With the help of the Imocap system, Bill Nighy’s creepy Davy Jones is the next great CG performance after Gollum and King Kong. All images © 2006 Disney Enterprises Inc and Jerry Bruckheimer, Inc. Photo credit: ILM. 

When undertaking back-to-back sequels to Disney’s surprise blockbuster, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Industrial Light & Magic quickly realized that it needed to significantly raise the bar. Not only did the shot count triple from 324 to 979 on this summer’s record-breaking Dead Man’s Chest, but also the CG creatures were more complex and closer to the action. This required several R&D wrinkles and getting the creature pipeline up to speed on the new Zeno platform in San Francisco.

As most of you have seen by now, the results of the character animation are very impressive. They’ve already begun talking about the creepy Davy Jones as the next great CG peformance beyond Weta’s Gollum and King Kong. Lord of the Deep and commander of the mysterious Flying Dutchman ghost ship, Jones is a delicious mutation: part human and part squid, with a beard full of wiggly tentacles, and crab-like claws.

Unable to rely on traditional MoCap or hand animation, ILM created an innovative new system called Imocap that allowed onset and on location motion capture to elicit the most believable look and performance possible out of actor Bill Nighy.

“The characters required a lot of careful examination of human performances and then trying to combine that with the animation,” explains animation supervisor Hal Hickel. “We knew that there were going to be actors cast to play Davy Jones and his crew, and that those actors would be on set in the plates that we were going to be put those CG characters into and that somehow we had to extract the motion of the performances without having to reshoot later. We didn’t want to bring the mocap stage onto the set. So the R&D and MoCap groups came up with a solution: special [sensor-studded] suits that would be worn by Bill Nighy and other actors playing his crew. We would take reference cameras onto the sets and untethered cameras out on location with lightweight tripods and position them at angles off of what the main taking camera was seeing. This allowed us to track the movements and provided great data from the hero plates with the actors in them, casting their real shadows and making good eye contact with the live actors, and then we were able to extract their motion and apply it to our CG characters and put those characters right on top of the actors. There’s still a lot of animation artistry in there because there’s a lot of interpretation. This is just about getting the skeletal motion of the character; we still did all of the facial animation by hand [in Zeno].”

A second R&D project at ILM involved creating Davy Jones’ tentacle beard itself. Many tests were done to get the behaviors right.  

But more about Imocap in part two. Suffice it to say, Davy Jones is the most complex and human looking CG character in Dead Man’s Chest — and he’s all-CG. The animators incorporated as much of Nighy’s face as possible. However, the eyes proved to be an interesting test case. “As a backup, [director] Gore [Verbinski] asked us to put some makeup in a T-zone around his eyes and mouth, in case he wanted to do a blend for an extreme close-up,” Hickel continues. “But we never used it. We knew it would be difficult, but we figured we could get there pretty quickly. What was just as difficult was the whole spark of life. There’s always that last percent of realism that’s hardest to capture. The closer you get to the goal of it being real enough that people will stop worrying about it and thinking about it, the more glaring the omissions are. On top of which, there’s the gray area of his performance. The thing about Bill was he wasn’t a stone-faced villain. It was a very mercurial performance — he was constantly changing his expression and delivery. Nobody expected it. Every scene we’d stare at it and study it. I know there are animators that are leery of any technique that takes away some of their authorship. I totally understand that. Pure animation is wonderful. But I also think the collaboration between an animator and a live actor is an exciting thing too. I imagine it’s what makeup artists feel.”

Zeno added an additional challenge. ILM came into Dead Man’s Chest with only a small portion of its creature pipeline function intact. War of the Worlds and The Island, the two previous projects done with Zeno, were primarily hard surface works. The creature work on those didn’t need cloth, sim, flesh or hair. A large part of the effort was re-enabling the pipeline, particularly the facial animation.

Meanwhile, the second R&D project involved the tentacle beard itself. “Our R&D folks worked with James Tooley, our sim guru [creature development supervisor], and Karin Derlich [creature technical director], who came up with behaviors,” Hickel adds. “And we’d do tests and I’d say, ‘This one is too tentacly and this one feels too much like an elephant’s trunk and this one feels too much like a snake.’ We would look at tons of octopus references. After we got it, then those behaviors were added to the solver through what we call ‘Joint Motors,’ so all the tentacles were divided into little joint segments and each segment was essentially a little motor that was directed to move this way or that way. So those joint motor impulses were sent out at the same time the tentacles were receiving force information: I need to swing this way, I need to swing that way… and so it would all happen together.