Disney’s Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise has arguably become one of the most important film series for the visual effects industry.

From Davy Jones in Dead Man’s Chest to the impressive Maelstrom, the terrifying whirpool created by the sea goddess Calypso in At World’s End, the films have pushed the boundaries further and further.

In Salazar’s Revenge, out in cinemas now, the Oscar-winning team at MPC had to deal with making Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow look younger as well as concentrate all their skills and wizardry on some of the most impressive water sequences ever seen on screen.



Metro.co.uk sat down with Gary Brozenich, an Oscar nominee who also worked on Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and Sheldon Stopsack who has worked on films including Guardians Of The Galaxy and Harry Potter, to talk all things visual….


Captain Jack Sparrow (Picture: Disney)

What would you say is the trickiest moment for VFX on Pirates Of The Caribbean 5?

Sheldon Stopsack: There are two aspects that were the trickiest and the one that we keep referring to the most is the character work of Salazar and his crew; it’s probably the single most creative aspect that we’ve had to deal with because it was such a crucial character and performance of Javier Bardem.

We didn’t want to distract from it or step on him, we were just here to enhance and support that performance so that was the number one technical and creative challenge.

The second thing that took a huge amount of our time was dealing with the huge amount of water affects that we hadn’t seen before, in the various stages.

Gary Brozenich: At one point, if you’ve seen the trailer, the oceans part so the ocean has to separate and we’re down at the bottom of the sea and there’s activity on the top and on the bottom, and what had to be developed was a way for you to be able to direct water – which we’ve done with numerous films here and both Sheldon and I worked on many of them where water plays a big component and it has to look natural and behave – but in this film, in some cases we had to do literal direction of the water – it had to change, part, collapse, waves had to come in, we had to wipe cameras at a certain time.

The demands of that from a technical and creative stand point were significant.

‘The trickiest VFX work was on Salazar and his crew’ (Picture: Disney)

Where do you start with creating this whole world of pirates at sea?

GB: The ideas, the concepts and the look will be developed in 2D concept artwork that would be looked at, viewed, and agreed upon all up the chain.

Where the rubber hits the road is when you’ve actually built the partial set pieces and then they’re shot and then it comes to the facilities (MPC) and you have to take those ideas and translate them into something that looks realistic and moves, and for us that’s where the bigger creative challenge comes in.



All the different ideas you’ve been talking about for six months, a year, actually converge on to a shot and then at that point you have to test everything for real – and it has to work in an edit where shots are cut back to back and it all has to be continuous and it opens up all other avenues of creative exploration.

SS: It’s an interesting process which you almost approach in naive way – you have to start somewhere, discussions and artwork but you have to start executing it and it builds from there, and grows, a visual development.

How involved are the filmmakers, do they give you space to experiment?

GB: Yeah I think to a certain extent; there probably hasn’t been many days in the last year or three years where I haven’t had email or a phone contract with Joachim or Espen about what we’re doing that day, through pre-production, shooting or post.

There’s an enormous amount – because of the way visual effects are created, with a large volume of people, over a long period of time – that they cannot sit on top of which is why they hire us to supervise the development of the look of those shots and then get them involved and share it with them when we need answers.

Were they involved in the development of the look of every aspect? Pretty much, and certainly for all the big decisions but we fill in a lot of blanks behind the scenes before we want to put it in front of them and get the answers that we need.

Depp ‘had a lot of input’ in the VFX on his younger self (Picture: Disney)

With Jack Sparrow, how much input did Johnny Depp have with the effects of a young Jack?


GB: He had a lot of input.

We went through quite a lot of design processes, as such, with what he wanted to look like. The biggest challenge is everyone knows what Johnny Depp looked like, from 21 Jump Street and Crybaby and all the way up so there’s a road map there for what he did look like, but the way that his character performs and the way his costume looks and how he put himself across as a younger version of himself was completely down to him.

How we did it though, technically behind each one of those performances Johnny did the performance so that’s the trick – the biggest challenge was that Jack Sparrow is so familiar that every tick he does and every twitch of a hand or eye or quirky movement that he does is something we’ve all seen evolve over five films and he’s a beloved character.

Kids dress up like Jack Sparrow for Halloween, I’ve done bad Jack Sparrow impressions at parties – we all have, right?

But that was the real challenge, and so for me, in my job it was super important to find a way that underneath it all was still Johnny Depp doing the performance.

‘The ideas, the concepts and the look will be developed in 2D concept artwork (Picture: Disney)

Where did the inspiration come for those terrifying ghost pirates?

