Our Flag Means Death got a crucial tech boost from Avatar 2

Season 2 of David Jenkins’ pirate comedy-romance-drama Our Flag Means Death has finally premiered on Max, with an opening three-episode arc that’s guaranteed to get the series’ fandom buzzing. This third episode ends with a scene that seems to have been designed specifically to encourage the fan art crowds who’ve made the series an obsession. Polygon talked to the series’ VFX supervisor, David Van Dyke, about what went into shooting that sequence — and how James Cameron’s Avatar : The Way of WaterHelped.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for season 2, episode 3 of Our Flag Means Death.]

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At the end of episode 3, Ed “Blackbeard” Teach (Taika Waititi) is in limbo after being assaulted and nearly killed by his crew. There, he meets his former captain Benjamin Hornigold (another of the series’ historical pirate characters, played by Mark Mitchinson), who tries to help him through his emotional crisis over being abandoned by Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby). Except Hornigold mostly helps by pointing out Blackbeard’s failings, then tying a stone to his waist and throwing him off a cliff into the sea — where he sees a vision of Stede as a fish-tailed merman, coming to save him.

“Just so you know, Rhys and Taika did very well underwater,” Van Dyke told Polygon about shooting the scene. “Rhys is not an Olympic synchronized swimmer, but he’s a strong swimmer. The two were equally comfortable under water. They both did a really good job of being mermen.”

Van Dyke claims that he had been asked initially if he would be able to do the scene using CG versions for the men. This was due to safety concerns. He explained that it was possible, “but that’ll cost millions and millions of dollars, and we don’t really have that.”

In the end, he shot it practically. Season 1 Our Flag Means Death The first season was filmed on a Los Angeles soundstage, while the second moved production to New Zealand. That gave Van Dyke a lot of advantages in terms of shooting natural backdrops to use on the production’s giant virtual environment screen, and in using experienced crews from past special-effects-heavy productions, from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies to James Cameron’s Avatar movies.

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“There were definitely a few pieces that were serendipitously to our advantage,” Van Dyke says. “New Zealand was where they shot a lot of Avatar stuff, and there just so happens to be an enormous tank on the lot. There are a bunch of Avatar crew who are SCUBA certified, because they’ve been shooting in that tank forever. This was not something we had to figure out — we didn’t have to send a bunch of grips and lighting technicians off to SCUBA school. So they were there, they had really amazing underwater photography teams, and obviously a really good stunt team that was able to train up Taika and Rhys to make sure the scene was working.”

Van Dyke points to New Zealand’s thriving mermaid freediving community as a boon when it came to designing Darby’s merman outfit. “There are a lot of incredible mer-tails out there,” he said. “We were able to take those, and [costume designer Gypsy Taylor] and her team brought them together to make these beautiful physical pieces, so Rhys was able to actually sell it and do the performance underwater.”

Van Dyke said that the sequence began with the cliff jump sequence. This sequence used a lot more CG effects than the underwater scenes. “That cliff sequence was a great culmination of effects, merging physical photography and our LED wall, because you can’t really put those two guys on a thousand-foot cliff,” he said. “The insurance alone would be out of control. Also, we’re not really in the business of having people fall to their deaths.”

Photo: David Van Dyke/Max

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The cliff sequence began with sequences shot off New Zealand’s Bethells Beach, using drones to capture images looking inward from the ocean and photogrammetry of a specific ledge for production designer Ra Vincent and the art department to reproduce in the studio.

“The wide shots use production plates of those cliffs, and the tighter shots use photography we shot specifically to build out the stitching of the cliff sequence,” Van Dyke said. “Hornigold and Blackbeard are standing on a cliff set. The actual cliff plates were used to show the ocean. [the drop would be]. Then he falls into the ocean, falls into our tank.”

The next shot was to have Waititi pull himself deep under water with a stone that was tied around his waist. This part of scene was more practical and conventional than the other parts of the sequence.

“The tank is massive, but it’s not 300 feet deep. It’s pretty darn big, but it’s never big enough, as they say,” Van Dyke says. “So when Taika is being tugged by the rock, we actually shot that sideways. You can get more distance in your shot by turning the camera around. The problem is the bubbles — they should be streaming off him and then rising to the surface, but if you’re going sideways, they’re going to come off him and then go up, perpendicular to him. So we took over with CG to make sure our bubbles were traveling toward where the surface was supposed to be.”

Van Dyke confirms that the CG used in the underwater scene was mainly to conceal the lighting and rigging required to film it. “Anytime you’re shooting anything underwater, there’s gonna be a lot of gear. There’s no way you can get around that. So we’re making sure we have [convincing deep-sea]The bubbles and lighting. And then there’s his performance — that’s a real performance.”

Van Dyke’s biggest challenge was to make Darby, as well as Waititi look good. “Taika’s wig — I was amazed that thing stayed on so long. It’s a long shoot. All weekend, he shot all day. The things continued. It’s a heavy weight. And Rhys is really working underwater, so his tail has to be working, so it all feels seamless.”

In the shot that appears to have been created by CG, both men are floating in the ocean and facing each other over a vast void. Van Dyke claims that he only used a small amount of CG in this shot to cover the walls of the tank.

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“In that case, we were not shooting sideways,” he said. “It’s essentially a locked shot. The goal was to get them in the correct depth under water and make sure that the light shafts above them worked properly. We don’t have to track as much, we don’t have all these moving elements, we don’t have to worry about where the bubbles are going. That one was really just about cleaning up the tank, doctoring out the sides of the shot, where we can see the water receding into blackness, then giving the base of the tank true depth, so it really feels like they’re suspended a hundred feet below the surface.

“Obviously, a fair amount of CGI and visual effects had to go into it. But at the same time, it was a moment where we really needed to let the story take over, and have the visual effects just get out of the way, man.”

Three episodes are available. Our Flag Means DeathSeason 2 is now available on Max.

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