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With Sparrow in tow, the heroes call pirate lords from all corners of the world to the Pirate Kingdom. The sailing approach to this kingdom was shot on location in Dominica and augmented with matte paintings and CG shots executed by ILM. The interior of the kingdom was shot onstage in Los Angeles. “The pirate lords’ meeting is set in an upside-down boat hull,” says Wolski. “There were lots of pirates of different nationalities, including the Keeper of the Law [Keith Richards], Sparrow’s father. In the background, through holes in the hull, you see pieces of other ships. This was done with smaller sets and painted backings just to give it some depth.” The set features an enormous chandelier made out of a boat anchor and covered with candles. “Candles were part of our lighting on all three movies,” notes Sanchez. “On the first film, we asked the art department for three-wick candles so we’d get maximum flame and output. On any set that was a night interior, we’d try to use as much candlelight as possible. We even used them for fill, putting six or eight of them on stands — it’s the most realistic flicker effect you’re going to get. We used about 50 candles on the kingdom chandelier and augmented that with ropelights. Above the room, we had softboxes color-corrected to match the firelight. For fill, we used Kino Flos — some 4-bys and some we made from Kino Flo parts. Dariusz had an idea to build a loose fixture with fabric that we could just wrap around parts of the set, like posts.” The pirate lords choose to unite, and the film’s finale takes place as their fleet and the East India Trading Co. armada meet near an enormous ocean whirlpool conjured by Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris). “Tia gets very angry, grows into a 100-foot-tall giant, breaks into millions of crabs and creates a maelstrom,” explains Loomis. The Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman sail into the storm, blasting away at each other with cannons; meanwhile, aboard the Pearl, Elizabeth and Will decide to marry. “We shot the maelstrom with slightly longer focal lengths than usual to compress the image and bring the rain closer,” notes Wolski. “We shot masters at 30mm instead of 21mm, and close-ups closer to 50mm. It made everything a little more dramatic and abstract.” To capture shots of the giant Tia Dalma, the production used a custom close-up lens that was originally designed by Dan Sasaki, senior technical adviser at Panavision, for Dead Man’s Chest. “It was very long and had a moving element at the end like a snorkel lens,” recalls Loomis. “We could pan and tilt, as well as rotate the image with a little motor. The lens could focus on the front element so it had a macro effect. It gave us the ability to shoot very close and wide to exaggerate Tia’s size. The lens originally came about on Dead Man’s Chest because Gore wanted to do very close shots of a pair of dice without using oversized props. We also used it to do a dolly shot revealing Davy Jones’ heart beating in his chest, which was built as a live prop.” Wolski adds, “It’s basically a stripped-down version of the Frazier lens, and it’s one stop faster.” The maelstrom set was housed in a 600'x300'x80' hangar in Palmdale, California, that had been used for the main airport set of The Terminal (see AC July ’04). Both the Black Pearl and Flying Dutchman were mounted as full-sized sets on enormous gimbals built by special-effects director John Frazier to simulate the violent motion of the whirlpool. The set was surrounded by bluescreen mounted on 1,700' of dual-curtain track, which was later replaced by CG shots of a stormy sea. The maelstrom was lit by an array of space lights overhead; each unit housed six 1,000-watt globes. “It was pretty extensive,” says Sanchez. “We used 1,400 space lights, 100,000 amps generated by 10 Cat Generators, and about 80 miles of cable. We also had 20Ks and 5K Skypans that we moved from shot to shot to light the bluescreen from the floor. For a sunlight-effect sidelight, we used Dinos on Condors. On some shots we used the Gaffair balloons.” “We also moved around 100-mph fans on 30-foot towers mounted on pettibones,” he adds. “We had a lot of rain heads up above, too. All the lines were GFI [Ground Fault Interrupter]-protected and taped up with waterproof tape.” “The classic rule with rain is that you backlight it so you can see it,” says Wolski. “But the space lights worked out so well and the rain was so thick we could read it extremely well, so we didn’t need to backlight it. It was a nice, different approach to shooting rain.” The space lights were programmed into chase patterns by lighting programmer Chris Bennett in order to suggest the whirling motion of the whirlpool. “We created a group of 50 space lights trailing in and out,” says Bennett. “It was doing 100 crossfades per second, which initially overwhelmed the board, so we slowed it down a little. The heat [the rig] generated was so intense we could only leave it on for a few minutes at a time, or the cable would start melting. So we ended up ramping everything up and down as many as 75 times a day. We’d bring them up and they would read everything really quick or do a take. We’d turn off sets of lights here and there, at the fill and soft sides. We also had another rigging crew that came in at night to change burnouts — we were changing 15-20 globes a day. All the units were DMXed and controlled through a Whole Hog 3 system.” Sweeping shots of the ships were captured with a custom Technocrane rig designed by Richard Jones. “It was a 12-foot-square platform that went onto a 70-ton construction crane,” says Popovich. “Then we put a 30-foot Technocrane on the crane and got a reach of about 100 feet. The lowest we could go was 12 feet off the ground. The platform would self-level at any position. We used it down in The Bahamas mounted on a barge and on land to get above the masts of the ships. When we moved to Palmdale, we cut it into pieces, shipped it and put it out onto another crane there. It was a very useful tool for filming around the ships.” One of the most challenging shots in At World’s End features the demise of Lord Cutler Beckett aboard his ship, the Endeavour. The Black Pearl attacks with fusillades of cannon fire, culminating in a slow-motion dolly shot into Beckett’s close-up as the ship disintegrates around him. The scene was filmed with Photo-Sonics high-speed 35mm cameras. “That was a complicated motion-control shot photographed by Ben Seresin, and it was done in two passes,” says Wolski. “One pass had Beckett walking at 70 fps, and then there was a motion-controlled repeat of the same move at 360 fps with all the debris and pieces of the ship blowing up. The camera is pushing in at full speed. To repeat this move and match it at 360 fps, the motion-control rig had to go extremely fast and then stop. On the first take, the rig broke. Then they decided to go with a simpler rig that didn’t have a pan head. That was a big challenge.” The high-speed shots were lit with 3 million watts of SoftSun lighting. (See diagram on page 45.) “We were lighting to a T22 1/2,” says Sanchez. “We had 16 SoftSuns, five 100Ks, 10 50Ks, and one 25K in overhead trusses aimed through a diffusion frame along with 18K HMIs. That was such a hot set we incorporated more than 100 tons of air conditioning to keep the cabling and the entire area cool.”
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