on a dolly and whatever direction he wanted to point, it was fine. I think that you really feel that in the film. I don't think that you feel like there is ever an artificial kind of restraint on the filmmaking in order to save a few bucks or make the work easier to do. It certainly wasn't easy to do, but it was also great to do. Is the primary issue just the matter of time it takes to render each sequence? What is the process of finding and making – you're talking about water for this one – these to where you can just say, 'Okay, we've got that.' Jon Knoll: Well, a big factor there is time. This was an extremely short postproduction schedule. It was actually six weeks shorter than 'Pirates II' which was the scariest experience of my life. Two months ago I was convinced that it was impossible to get this done in time. We were working around the clock and nothing can be done to really speed this stuff up. We're cutting as many corners as we can. We're trying to be as efficient as we can and push the stuff forward and the shots just weren't happening at a rate that was fast enough to get done in time. Now fortunately there is a thing that happens on all shows where the first round of shots takes the longest because you're still working through the technical issues and you're still trying to get in sync aesthetically with what the director is looking for and there is a little give and take on that. So the first round is always the hardest and takes the longest and the second round of shots you have the experience of the first round and you have some of the technical problems solved. You have some aesthetic stakes in the ground for what the sequence ought to look like so that it goes a little faster and then they gradually start getting faster and faster. So the number of shots that you finish per week gradually goes up and I have a chart in my office that I do to try to reassure myself, but sometimes it's a very scary thing and it's very simple. It's the number of shots in the show versus the schedule. Ideally you're following a straight line to the end, but this looked like an exponent curve. So it was very shallow at the beginning and it really wasn't until March that it even started to up kick. Back at the beginning of March we were probably only going to be thirty percent of the way done for the movie when the deadline came at that rate. By April we were going to be two thirds of the way done by the time final deadline hit, but that still left us two hundred and fifty shots short. Hal Hickel: That's a lot of shots to be short. Can you talk about the rendering process? Jon Knoll: Yeah, we did a major expansion that I'm sure glad didn't come any later than it did. Around the middle of February we doubled our online disk space, storage and we doubled our processor pool. So I think that the peak of it all we were using seventy thousand processor hours every night. That's the equivalent of running one processor, one machine for seventy thousand hours and that's about eight years of processing per night. I think that we've done that long enough that by the time we set the last shot, today hopefully, we'll have used – I need to get stats – but I think that it's approximately one millennium. So we've used about a thousand processor years to get this show done. How big is your server room? Jon Knoll: I don't know the answer to that. I think that they're all three gigahertz prox and as I said, we're using about seventy thousand processor hours per night. Evening is fourteen hours or something. It's something like that. Hal Hickel: The other thing that you have to remember is that 'Pirates' isn't the only other big complicated show that's currently happening at ILM. So there is that as well, but in terms of just load on our network and our system, we're not the only show. Can you mention the other ones that you're actually working on right now? Jon Knoll: 'Transformers.' That's in production right now. 'Evan Almighty.' 'Iron Man' is just starting up. 'Spiderwick Chronicles' is in production right now. Is there a technical sort of sound bite that you have or is it like at Pixar where it's like for every twelve hours it's about one twenty fourth of a second or something like that? Jon Knoll: Well, lets see. I think that you could probably work it out. At the peak we're getting, I think it was eighteen finished shots done per day and we were using seventy thousand processor hours per night. So I think that if you divide that up you can work it out approximately. Hal Hickel: It's an average of about five seconds a shot. You touched earlier on the main characters like Davy, but then there's also the background characters and the editions and extensions or the environments, how much of the environments in this third film are being touched by CG, I guess? Hal Hickel:  I don't know. I know on 'Pirates II,' for instance, was it like seventy five percent of all the Cannibal Island shots required some form of augmentation? That's about right which is surprising when you look at the sequence because I think that it's seamless enough that people probably figured that a number of those shots that we actually worked on were just great looking Dominica scenery which there was plenty of, but a lot of those peaks had to be augmented and made more vertical and caverns made deeper and so on and so forth. In 'P3' do you have a sort of estimate? Jon Knoll: I would say about half of it, out of the