pirates of the caribbean - Cannes International Film Festival

Charles Gibson, who won an Academy Award®, with a few collaborators, for their gamechanging
work on ‘Dead Man’s Chest.’
In addition to creating photo-realistic mermaids, Gibson
and his legion of VFX artists would be called upon to do
everything from extending the urban landscapes of 18 th
century London to altering the already astounding natural
environments filmed in Hawaii, not to mention bringing a
whole ship to terrifying life in the “Queen Anne’s Revenge”
mutiny sequence.
It would be up to Gibson, VFX producer David Conley and
Ben Snow of Industrial Light & Magic to ultimately convert
the black-suited swimmers into terrifying mermaids.
“Based on what ILM had done with Bill Nighy and Davy Jones in ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ and
‘At World’s End,’ notes Gibson, “we knew that we could create fully synthetic characters
with great fidelity that matched the performances of live-action characters. The
actresses who played the mermaids were tracked wearing either special suits or, in
some cases, transfer tattoos when they couldn’t be wearing suits. These were then
blended so that we had the best of both worlds.”
Adds ILM’s Ben Snow, “We put the synchronized swimmers into ILM’s tracking
costumes. They’re wearing marker bands so we can edit our computer mermaids where
the synchronized swimmers and stunt players were. The swimmers are really amazing.
They’re able to do incredible things with their bodies, like ‘porpoise-ing’ in and out of
the water. One of the ways that we can use the performance of the swimmers is to track
them by the markers they wear on their costumes. We have a couple of our people
shooting with video cameras, and we are able to synchronize those with the RED digital
cameras used for actual filming. That helps us track the movements because we can use
the multiple angles and allows us to take what
Rob Marshall was doing when he directed the
scenes and reproduce them in animation.
We’ve come up with an interesting design for
the mermaids, part creature and part
beautiful women, with long, jellyfish-like
tendrils that whip out and drag sailors to their
doom. It’s technically very challenging, but
also very exciting.”
Charlie Gibson and company also helped to create the seaweed whips that the
mermaids use to drag the hapless pirates to their doom. “Stunt coordinator George
Ruge had his guys getting pulled on rigs and ratchets,” notes Gibson, “so we just rode on
their coattails and created the right animation to create a successful hybrid of real
action and visual effects.”
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