Pirates of the caribbean: at world's end - Disney

THE MAELSTROM
After Peck, Mallory and Van Stone completed their “first draft,” conceptual consultant James Ward
Byrkit became involved in the process, drawing illustrations and creating other materials. “Jim came up
with some wonderful stuff,” says Peck, “like how to attack a ship, or a castle. We have all kinds of things
in the book, including recipes for beer, or where you can find the best brothel in Singapore. Jim helped
us lay in the character and texture of the Pirate Code. We have wine stains, blood stains, sunflower seeds,
wax stamps and seals, and addendums actually sewn onto the parchment pages.”
The final dimensions of the Pirata Codex were 20" x 28", with the embossed covers an inch bigger,
and the “hero” version of the book weighed some 80 pounds and contained a thousand pages of textured
parchment. “So we had to make two books,” Peck continues, “because we had these two little old men in
the film, sort of like a 90-year-old ZZ Top with beards down to here, playing the pirate librarians, who
have to carry it. And since Captain Teague, played by Keith Richards, is the Keeper of the Code, we
wanted to give him something easier to work with. So the second version only weighed about ten pounds.”
The Maelstrom
For the climactic “Maelstrom” sequence of AT WORLD’S END—the massive, apocalyptic battle
between the pirate and British East India Trading Company armadas that takes place in a supernaturally
induced storm of monumental proportions—the filmmakers had to find a facility in which they could
build full-sized replicas of both
the Black Pearl and Flying
Dutchman from the decks up, as
well as various other set pieces.
The only such structure anywhere
near Los Angeles (or perhaps
anywhere else, for that matter)
was Building #703 of the
enigmatically named “Site 9.”
This elephantine 600-foot-long,
300-foot-wide and 70-foot-tall
hangar in the desert community
of Palmdale, California—58 miles north of The Walt Disney Studios in Burbank—was built by Rockwell
International in 1983 for the assembly of 100 B-1 bombers, and had, over the past few years, been used
as a shooting stage for a number of films, including Steven Spielberg’s “The Terminal.”
“This is one of the most elaborate and ambitious action sequences I’ve ever seen conceived for a film,”
notes Rick Heinrichs, “and it requires coordination of several departments, including ours, visual effects
and special physical effects. If it’s even 85% of what we hope for, it will be off the charts.” Adds executive
producer Mike Stenson, “You walked inside of that hangar, and it was like Area 51.”
Inside of “Site 9,” Rick Heinrichs worked in synergistic conjunction with another Academy Award ®
winner, special effects supervisor John Frazier (“Spider-Man 2”), to construct the Pearl and the
Dutchman, decks up, mounted on massive, highly sophisticated motion bases, surrounded by gigantic
blue-screen backings. “John Frazier is the best special physical effects supervisor there is,” says Stenson.
“Nobody else could have pulled off the physical elements of the special effects that we do in this movie.”
Frazier and his team designed and built the motion bases for the two key prop ships, as well as another
rig for both the scene in which the Hai Peng goes off the edge of the world, and the “Green Flash”
sequence, in which the Black Pearl passes between worlds by turning completely upside down in the
ocean. “What we decided to do on AT WORLD’S END that has never been done before on any motion
picture,” notes Frazier, “was to put a tower at each end of the two ships which allowed us to heave them
up 15 feet. And by doing that, we were able to get the actual realistic movement of a ship in the ocean.
Normally, we pivot it in the center, but ships don’t do that. In this case, we pivoted the ships on each end
to bring the bow up and down, and then we had two hydraulic rams on the either side of the ships that
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