GB: There were a number of iterations that they went through where we had to continually rethink the idea behind them.


Where it settled into eventually was head sculpts which we found, they were ancient heads made from mud that had been underwater for a long period of time and they had cracked, and they had evolved into this crazy look we didn’t think we could get to any other way, and that was the foundation for their faces.

In terms of the costumes, they were designed by Penny Rose head to toe and we then took them and extrapolated their individual stories from that; each pirate is missing a different body part, holes ripped through their gut or the left hand side of their body is shredded or they’re missing their head or their legs.

What we did is try to create a broader narrative around what could have happened to make them look like that so we put them into groups and said, ‘if there was a bomb that went off and part of the ship was blown up and these six people were around it, what would they each individually look like when blown up by the same thing?’

So we tried to create a logic structure in order for it to feel more comfortable with the audience to take on board; the logic structure has to lay the foundation to then make them feel like a cohesive whole and also fit with the design of the ship, as the ship went through the same events and that they all belong to the same ship.

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And the ghost sharks?

GB: The ghost sharks were always there in the script but visually it was a different journey.

It was such a funny thing to read – if something reads well in the script and makes you laugh out loud then you know it’s going to translate well into the shot, it must be good – and I must say when I read the script there was a bunch of things that made me laugh out loud and that made me realise there were some moments that would translate beautifully into film.

The design came from the art department, nose to tail, and they built practical versions of them to go on set. We then took those practical versions and in the shots where the [practical versions] are shot we augmented on top of them and broke their jaws and had goo come out of their mouths and generally tried to make them as gross as possible and make the environment as disgusting as possible.

We then had to make digital versions of them as they swim, and go in water and chase, and they had to perform in way [the practical versions] never would in the real world.

‘Part of the fun of being involved at the start is there may be ideas you can bring to it’ (Picture: Disney)

Do you have input with the script then? If you read it and think ‘that won’t work’, do you get any say?

GB: No, that’s above our pay grade!

Part of the fun of being involved at the start is there may be ideas you can bring to it that you know that visual effects can do and add to the story, and that may influence or make its way into the script, but the foundation is done by the filmmakers.

How has Salazar’s Revenge been trickier than On Stranger Tides, how has VFX changed in those six years? Is it harder? Easier?

GB: Technically I think there’s a bigger volume of visual effects in this one than there was in On Stranger Tides but the technology that has evolved… it’s an interesting one because in my mind it’s a short period of time but in terms of visual effects progression, it’s not.

SS: Tech has evolved and moved on in the six years which is a life time in this industry. The technological aspect is always about trying to push the boundaries, that’s the nature of our business but what has changed is the utilisation of it.

It’s a very different world, it’s a much stronger part of the filmmaking process and filmmakers are utilising it more for their own good.

GB: We’re a lot more woven in to the narrative of the process and filmmakers will take a bigger leap of faith to write things into stories that are crazier than the previous version of a franchise film because they feel they can do it, and that to me is the biggest change.

Pirates Of The Carribean as a franchise though has always been groundbreaking, and they’re some of the best visual effects that have ever been done, and the most well executed and well thought out.

What the filmmakers wanted to do with Salazar’s Revenge was build on that idea that these are VFX strongholds for the industry but also get back to the spirit of the original films.

Jack Sparrow is looking for trouble (Picture: Disney)

What is the most expensive piece of trickery that VFX can do?

GB: Me!

Unfortunately no, I think it’s deceptive – it’s interesting though because quite often the things you think may not necessarily be the most expensive thing quite often are.

Like there are shots you can do that will cost as much as a house simply because the demands that are made on the shot have stacked up so much – there are six or seven major components that go in to them that then require six or seven people to work on each one for six to seven months or more and then add that up, those are the things that, if you went through a film shot by shot and we told you how much one shot cost you’d think we were crazy.

But when you see what we started with and how much how to do into it, the craft, and craftsmanship and labour to get from A to B, those are the most expensive parts.

‘We were able to sympathetically apply what we needed to to the effects on him’ (Picture: Disney)

What is your favourite VFX moment in Salazar’s Revenge?

GB: There’s a few shots on Javier where he’s delivering a major dialogue performance with Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) and the acting is so strong I think we were able to sympathetically apply what we needed to to the effects on him and around him and to the backgrounds of the world, that to me is the magic moment of filmmaking when hopefully the audiences will see that and won’t think anything about what we did and just accept it and just watch those two.

They’re like two heavyweight boxers fighting when you see them acting together and I think if the audience can make it through the dialogue sequence and not think about what we did, that’s my favourite.