Less than 10 minutes into Netflix's The dogging british sex videoSea Beast, we're treated to a battle of absolutely epic proportions. The crew of the monster hunting ship the Inevitable takes on a sea beast known as the Brickleback. There are harpoons, there are heroic deeds, and there are many, many tentacles.
The sequence, which lasts about eight minutes, is the kind of showdown you'd expect to see in a film's climactic final moments. Here, it serves as a pulse-pounding indication of things to come. It introduces us to The Sea Beast's world of sea monsters and the hunters who seek to kill them, as well as characters like famed hunter Jacob Holland (voiced by Karl Urban) and the Inevitable's legendary Captain Crow (voiced by Jared Harris). On top of all that, it's a technically impressive set piece featuring breathtaking animation and a ton of moving parts. Mashable spoke with The Sea Beast's director Chris Williams, as well as editor Joyce Arrastia and VFX supervisor R. Stirling Duguid, to learn how they brought this massive scene to life.
What makes a good action sequence?
"Mad Max," but at sea. Credit: Netflix When it comes to action inspirations, Williams describes himself as "a child of George Miller."
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"[Mad Max 2:] The Road Warrior left a mark on me, and I always appreciated just how far [Miller] pushed his action scenes beyond anyone's expectations," Williams told Mashable in a phone interview. Throughout his animation career, which includes credits as director of Big Hero 6 and co-director of Moana, Williams has similarly pushed for bigger and better action set pieces.
He explained that it's important not to settle for "good enough" when it comes to all aspects of animation and storytelling, including action. "It's just that simple question of, 'can we go further?'... How can [an action scene] be bigger, how can it be more exciting, more unexpected? Can we introduce more peril, can we introduce more fun? Have we turned every stone?"
The Brickleback fight most certainly turns every stone, taking us across the Inevitable's deck, up into its rigging, and even down into the depths of the ocean. As it does, we get swashbuckling action intertwined with key character development.
"There's a truth to the idea that a great action scene should also reveal character," said Williams. "You should be engaged with the characters and feeling the peril for the characters and... pushing character dynamics and relationships over the course of the action scene so that we understand the character more deeply at the end."
A great action scene should also reveal character.
Key to character development in this sequence was the idea of establishing trust and camaraderie between every crew member on the Inevitable. "Their very lives depend on the idea that this is a cohesive team. Everyone's doing their part and everyone's excellent at what they do, and they can trust each other with their lives," explained Williams.
With Captain Crow, Williams wanted to show his authoritativeness and command of the ship, as well as the more father-son feeling he has with Jacob. You can see him watching out for Jacob throughout the fight, even when he's fighting off a Brickleback tentacle. Then, when Jacob goes overboard, Captain Crow stops in his tracks and readies the ship to get him back.
Meanwhile, the focus on Jacob was not only to show that he's an exceptional hunter, but also that he's ready to put other people's lives ahead of his own. In one section of this fight scene, he sees that several people are in danger and quickly goes about helping them. He slashes tentacles, sends buoys into the ocean to keep overboard crew members afloat, and catches people falling through the air. It's an efficient and engaging way to see just how much Jacob cares about his crew mates.
Williams credits The Sea Beast's head of story Owen Chietsu Sullivan with coming up with that section, saying there was a hole in the middle of the sequence that they didn't know quite how to piece together until toward the end of the production. "A director doesn't make an action scene by themselves," said Williams. "I can't stress enough how collaborative of an endeavor it is."
SEE ALSO: 'The Sea Beast' review: Excellent seafaring adventure is 'Moby Dick' meets 'How to Train Your Dragon'Designing the Brickleback
Attack of the Brickleback. Credit: Netflix Another key element of this action sequence is having a formidable foe to square off against. The Brickleback is exactly that: a massive leviathan with tentacles, a hard exoskeleton, and a fearsome set of jaws. However, it isn't just a scary monster for the sake of having a scary monster — although Williams did say he wanted the monster to feel "prototypically scary." This monster was designed specifically with this fight in mind. After all, this sequence is our introduction to how the hunters operate. What kind of creature would allow us to see the full scope of their monster hunting methods, and of how the Inevitable works?
For example, having tentacles that move around gives us an opportunity to see how characters interact with threats coming from different directions. Strong jaws and a tail so big it can wrap around the ship allow the Brickleback to latch onto the Inevitable and give us some chances for close-range combat. The Brickleback's hard exterior lets it deflect the initial barrage of cannon fire, leading to the use of lances, bows, and arrows. According to Williams, The Sea Beast's naval consultant Gordon Laco, who was also a consultant for nautical drama Master and Commander, pointed out that fixed cannons would not be particularly useful against a very agile moving creature. That led to the use of swivel guns in the film instead.
From an animation and visual effects standpoint, the Brickleback presented its own set of challenges. VFX supervisor R. Stirling Duguid explained that he and his team needed to refine the texture of the Brickleback so it held up whether the shot was close-up or wide. The Brickleback also proved to be a difficult creature when it came to rigging due to its exoskeleton. For example, Duguid had to make sure none of the Brickleback's plates intersected in the wrong way. One wrong move could break the immersion.
For as much work as went into the Brickleback, we don't get a full glimpse of it for quite a long time. We see flashes of tentacles and plates, a shot of its eye, and an obscured view of its shape underwater. However, it isn't until the Brickleback breaches and crashes into the Inevitable that we see it in all its glory. This delayed reveal of the Brickleback was all by design — it gives us Jaws-style levels of anticipation, where we know we're about to see a monster, we just don't quite know what it looks like yet.
