Hey folks, Harry here with some interesting behind the scenes technical info on the making of 100 ft tall tidal waves that crash into the ship in PERFECT STORM, the new Wolfgang Peterson film that will be underway soon. This set up sounds amazing and... a tad dangerous. I'm sure they have tons of safety harnesses and stuff... but... Man... You know that'd have to be scary and fun as hell! Well, here ya go...
Hi Harry,
I raise wyverns, and a couple of days ago one of them flew back home with news about A Perfect Storm. It seems he had overflown Edge Innovations, the amazingly cool robot effects house which built fish for the film, where he spotted somewhere around 50 or 60 fish, most of which were swordfish (what the Gail and her fleet fish for). Of these, some actually swim, but most were designed to look, act, and feel like dead fish ought to. They also built a large mako shark, which acts very alive. I'll touch on that again at the end, where the spoilers are. After looking in on Edge, he flew on down to the WB set and spied on the huge pit where they built a full-size mock-up of the Gail, mounted it on a giant motion base (which can tilt it and move it in any direction), and surrounded it on all 4 sides with giant walls over 100' high made of dump tanks. On the order of 70 per wall. That's a few tons of water that will all get released in the space of a couple of seconds. To simulate the 100' waves, they tilt the boat up to like 50 degrees, dump one wall and move the boat upward at the same time. Then they suddenly tilt it back and move it again and dump another wall. And they have stuntmen on board the whole time. That just drips with cool.
PLOT SPOILERS!
It seems that the scriptwriters decided that the basic factual story of what happened to the Gail wasn't enough; they really liked all the stories of what has happened in the past, and decided to make it all happen to the Gail. So, in the middle of the storm, a large mako shark gets washed onto the deck and grabs hold of Bobby's leg, and another crew member has to shoot it in the head with a shotgun to get it off. They also apparently have attempted to insert some touching, empathic scenes with the crew in the middle of the storm. How on earth they're going to shoot an emotional scene when the boat is bouncing around in 100' waves and 100 mph winds, I don't know.
That said, he took off to go find a snack. I trust this information will find itself useful.
-Silbakor
