When VFX and Practical Sets Work Together, Sometimes You Invent New Cameras

The first person swallowed by the rogue sperm whale in “Whalefall” wasn’t grieving diver Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams), 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 building a series of sets that couldn’t be easier to write into Final Draft, and couldn’t be harder to realize in real life.

INT. Whale.

Ramsey had worked with director Brian Duffield and director of photography Aaron Morton on a previous project, “No Will Save You,” and some of the folks at WETA on “The Rings of Power” series. But they all knew it would take a huge team effort and a combination of practical and digital effects in order to create the interior of the sperm whale that takes Jay on a ride both literal and spiritual. Avery and the “Whalefall” team would eventually craft five different stomach sets (some of which crossed the Pacific Ocean to get from Weta Workshops in New Zealand to the shooting tanks in Los Angeles) plus a mouth, an esophagus, and a puppet of a giant squid.

“You don’t get challenges like this. And so it just was a tremendous thing. I mean, pretty much everybody came at it with a sense of, ‘Oh, this is gonna kill us, but we’re gonna have fun while we’re doing it anyway,’” Avery told IndieWire. “I was really worried because here I am [in the research process] clicking through images of the insides of grotesque stomachs and being like, ‘They’re never gonna make this movie.’”

But no amount of tripe samples, anatomical explorations of the corpses of beached whales, nor  orthoscopic images of people sticking cameras down the throats of orcas and dolphins and horses and cows could scare off the “Whalefall” team, which conducted four different camera tests to scale up and calibrate the sets they’d need.

“In the long run, you want the emotions [of the story] to come through. So the stomach has to become a character. It’s not just about the mechanics of it but how you make things activate. The WETA team, in particular a guy by the name of Ben Milson, was really instrumental in terms of figuring out what motion you need to convey different emotions inside the whale,” Avery said. “At the same time, it was practice. Try this. Try that.”

‘Whalefall’©20th Century Studios/Courtesy Everett Collection

The team practiced over four different camera tests, scaling up the stomach sets (made of silicone, latex, and also a fair bit of upholstery) each time and adding more variability in how each could be used. Each set was rigged to move differently, from a large gimbal that could achieve the big swings of the whale rising or diving, 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 of the stomach sets were able to be struck from the outside to create additional tension or even act against Abram’s distress, whether big spasms caused by the full weight of a grip throwing themselves against it or smaller shivers caused by tools jury-rigged out of plywood and pool noodles. “Each step of the way, we learned something and figured out something a little bit more, and came to a way that this is how we can get the camera in. And by the way, sometimes there’s two cameras. There’s two cameras, a boom, and an actor.”

It’s a feat to get all of that in. But the two cameras, boom, as well as all the LED strings used to light the stomach interior can’t stay there. The practical challenge of creating a realistic shooting environment for this truly wild and singular experience is one thing. What Avery and the VFX team realized, though, is that they’d need to digitize not just each environment, but every moment.

“Normally what we do when we build a set, and they have to scan it for visual effects [is] we’ll film out the scene, and then they’ll come in, and they’ll just scan the whole set, and that’s that. But that didn’t work because the set kept changing. The set’s always moving,” Avery said.

Enter production VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, who was part of the early camera tests in order to figure out how to take the guts of what Avery was designing and render it in a digital environment. “ We had like a four or five-week period where we were kind of all on other jobs and working part-time trying to figure this out,” Avery said.

‘Whalefall’ ©20th Century Studios/Courtesy Everett Collection

What Rocheron figured out was an infrared binocular camera that could attach to the other cameras that allowed him to capture a moving 3D scan of the set that matched every single shot. “He invented the camera, he wrote the code, and figured out a way to capture that constant motion. So we had both the actor with the right light on his face interacting actually realistically, physically, entirely with a moving set that was always the right size and shape, and the right color, and the right finishes,” Avery said.

Rocheron could translate all of that information into WETA’s digital pipeline, and enhance what had been shot, not just by painting out lights or a boom mic, but by creating that extra slimy, organic, alive quality of living tissue. Rocheron and his team painted some samples of the sets with “ either ginger ale or seltzer water, I don’t remember which, and lit it in black light, and that gave him bioluminescent drips. Then he could use that as the texturing to get the bioluminescence kind of falling off the walls,” Avery said.

There are some shots that are really just the stomach sets Avery built, but the overall effect and the emotional stress of being inside the whale is achieved through a fantastic melding of the practical and the digital, always retaining the tactile qualities of the former while adding scope and a kind of seamlessness with the latter. That’s the kind of collaboration that makes effects work, and it came about because, according to Avery, it wasn’t whales but people all the way down.

“I was the first guinea pig and the WETA guys were all in there, too, figuring out the action and pushing and pulling [the stomach] and all that stuff,” Avery said. “We all worked together as a team. It was a truly collaborative effort, and we just worked well together — and that was across two continents, you know. That was great.”

“Whalefall” is now playing in theaters.