To keep the Brickleback's true scale and form a secret for as long as possible, Williams revealed that they ended up removing a shot from the movie. Originally, there was a shot from under the Inevitable that showed the Brickleback barreling toward the surface to upend the ship, but it gave too much away and upset the anticipation that had been building throughout. "The moment that the crew was surprised and knocked over... That was the right moment to really reveal the creature in all of its glory and get a sense of just how big it was," explained Williams.
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That's a lot of ropes. Credit: Netflix One of the elements of this fight scene that impressed me the most throughout was simply the fact that it was set on a ship out at sea. From the ocean to the sails and ropes onboard the Inevitable, it was clear that this fight scene would have been extremely complex to animate even if there wasn't a giant tentacled monster in the mix.
Duguid has a lot of experience working with water in VFX, from Castaway to Surf's Up. For The Sea Beast, which has 800 water shots, he and his team at Sony Pictures Imageworks streamlined the animation pipeline so that artists of all skill levels could contribute to the project. This involved having artists working on different water elements — like splashes, ambient foam, white water — in the same shot and then stitching their work together.
The Imageworks team ended up referring quite a bit to the Beaufort scale, which is a centuries-old scale used to gauge wind strength and describe the effect of different wind speeds on land or sea conditions. Duguid estimated that the Brickleback fight scene came to about a 5 on the Beaufort scale (which goes up to 12), although the displacement of water by the Brickleback and the Inevitable definitely complicated waters that were otherwise fairly calm.
The biggest challenge proved to be the environment of the Inevitable itself. "Essentially, it's like a moving environment, like a character as an environment," Duguid said. "We didn't have a concept for that in our pipeline; things were either environments or characters. For something that massive, we had to retool our rigging system and the way we handled environments."
Among the obstacles Duguid and Imageworks faced when it came to the Inevitable were the 5,000 ropes above deck. "Rope is very hard, traditionally, for animators, because it has a very distinct texture. You can see the coil. It's very obvious if a rope is stretching and looks like rubber, it just does not look right," said Duguid. "It maintains its structure."
To help tackle the daunting task of animating 5,000 ropes, Imageworks software lead Dan Sheerin developed a rig that would simulate a length of rope, the static portions where a character would be grabbing said rope, and the slack and stretch of the rope. So when you're watching thousands of ropes swinging around in the back of the Brickleback fight, just know that a ton of work and math went into making sure the film got those just right.
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The same can be said of the sails, whose movements had to be plotted meticulously based on wind direction in the scene. "Getting the sails to fill with wind in a way that felt authentic, that was something that became kind of a last-minute stall, and one of those things that was down to the wire in terms of, 'can we actually make this movie?'" said Williams. According to Duguid, the VFX team had to revisit the model of the Inevitable several times in order to get the sails to sit right.
In the end, it all paid off, with one wide shot of the Inevitable's sails proudly filling with wind holding an extra significance for Williams. "When I saw that shot, that was the day that we knew we could do it right," said Williams. "That was the moment when I knew, hallelujah, we can make this movie."
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The fight begins. Credit: Netflix Along with the excellent action and the technical prowess on display in the Brickleback fight scene, something that this set piece absolutely nails is its sense of rhythm. There's a real ebb and flow to the sequence, where we move from intense action to quiet anticipation and back to intense action again. There's a moment where the crew loses sight of the Brickleback before realizing it's below them. It's a great piece of calm before the storm, and it helps build suspense around the entire encounter.
"We definitely can control how much of that space we want to create in the quiet moments between the action," said The Sea Beast editor Joyce Arrastia. "I'm a big fan of that because I do think that when the attack finally happens, it makes it more dynamic... There's something about the quietness and peeling back a lot of the audio in those moments that helps with creating tension."
Arrastia said that the Brickleback encounter was the most worked-on scene in The Sea Beast, and that she was working on it until very late in the production process. As Williams mentioned in our interview, animation is incredibly iterative. In between storyboarding and previsualization and animation and final lighting, Arrastia would be re-working the sequence to re-establish its rhythm. "We were trimming this to the bitter end," said Arrastia.
You'd think the hardest part of editing this fight scene would involve the large monster or the fighting crew of the Inevitable, but Arrastia revealed that one of the biggest challenges she faced while editing was actually nailing the comedic beats involving the ship's bagpiper. The bagpiper is an unsung hero of the scene, providing killer jams for monster fighting. However, when said monster gets its tentacles on the bagpiper, he's flung around in the background, squealing bagpipes and all.
Jacob eventually saves the bagpiper, and there's a great beat where he lets out an awkward bagpipe toot upon seeing the Brickleback preparing to attack again. "That funny sound was the hardest, most challenging sound to find, and it ended up being just a whoopie cushion sound, just a fart sound," said Arrastia.
Arrastia admitted that there were times when she wanted to cut the bagpiper out, worried that it would ruin the tension, but that Williams pushed for it. In the end, it's safe to say that the bagpiper, and Arrastia's edit of him, is a great addition to the scene. It's a solid beat of levity in a sequence that's full of hardcore action beats. Arrastia appreciated this herself when watching the scene play out at the film's world premiere at the Annecy Film Festival. "That moment really paid off, and it made me realize, 'Oh, I'm so glad we kept it in.'"
Between small details like the bagpiper and the entire scene's epic scope, the Brickleback encounter is one of the most engaging film openings of the year. It's got everything you'd want from a monster fight: killer action, a dynamic rhythm, character-building moments, and a real sense of fun. The sequence is even more impressive once you understand the sheer amount of behind-the-scenes work it took to get the visuals and edit exactly right. Thanks to Williams, Arrastia, Duguid, and the entire Sea Beast team, this is a fight you'll want to dive into again and again.
The Sea Beast is now streaming on Netflix.
Topics Film Netflix Streaming