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

PROPS
talk about the script, story, themes,
character beats, things that go
beyond traditional storyboarding.
The best part about films like
‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ is that
there’s lots of room for creative
enhancement.”
In addition to the more than 3,000
storyboards for “Dead Man’s Chest”
and AT WORLD’S END that Byrkit
created (he also did three weeks of
consultancy work on “The Curse of
the Black Pearl,” doing the very first
drawing of the Black Pearl and other
ships), he also bounced back and forth between departments, such as production design, props and the
pre-visualization team, helping with simplified animatics of the overwhelmingly complex action
sequences that were a blueprint for Verbinski on set, and later, for Industrial Light & Magic’s visual
effects.
One project that truly demonstrates synergy between behind-the-scenes artists is the magical map to
uncharted realms that our anti-heroes acquire from Singapore Pirate Lord Captain Sao Feng in AT
WORLD’S END that will take them to, well, not only World’s End, but places beyond, around, and upside
down. “We had this big meeting back in July 2005 for which Gore called everybody in,” recalls Byrkit.
“He knew that he needed this great map, but wasn’t sure what form it would take. He just knew that he
wanted it to be very special, and something we hadn’t seen before. He also wanted there to be secrets to
the map: perhaps it changed form and revealed things. We came up with things as varied as something
like a pop-up book in which you grab the center of the map and pull it out like a Chinese lantern, or the
idea that if you shone a light underneath the map it would project this whole universe, like a planetarium,
on the ceiling or the walls. I actually bought a bunch of Chinese lanterns and tried to paint a globe on
them, and spent about a week of research and development trying to see if it would work. And after a
week, I just knew that it wasn’t going to work.
“So I went back to an earlier idea that I had about a circular map with rings that represented
metaphorical places to which you could travel, which I thought tied into the whole ‘Pirates’ theme. Gore
and I had been talking about the notion that ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ takes place during a time in history
in which the maps weren’t yet filled in, which means that anything is possible in the world. There are all
these places in the world that are terra incognita—lands that are unknown—so they could have monsters,
they could have magic, they could have new civilizations. I loved the idea that this map was very old, made
before the Enlightenment, before people got so scientific about mapmaking, when they still blurred the
geographical realities with metaphorical inner journeys which are as important as physical journeys.
“When I showed the mockup of the circular map to Gore,” Byrkit continues, “he said, ‘That’s it! Now,
not only do the rings move, but you need shapes to start appearing, and land masses that become shapes.’
I went back and, based upon several conversations and input from Gore, painted a final map which took
several months, because it kept evolving. The rings can line up in infinitely different ways, like a
combination lock, and each way reveals some new secret, some unknown territory, some unexplored
place, some metaphysical place, some parallel universe.
“It took seven or eight months of putting all the elements together, testing them, and making them
right. I had several hundred phrases and names of places which I needed to be translated into Chinese
calligraphy, so propmaster Kris Peck brought in an expert named J.C. Brown, who’s worked on films like
‘The Last Samurai’ and ‘Memoirs of a Geisha,’ to make sure the brushstrokes were right. The original
painting was done on washi—handmade Japanese rice paper—that I treated with layer upon layer of
transparent washes of watercolors, some acrylic and artist inks. It has a really amazing, translucent quality
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