seventy hundred and fifty shots that we did on the show have some sort of environmental component. Either we're making the whole maelstrom behind the background or behind the foreground we're doing some other augmentation or replacement. Hal Hickel: You're talking about a lot of fairly not so glamorous stuff where for whatever reasons on the day, it's like the real Black Pearl, but it had to be Shot moored to a pier rather than out at sea. So the background waters are the wrong color because it's too shallow or too close to shore or there are piers and other junk visible. So there is a lot of stuff like that has to be taken out and cleaned to make it look seamless as well as the really sexy stuff like the maelstrom itself. The maelstrom too is an extraordinarily long sequence and so creating that environment, that world for that much screen time and as complex of an environment as that is, that's very fun to work on. Are you having to start from scratch every time with the maelstrom sequences? Jon Knoll: No. In fact, we couldn't have finished it up if we couldn't have shared some of the assets and even some of the renders from shot to shot. Some of the stuff on deck, what's really happening is that it's all about what's happening in the foreground and you want believable looking water in the background, but it's not what the shot is about. The shot is about what's happening in the foreground and so in the same way that you would do a painted site behind an office building scene where it's about what's happening in the office and not the skyline, but you do want something back there that's believable, we made a series of running footage, essentially painted sites. We made some, what we call, generic backgrounds that were viewing the compass points. We take a lot of time into them to make them really good and have really nice wave action and spray and all the things that you need to make that maelstrom look good and then we could take those backgrounds and just have done them once and then those become almost the photographed backgrounds that you can put the shot together with much more quickly than if we'd have had to custom fluid sims and renders for every one of those shots. Picking up on what you were talking about earlier, merging the live action with all the CG elements is that sort of a contrast to like the 'Star Wars' trilogy or what's going on with like '300' and things like 'Sin City?' Do you have a personal regarding such things or do you try to be more of a purist? Jon Knoll: Well, I worked on all of the 'Star Wars' pictures and so I've been on that end of the extreme part of the methodology, and I was always the one who was arguing for like, 'Can I have just a little bit more? Can we at least do the floor?' We did the desk that the guy was supposed to be leaning on and those kinds of things for better interaction. I think that it helps the actors the more that you have there and that's partly why we wanted all the performances to happen on the set because I think that it helps everyone involved, the more that's real. I often have, or I always have very productive collaborations with physical FX because I think that the best results you get are when you have a really good partnership there and things that are best done on set like, 'Actually, you know what, I want to have the real rain on the set, I want to have the real smoke blowing through the shot -' even though it may be harder to put CG characters into it because now I have to figure out how to put the CG character behind this blowing smoke that's very thin and wispy and I'll never be able to pull a man off, but we'll have to figure out some way of getting it in there. It changes the photography. Blowing smoke through the set acts as a bounce card and you see it reflected on wet decks. All of those sort of atmospheric things that happen on set, the explosions, all of that stuff I think makes for a better looking shot and I like to work together with the physical FX and the art department to get the best looking plates that we can get with as much real happening in there as we can. Then we'll do what really need to do as visual FX, but I'm not trying to expand my domain. Hal Hickel: Plus, Gore Verbinski is a director who, despite these films being big Hollywood blockbuster romantic vision of 1700's pirates and their world, where there is a side to him where he really likes for things to be a little bit dirty, to be a little bit natural and gritty as if they kind of just ran out on these ships with a small crew and some bounce reflectors and with available shot some of the stuff with a really good eye. That's not the case. There is a much bigger production with a lot more apparatus behind it off screen than that, but he likes that feel. So if he wants a jungle environment he would really rather find a jungle island and go there and shoot despite all the hardships of doing that and we're totally behind that because the natural world is just such a difficult thing to create out of whole cloth and we'll do it when we have to do it, but the rest of the time if they can actually go there and shoot there it's better and we love that. It's a great thing. Can you talk about how many of these Flying Dutchman crew members that we can expect to see that we haven't seen before, new characters? Jon Knoll: We went into three not expecting that we were going to have to do any new characters because we had seventeen