{"id":936307,"date":"2026-10-22T00:56:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T00:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/936307\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T00:56:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T00:56:13","slug":"whalefall-production-designer-ramsey-avery-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/936307\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Whalefall’ Production Designer Ramsey Avery Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first person swallowed by the rogue sperm whale in \u201cWhalefall<\/a>\u201d wasn\u2019t grieving diver Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams<\/a>), searching the waters off the coast of Northern California for the remains of his recently deceased father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). It was production designer Ramsey Avery, who was responsible for building a series of sets that couldn\u2019t be easier to write into Final Draft, and couldn\u2019t be harder to realize in real life.<\/p>\n

INT. Whale.<\/p>\n

Ramsey had worked with director Brian Duffield<\/a> and director of photography Aaron Morton on a previous project, \u201cNo Will Save You,\u201d and some of the folks at WETA<\/a> on \u201cThe Rings of Power\u201d series. But they all knew it would take a huge team effort and a combination of practical and digital effects in order to create the interior of the sperm whale that takes Jay on a ride both literal and spiritual. Avery and the \u201cWhalefall<\/a>\u201d team would eventually craft five different stomach sets (some of which crossed the Pacific Ocean to get from Weta Workshops in New Zealand to the shooting tanks in Los Angeles) plus a mouth, an esophagus, and a puppet of a giant squid.<\/p>\n

\"THE<\/a> \"Morgan<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t get challenges like this. And so it just was a tremendous thing. I mean, pretty much everybody came at it with a sense of, \u2018Oh, this is gonna kill us, but we\u2019re gonna have fun while we\u2019re doing it anyway,\u2019\u201d Avery told IndieWire. \u201cI was really worried because here I am [in the research process] clicking through images of the insides of grotesque stomachs and being like, \u2018They\u2019re never gonna make this movie.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But no amount of tripe samples, anatomical explorations of the corpses of beached whales, nor \u200aorthoscopic images of people sticking cameras down the throats of orcas and dolphins and horses and cows could scare off the \u201cWhalefall\u201d team, which conducted four different camera tests to scale up and calibrate the sets they\u2019d need.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the long run, you want the emotions [of the story] to come through. So the stomach has to become a character. It\u2019s not just about the mechanics of it but how you make things activate. The WETA team, in particular a guy by the name of Ben Milson, was really instrumental in terms of figuring out what motion you need to convey different emotions inside the whale,\u201d Avery said. \u201cAt the same time, it was practice. Try this. Try that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"WHALEFALL,\u2018Whalefall\u2019\u00a920th Century Studios\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

The team practiced over four different camera tests, scaling up the stomach sets (made of silicone, latex, and also a fair bit of upholstery) each time and adding more variability in how each could be used. Each set was rigged to move differently, from a large gimbal that could achieve the big swings of the whale rising or diving, to a washing machine-type rig designed to spin, to a rig calibrated to create very specific, fine, and almost emotional movements in close-up.<\/p>\n

Some of the stomach sets were able to be struck from the outside to create additional tension or even act against Abram\u2019s distress, whether big spasms caused by the full weight of a grip throwing themselves against it or smaller shivers caused by tools jury-rigged out of plywood and pool noodles. \u201cEach step of the way, we learned something and figured out something a little bit more, and came to a way that this is how we can get the camera in. And by the way, sometimes there\u2019s two cameras. There\u2019s two cameras, a boom, and an actor.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a feat to get all of that in. But the two cameras, boom, as well as all the LED strings used to light the stomach interior can\u2019t stay there. The practical challenge of creating a realistic shooting environment for this truly wild and singular experience is one thing. What Avery and the VFX team realized, though, is that they\u2019d need to digitize not just each environment, but every moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cNormally what we do when we build a set, and they have to scan it for visual effects [is] we\u2019ll film<\/a> out the scene, and then they\u2019ll come in, and they\u2019ll just scan the whole set, and that\u2019s that. But that didn\u2019t work because the set kept changing. The set\u2019s always moving,\u201d Avery said.<\/p>\n

Enter production VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron, who was part of the early camera tests in order to figure out how to take the guts of what Avery was designing and render it in a digital environment. \u201c\u200aWe had like a four or five-week period where we were kind of all on other jobs and working part-time trying to figure this out,\u201d Avery said.<\/p>\n

\"WHALEFALL,\u2018Whalefall\u2019 \u00a920th Century Studios\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

What Rocheron figured out was an infrared binocular camera that could attach to the other cameras that allowed him to capture a moving 3D scan of the set that matched every single shot. \u201cHe invented the camera, he wrote the code, and figured out a way to capture that constant motion. So we had both the actor with the right light on his face interacting actually realistically, physically, entirely with a moving set that was always the right size and shape, and the right color, and the right finishes,\u201d Avery said.<\/p>\n

Rocheron could translate all of that information into WETA\u2019s digital pipeline, and enhance what had been shot, not just by painting out lights or a boom mic, but by creating that extra slimy, organic, alive quality of living tissue. Rocheron and his team painted some samples of the sets with \u201c\u200aeither ginger ale or seltzer water, I don\u2019t remember which, and lit it in black light, and that gave him bioluminescent drips. Then he could use that as the texturing to get the bioluminescence kind of falling off the walls,\u201d Avery said.<\/p>\n

There are some shots that are really just the stomach sets Avery built, but the overall effect and the emotional stress of being inside the whale is achieved through a fantastic melding of the practical and the digital, always retaining the tactile qualities of the former while adding scope and a kind of seamlessness with the latter. That\u2019s the kind of collaboration that makes effects work, and it came about because, according to Avery, it wasn\u2019t whales but people all the way down.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was the first guinea pig and the WETA guys were all in there, too, figuring out the action and pushing and pulling [the stomach] and all that stuff,\u201d Avery said. \u201cWe all worked together as a team. It was a truly collaborative effort, and we just worked well together \u2014 and that was across two continents, you know. That was great.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhalefall\u201d is now playing in theaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first person swallowed by the rogue sperm whale in \u201cWhalefall\u201d wasn\u2019t grieving diver Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams),…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":936308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,1689,344,31405,179583,351371],"class_list":["post-936307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-top-of-the-line","tag-weta-fx","tag-whalefall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/936308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}