To evoke the harrowing realities of war for the three main characters and their fellow Marines, it was essential that the production team of The Pacific create as realistic a setting as possible, especially in the battle scenes.
To achieve this without endangering the actors was the responsibility of stunt coordinators Charlie Croughwell and Mitch Deans, special effects supervisor Joss Williams and visual effects supervisor John Sullivan.
Croughwell and Deans worked closely with the directors on the staging of battle scenes, keeping safety the top priority. "The stunts and the actors and special ability extras [extras who attended boot camp with the principal cast] are coordinated to make sure that everything looks as visually pleasing as possible, and is as safe as possible,"says Deans.
"That's my key role here." What on screen appears to be a chaotic battle scene is in reality a well-choreographed performance, with actors nimbly hitting their marks between explosions.
Croughwell adds, "In many films you use a stunt double for a lot of this. With this one, we wanted to try to utilize the actors as much as possible, which is great, because they were all young and in great shape, and they were all willing to do it."
The stunt coordinators also collaborated with special effects supervisor Joss Williams, whose team was in charge of rigging the squibs, the small charges that cause the bullet holes in costumes and sets.
The team took special pains to ensure that the scale of the stunt and explosion was an authentic reaction to the specific artillery used.
The actual rigging and detonation of the myriad explosions were Williams' domain, which also required sophisticated planning to ensure the safety of the cast while creating a sense of peril.
Many of Williams' crew were veterans of the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers and had worked on various other projects together. Williams gives an example of one set-up, explaining, "We're doing 15 explosions in the background alone.
"Then, through the mid-ground and into the foreground, we'd have something in the region of 50 to 60 explosions, including our water banks, all going off in one take. That needs a huge amount of choreography."
Among numerous other effects, visual effects supervisor Sullivan multiplied the number of troops disembarking from landing craft to attack the beach through the use of computer-generated imagery, creating a force ten times its actual size.
Barges were enlarged to look like landing ship tanks (LSTs), which would carry sizeable quantities of vehicles, cargo and troops to shore.
Sullivan explains that the barges were filmed with working period amtracs "[amphibious tractors], which would have troops and guns on them, disembarking to attack the beach.
I used both computer-generated imagery and also cloned what I shot to create the appearance of a fleet and a background with many, many LSTs discharging amtracs for the attack."
The goal of Sullivan's work was to "lend a tremendous sense of reality to what we're doing, to make something that is accurate to what the true war in the Pacific was."
Tagged in The Pacific