The first person swallowed by the evil sperm whale in “Whalefall” wasn’t grieving diver Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams), who was searching the waters off the coast of Northern California for the remains of his recently deceased father Mitt (Josh Brolin). It was production designer Ramsey Avery who was responsible for creating a series of sets that couldn’t have been easier to write in the final draft, and couldn’t have been harder to realize in real life.
INT. whale.
Ramsey had worked with director Brian Duffield and director of photography Aaron Morton on the previous project “Nobody Will Save You” and some people from WETA on the series “The Rings of Power”. But they all knew that creating the interior of the sperm whale would take a massive team effort and a combination of practical and digital effects that takes Jay on both a literal and spiritual ride. Avery and the “Whalefall” team would eventually create five different stomach sets (some of which crossed the Pacific Ocean to reach the shooting tanks in Los Angeles from the Weta Workshop in New Zealand) and puppets of a mouth, an esophagus, and a giant squid.
“You don’t get challenges like this. And so it was a tremendous thing. I mean, almost everyone came in with this feeling of, ‘Oh, it’s going to kill us, but we’re going to have fun doing it anyway,'” Avery told IndieWire. “I was really worried because I’m here [in the research process] Clicking on bizarre stomach-churning images and being like, ‘They’ll never make this movie.'”
But no amount of trip samples, nor physical exploration of beached whale corpses, nor arthroscopic images of orcas and dolphins and people sticking cameras around the necks of horses and cows could scare the “Whalefall” team, who conducted four separate camera tests to mount and calibrate the sets they would need.
“In the long run, you want feelings [of the story] To come through. So the stomach will have to become characterful. It’s not just about the mechanics of it but also about how you activate things. The WETA team, especially a guy named Ben Milson, was really helpful in figuring out what motions you needed to convey different emotions inside the whale,” Avery said. “At the same time, it was practice. try this. Try that.”
The team practiced four different camera tests, each time enhancing the pet set (made of silicone, latex, and largely upholstery) and adding more variability in how each could be used. Each set was rigged to move differently, from a large gimbal that could capture the large swings of the whale’s rise or dive, to a washing machine-type rig designed to spin, to a rig calibrated to create very specific, fine and almost emotional movements in close-up.
Some sets of abdominals could be struck from the outside to create additional tension or even act against Abram’s distress, whether a large cramp caused by the full weight of the hold throwing himself against it or a small shudder caused by jury-rigged devices made from plywood and pool noodles. “Every step of the way, we learned something and figured out something else, and came up with this way that we could get the cameras in this way. And by the way, sometimes there are two cameras. There are two cameras, a boom, and an actor.”
Getting it all in is a feat. But the two cameras, the boom, as well as all the LED strings used to illuminate the inside of the belly can’t stay there. The practical challenge of creating a realistic shooting environment for this truly wild and fantastical experience is one thing. However, Avery and the VFX team realized that they would need to digitalize not only every environment, but every moment.
“Usually what we do is when we build a set, and they have to scan it for visual effects [is] We’d be filming the scene, and then they’d come in, and they’d scan the whole set, and that was it. But that didn’t work because the set kept changing. The set is always moving,” Avery said.
Add production VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, who was part of the early camera tests to figure out what Avery was designing and how to render it in a digital environment. “We had a four or five week period where we were at other jobs and working part-time,” Avery said.
Rocheron created what he thought was an infrared binocular camera that could connect to other cameras allowing him to capture a dynamic 3D scan of the set that matched every single shot. “They invented the camera, they wrote the code, and figured out a way to capture that constant motion. So we had both actors who had the right lighting on their faces, they were actually interacting realistically, physically, with a completely dynamic set that was always the right size and shape, and the right color, and the right finish,” Avery said.
Rocheron can translate all that information into WETA’s digital pipeline, and enhance what was shot, not just by painting lights or boom mics, but by creating the extra sticky, organic, lifelike quality of living tissue. Rocheron and his team painted some samples of the set with “either ginger ale or seltzer water, I can’t remember, and lit it under black light, and that gave him bioluminescent drips. Then he could use that as a texture to get the bioluminescence falling off the walls,” Avery said.
There are a few shots that are actually just Avery-built pet sets, but the overall impact and emotional tension of being inside the whale is achieved through a brilliant mix of practical and digital, always retaining the tactile qualities of the former while adding scope and a kind of spontaneity with the latter. This is the kind of collaboration that materializes effects, and it happened because, according to Avery, it was not the whales but People all the way down.
“I was the first guinea pig and all the people from WETA were there too, tracking the action and pushing and pulling [the stomach] And all that stuff,” Avery said. ”We all worked together as a team. It was really a collaborative effort, and we worked well together – and this was across two continents, you know. that was great.”
“Whalefall” is playing in theaters now.