Production
Most close-up shots involving limited movement by Willy, such as when Willy is in the trailer and the sequences involving Willy swimming in the open water, make use of an animatronic stand-in. Walt Conti, who supervised the effects for the whales, estimated that half of the shots of the orca used animatronic orcas (each full-sized whale needed over 250 horsepower of hydraulics). Conti stated that the fewer movements of a real Orca actually made things difficult in some ways for him and his crew; they had to concentrate on smaller nuances in order to make the character seem alive. The most extensive uses of CGI in the film is the climax of the film, filmed in Astoria, Oregon, where Willy jumps over Jesse and into the wild. All stunts with the whale were performed by the young orca trainer Justin Sherman.
Read more about this topic: Free Willy
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)