When the ship is about a third of the way over, the shot switches from live action to bluescreen. The filmmakers had taken a section of the deck and put it on a giant gimbal and tipped it back and forth with the actors running across it, with all of their wires and harnesses, in front of a bluescreen. ILM shot miniatures to extend the bow and hull, and for the sails and masts, and those elements all had wires and rigs. Evil Eye put it all together, pulled the bluescreen, put in the ocean, sky, water splashes and other elements, and finalised the shot.
Paint and roto supervisor Justin Graham explained part of the task. “In most of the shots, the actors and their safety wires would be pushed right up against the wood of the ship, not moving. This made wire removal a problem because we didn’t have a lot of frames to work with. Furnace did an amazing job interpreting the texture of the wood. We just drew a spline over the wood, animated it to match the wire, and Furnace interpreted it automatically. It saved a ton of time.”
Furnace also came in handy for removing rigs and pulleys on the miniature sails and masts that didn’t match those of the real ship. “The shots of the sails blowing in the wind were pretty complex and we didn’t even want to think about having to paint all the rigs out,” said Graham. “We matted out the rigs and ropes and hoped for the best. Furnace did a brilliant job interpreting and interpolating the elements. It’s fast and the results were awesome.”
On the same sequence, the compositing team, working with Graham, found a way to use Furnace WireRemoval that probably wasn’t intended by the designers. “Some of the ropes and rigging that were flying around actually needed to be preserved when the background was replaced. We were trying to figure out how to do that, since they were smaller than what we could matte out with the roto tools. One of the compositors noticed that Furnace had an alpha function with a two-point spline. It was genius! We drew a two-point spline, Furnace gave us a matte, and we adjusted the thickness of it to preserve those ropes.”
He added, “These tools give you more than you’d ever ask for. They’re flexible and offer a lot of solutions to desperate people in desperate situations.”
Visual effects supervisor Dan Rosen also applied Furnace’s Kronos optical flow tool on a series of shots at the beginning of the sequence where the top of the mast and sail appear to be arcing through the frame to indicate the ship’s rocking. “It was a miniature element and it didn’t move in a linear way,” Jacks explained. “Dan and his team used Kronos to re-time that plate, smooth it out and speed it up.”
He added, “We really value what The Foundry brings to our pipeline, and actually, to our business. They’ve been really supportive since we first opened and their technology has always been top notch.”