Anna Daniels
As Brzeski told Looper, the production design team certainly put a ton of effort into building physical scenery, but they also implemented “proxy scenery that was effected digitally.” He explained, “I mean practical in a sense up to a point and then we extend it […] and especially the effects and explosions and all that kind of stuff are more handled in the digital sense now.”
When building a world digitally, especially one that’s underwater, it’s important to carry out what’s known as a proof of concept — a realization of a particular method one plans to utilize in order to assess if it will actually work. The folks at Warner Bros. were especially concerned with things going smoothly, and there was a decent amount of pressure to ensure that Aquaman‘s digital effects looked as natural as possible.
“We kind of did that in Aquaman too, because there were a lot of issues with, ‘How are you going to do all this water?’ That, too, had to be kind of worked out. Again, it’s been done, but it’s not [been] done for a whole movie […] Would it fall apart after a certain point?” said Brzeski. “Whey were scared to death at Warner Bros. about Aquaman, and rightfully so. I was kind of scared, too. I mean we knew how to do scenery, but, to have guys swim under the ocean in a convincing sort of way? It took a lot of rigging. [It was] a ballet on wires, basically.”
Thankfully, as Brzeski noted, a stunt team in Australia that helped out on Aquaman built “a whole stage just so people could learn how to swim in there.”
Written by: Looper