characters that we built for 'Pirates II' and we thought, 'Well, that should be enough to get through all the action that we saw scripted.' Gore and George Ruge, the stunt coordinator kind of designed the choreography in that maelstrom battle where there are people sword fighting on the deck that involved enough characters, there is enough action going on in different parts of the ship that after we're done accounting Hal realized, 'You know what, we're short. We don't have enough characters to do all of this.' So it really wasn't our intention to do a bunch of new characters. In fact, there wasn't a budget for it and we actually didn't have any of our creature resources that we would need to do that. We didn't have our modelers and our texture painters and all of that initially and we had to kind of beg, borrow and steal and negotiate with the other shows to get the people to do it. The designs came from three different sources – Crash McQuery (sp?) who designed Davy Jones and all of the original characters on 'Pirates II.' He brainstormed and came up with a couple of characters. Jim Burkett who is Gore's concept artist and storyboard artist designed a couple of them and then Aaron McBride, our art director here, designed a few of them. So I think that it was ten new characters that we did and they're also kind of in categories. There are ones that are meant to be seen in tight close up and there are some that are meant to be unique characters, but don't need to play close to camera and so we can cut some corners with them to get them done faster. How much more of the Kraken will we see? Jon Knoll: Well, I think that you'll probably see it better than you saw it in 'Pirates II.' Hal Hickel: Can't give that one away. Can you estimate how many hours you've put in on the 'Pirates' film and 'P3' specifically and how it ranks against other films that you've worked on? Jon Knoll: Well, I've been on 'Pirates III' for not quite a year now. I think that we started it up in June of last year, but I've done probably almost two years worth of labor on it, something like that. Hal Hickel: The other thing with the new characters that we built was that we had some character that we hadn't explored last time, this guy who's kind of made of jellyfish which we had worked that into the design last time. We've got a guy who's kind of like a sea urchin with these big spines. So we got to explore some new things with those guys and that was fun and I think that the other thing to note about them, and this was required by what Jon was saying about us not really knowing ahead of time that we were going to need them, is that on 'Pirates II' there was quite a long design process of figuring out Davy's main crew members and sort of figuring out what looked good, what was sea like to use, what kinds of mussels and clams and barnacles and sort of how to put them together on these guys to make it read and feel like what we wanted it to feel like and not just look like a mess. So there was a lot of iterations and decisions to make about that. Well, this time around we had kind of already been through that and we sort of knew what looked good. We were able to turn these characters around really fast and the other thing is that we knew none of them were going to have any lines in the film or have to deliver a big performance, but as Jon said we did need to be able to bring them close to camera and so they had to be highly detailed. Even with that we were able to turn them around much quicker. We sort of got the drawings and we sent those straight to our CG modelers and they really whipped them out quickly and they looked great. They're really great characters, and in fact, again, it's one of those things where you get these new characters and then you finish the movie and you're like, 'I want a whole other movie to use these guys in because they're really cool.' You get to see them fighting a lot on the ships. I just want to ask about that website, the one that was nominated for a Webby this year. Can you talk a bit more about that and how much time you spend on that? Jon Knoll: Well, last year in the wake of the release of 'Pirates II' I spent a little time putting together a kind of before and after thing. I took some of the plates of the guys in gray suits and just did wipes back and forth to the finished shot and I did a [?] graph where I showed a bunch of that material. It looked like that was a good sort of basis, to just be able to wipe back and forth between what we shot on set and then here's how it turned out in the movie. So it's not guys in makeup obviously and it's not something that was all sort of made up in post. It showed that the performances were really authored by the actors on set and this was a good way to illustrate that. Miles came up with this idea of having that little magnifying glass during the running footage which is a much more interactive way than just my straight wipes. I thought it was a really clever idea, but I can't claim any credit for having come up with it. And that’s that! As you read this, Pirates should have already raked in millions and billions of dollars for Disney. Personally I think they should stockpile all of that money towards fixing the mess they call Disney’s California Adventure. Thanks to the generous folks at Disney and ILM for a great experience!! Have technical questions I can’t answer? george@latinoreview.com Source: Latino Review Comments