'Pirates of the Caribbean'
They are the scurviest scum ever to sail the seven seas. But to bring these blooming buccaneers to the big screen in Jerry Bruckheimer's "Pirates of the Caribbean," producers had to muster those wily effects wizards at Industrial Light and Magic.
Visual effects supervisor John Knoll says, "There are 324, at last count, visual effects shots that are being done here."
Knoll says 160 of them showcased those cursed pirates. First, ILM's Aaron McBride goes to the drawing board. He says, "What we always do is start with a rough pass of drawings. We then went in and refined in more of a photographic look."
Next, animation supervisor Hal Hickel steps in. He says, "You put a live actor in a suit with sensors on it and the motion of the actor gets put directly into the computer."
Then these computer-generated characters replace the actors in the scene, mimicking their movements exactly.
To make the transformation from actor to animation, ILM's Russell Earl first creates a digital model of the actor, then painstakingly matches his movements. Finally, as the moonlight rises, the elements are combined to reveal the skeletal form. Earl says, "When you see him transform in a shot like this, you don't even question. You see it and you're like, ‘How'd they do that?’"
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