How Disney crafted water for its visually stunning 'Moana'

[MUSIC] A generation, this [UNKNOWN] island has been home to our family, but beyond our [UNKNOWN] a great danger is coming. Now, we see a lot of movies that have had water in it before, but this movie is around water all the time. I mean, what is One of the hardest things, first of all, about basically building water, but through effects. One of the things we knew about was we were gonna be out there on the water with our characters out on the open ocean all the time. We knew that the existing solutions that were out there on the market weren't exactly what we were gonna be looking for to achieve the results we wanted. So we developed our own simulation engine called Flash. It really combined the best of both worlds from a couple of existing simulation technologies out there, into something we thought could do better for us. And it proved out that we really got some tremendous results. You can see how we cut out a piece of the water, and that area is simulated and affected by the boat's motion. Outside of that The general mathematical equation for how an open ocean looks are reasonably well known. So we knew that we can get good looking results there. But then the challenge became, how do we blend those two regions together. And what really needed to be a seemless way. So here we see is just sort of a graphic depiction of what that is. When we started to get that together, this is going on back, about a year ago, we started to see some promising results as we tide in that simulated region into the broader ocean. If you're careful with this, you can see on the left hand side there's kind of a scene, back there where, there's a slight discontinuity between our simulation and the open ocean. This is a test to cover months after that. We're getting more promising results. We're starting to art direct the water to our liking route. You certainly want to evoke that incredible feeling of the South Pacific. And what the water makes you think of. This is an early test, you can see more like a bubbling up and down not entirely in sync the boat. But we're really encouraged by what we're getting from the water itself. I am. You are a Woo man. What? It's actually Maui shape shifter then we got the wind and sea hero of man. I interrupted from the top your of man. So anytime we weren't on the open ocean we tended to be on an island. When we weren't on an island we tended to be on the shoreline. You see the sand getting wet, you see as the water recedes the dampness gets absorbed back into the sand. All these things you experience everytime you go to the beach but you don't really think about them. So we always want control. We have to provide our artist in effects and lighting with many, many levels of controls so we can balance out the colors, we can balance out the movement of the water. In a way that is gonna give us the exact prefect we're all looking for. So this the various colors here represent those different mats and so forth. That we have control over individually and that comes from tuning up on our shot. But here you see a few different types of splashes. And we also have things like water spouts And here's the shot created from the foundation effects where Maui's getting tormented by the ocean. And the only thing created by the effects artist is just the splashes coming off of Maui. Cuz the water splash themselves. It's just part of this foundation effects library. Super effective for the movie. And really allowed us to add incredible production value to much of the movie in a very straight forward way. And again Focus on the really really big effects. [MUSIC]