Making the fines t hours
Seth Maury reveals how his team at MPC plunged us into the depths of one of the most perilous sea rescues of US history in Disney’s The Finest Hours
How MPC recreated the tempest
The Finest Hours captures one of the most turbulent storms to hit the USA’S East Coast, and the story of the coastguards who set out to rescue an oil tanker that’s been broken in half due to the violent sea conditions. Set with the challenging task of realistically reproducing the tempest that rocked the New England coast back in 1952, was visual effects studio, MPC. “The pipeline on TFH was a little different from the traditional VFX flow,” admits VFX supervisor, Seth Maury. The team learned a lot about water simulation from their previous work on Life of Pi. “The process started with the FX simulation department.” The FX team made a base library of realistically simulated oceans for animation and layout to use further down the line. “The idea was if you already had a properly physically simulated ocean, then the fluid solvers could generate all the secondary passes of smaller waves, mist, foam, and so forth,” adds Seth. “Once these base oceans were created, animation and layout would then do digital scouts on them to find waves and locations that best suited the action needed.”
Pushing the boat out
As production progressed, however, sometimes the team found these base oceans didn’t always have the right types of waves, so they needed to create more waves with physical properties that the story demanded, resulting in 15 different base oceans to choose from. The team used blue screen plates of the practical boat and actors in a water tank that could be match moved, roto animated and placed in their oceans.
Using a combination of Maya, Flowline, V-ray, Houdini and PRMAN, the team were faced with a fair few challenges. “We didn’t have a lot of the standard elements to put in frame to help with scale, like humans, or birds, or landmarks. Many shots were just open ocean and a ship, and sometimes when you film from an uncommon angle with no common reference points, the shot can look miniature, so many shots were a study in how to adjust, add, or build so that they didn’t feel miniature.”
Riding the tide
The most challenging scene, reveals Seth, was the sequence where the CG36500 coastguard boat has to cross the Chatham Bar in 30-50 foot waves in various states of swelling and spilling. MPC had to develop new systems to create each of these waves and layer them into the same scene. “Many shots in this sequence were crafted as single-solution waves, such as looking down the barrel of a crashing wave, or being pushed along and backwards by a wave that had already crashed.”
But this all paid off, Seth admits, “I feel we created something that hadn’t yet been seen on screen – in both style and volume of shots – and that’s always a great opportunity to have in visual effects.” To watch The Finest Hours trailer go to www.bit.ly/finest-hours
I feel we created something that hadn’t yet been seen on screen… and that’s always a great opportunity to have