Skip to content 
The first person to swallow the sperm whale in “Whalefall” was not the sad 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). The production designer was Ramsey Avery, who was responsible for building a series of sets that couldn’t be easier to write into the Final Draft, and couldn’t be more difficult to realize in real life.
INT. a 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 mix of practical and digital effects to create the interior of a sperm whale that takes Jay on a journey both literal and spiritual. Avery and the “Whalefall” crew 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) as well as the mouth, esophagus, and puppet of a giant squid.
“You don’t get challenges like this. And so it was an awesome thing. I mean, almost everyone came to it with a sense of, ‘Oh, this is going to kill us, but we’re going to have fun while we’re doing it anyway,'” Avery told IndieWire. “I was very worried because here I am [in the research process] clicking through images of grotesque stomachs and being like, ‘They’re never going to make this movie.'”
But no amount of tripe samples, anatomical examination of beached whale bodies, or orthoscopic images of people sticking cameras down the throats of orcas and dolphins and horses and cows could scare the “Whalefall” team, who did four different camera tests to size and calibrate the sets they needed.
“In the long run, you want the feelings [of the story] to come through. So the stomach must be a character. It’s not just about mechanics but how you make things work. The WETA team, especially a guy named Ben Milson, was instrumental in figuring out what movement you need to express different emotions within the whale,” said Avery. “At the same time, it was practice. Try this. Try that.”
The team used over four different camera tests, increasing the stomach sets (made of silicone, latex, and also some padding) each time and adding more variability to how each could be used. Each set was rigged to move in a different way, from a large gimbal that could make the whale’s large limbs rise or dive, to a washing machine type rig designed to spin, to a rig calibrated to create unique, refined and almost emotional movements up close.
It was possible to hit some of the stomach sets from the outside to create additional tension or even counteract Abram’s distress, whether it was major spasms caused by the full weight of a grip throwing itself against him or smaller tremors caused by jury rigs made out of plywood and pool noodles. “Every step of the way, we learned something and worked out a little more, and we came up with a way that this is how we get the camera in. And by the way, sometimes there’s two cameras. There’s two cameras, an extension and an actor.”
It’s a job to take it all in. But the two cameras, energy, as well as all the LED strings used to light up the inside of the stomach cannot stay there. One thing is the practical challenge of creating a realistic shooting environment for this very wild and singular experience. What Avery and the VFX team realized, however, was that they needed to digitize not just every environment, but every moment.
“Usually what we do is when we build a set, and they have to scan it for visual effects [is] we film the scene, and then they come in, and they just scan the whole set, and that’s it. But that didn’t work because the set was changing. The set is always moving,” Avery said.
Enter production VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, who was part of the early camera tests to figure out how to take the idea of what Avery was planning and render it in a digital environment. “We had a four or five week period where we were mostly at other jobs and working part-time trying to figure this out,” Avery said.
What Rocheron invented was an infrared binocular camera that could be linked to the other cameras allowing him to capture a moving 3D scan of the set that corresponded to each scene. “He invented the camera, wrote the code, and found a way to capture that constant motion. So we had the actor with the right light on his face interacting realistically, physically, completely with a moving set that was always the right size and shape, and the right color, and the right finish,” Avery said.
Rocheron was able to translate all that information into WETA’s digital pipeline, and enhance what was shot, not just by painting lights or boom mics, but by creating that lean, organic, living material. Rocheron and his team painted some samples of the sets with “either ginger ale or seltzer water, I can’t remember which, and lit it in black light, which gave it bioluminescent drips.”
There are some pictures that are really just the stomach sets taken by Avery, but the overall effect and the emotional weight that is inside the whale is achieved through a very practical and digital melting, always keeping the tactile qualities of the former and at the same time adding space and a kind of sound with the latter. That’s the kind of collaboration that makes effects work, and it came about because, according to Avery, it wasn’t just whales. people all the way down.
“I was the first guinea pig and all the WETA guys were there too, getting in on the action and pushing and pulling [the stomach] and all that stuff,” Avery said. “We all worked together as a team. It was a really collaborative effort, and we worked very well together – and that was across two continents, you know. That was great.”
“Whalefall” is now playing in theaters.
