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MillimeterThe Perfect Storm: Gimbal Madness
Jul 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Ron Magid
While Wolfgang Petersen's film, The Perfect Storm, explores the theme of man vs.nature, behind the scenes, it was all about man vs. machine. To recreate the deadly high-seas saga of the Andrea Gail, practical effects veteran John Frazier (Armageddon, Speed) served up a computer-controlled gimbal capable of making a full-scale fishing trawler climb walls of water within a custom-built tank.
Petersen scouted the film world to find the ideal spot to shoot his actors swarming on the Andrea Gail. One by one, the Malta tank, Universal Lake, and the Baja facility where Titanic was made, were shot down. Petersen and Frazier decided instead to dig the largest soundstage tank in the world-a 95' square, 22' deep hole in the floor of Warner's legendary Stage 16.
In addition to Stage 16's huge motion base, the project demanded a whopping seven gimbals. Frazier had his hands full insuring that the full-scale prop boats could weather the rough ride. He says that although the real Andrea Gail was all steel, the film's construction team initially wanted to work in wood. "We said, 'Forget it! The first time we turn this gimbal on, it's going to come apart'," Frazier recalls. "So our Andrea Gail's all steel too. Anything else wouldn't have held up under the g-force we were pulling."
Meanwhile, Frazier and company set to work building what he says is the most complex gimbal ever designed for a feature film, a six-axis hydraulic motion base measuring 25' in diameter and 15' high. "Most gimbals have a universal pivot joint in the middle which gives us two axes of movement," Frazier explains. "Instead, this one has six intersecting rams on a 15-degree angle arranged in a circle. Each ram looks like an inverted 'V', and all six rams supported the Andrea Gail, which weighed 150,000 pounds. Each ram was capable of picking up 25,000 pounds. It's a take-off of flight simulator technology, but I don't think anyone ever thought 150,000 pounds would be sitting on top of one!"
While the gimbal took two months to construct, it took just a matter of days to program. "It was motion controlled-on a big scale," Frazier says. "So when Wolfgang came in, we were up and running and he could simply ask us, 'Can you give me a little bit more pitch? Or can you speed it up?' That sort of thing."
Frazier says the rig also provided some effective, but nerve-wracking practicals. "The boat literally would go over on its side, so a lot of those waves you see going over the bow were created by the action of the gimbal. It was so intense, there were times when that gimbal was so violent, I couldn't watch it anymore!"
Back in the relative safety of ILM, effects artists lead by weather-effects guru Stefan Fangmeier faced the challenge of marrying the digital and real water. "I admired Titanic a lot, but that water was flat," Petersen notes. "We were dealing with over 100-foot waves, not only shooting on water but creating water in an artificial way, which is the most difficult thing you can do and make audiences believe it. It's never been done before to that extent, the way we've done it in Perfect Storm."
Meanwhile, Frazier has already upped the ante. When asked if the Andrea Gail gimbal was the world's largest, he laughs. "I could say that-until Pearl Harbor, where we made a third of the battleship Oklahoma roll over. That is the biggest gimbal ever." For now.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
