![]() ![]() For the same reasons I love bands like Panic! At the Disco, Fall Out Boy, and Jimmy Eat World, I love Davy Jones. Here is my Davy Jones manifesto, courtesy of my 13-year-old self: I would travel all seven seas to be with this octopus man. (At my obsession’s peak, I forced all my friends to watch The Girl in the Café at a sleepover, which they resigned themselves to.)īut why was a man with an octopus for a face so appealing? The reasons, as it happens, are many. From the moment I saw his piercing blue eyes in the first trailer for Dead Man’s Chest and heard his nasally Scottish accent, I had found the pirate for me.Īs related in my conversation with my Polygon peers about our respective opinions about the most smoochable Pirates characters, my obsession with Jones - in itself the subject of a chicken-or-egg debate over whether my Nighy crush came first or if Jones was the reason for it - grew to such a fever pitch that my friends’ birthday gift to me was a poster of pictures of Bill Nighy and a Davy Jones head-topped pen. ![]() Not the nautical superstition, but the tentacle-faced captain of the Flying Dutchman played by Bill Nighy (with the aid of a lot of CGI work) in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. When I was but a wee 13-going-on-14-year-old, my biggest crush was Davy Jones. Grab your cutlass and hoist the colors: here be Polygon’s take on all things PotC. Trying to do everything in post is hardly conducive to the process.With the Pirates of the Caribbean movies more accessible than ever, and a summer season void of blockbusters, this month we’re diving deep into Disney’s swashbuckling series. But if these details prove anything, it's that terrific CGI creations like Davy Jones are a true group effort. Knoll, Hickel, and their fellow VFX supervisors Charles Gibson and Allen Hall would go on to take home the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects thanks to "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," and it was a victory well-deserved. Hickel spent months of labor-intensive work turning Nighty's on-set antics into what you see in the finished product. That is, after an animated team led by Hal T. Another benefit: Using Industrial Light & Magic's mo-cap system freed Gore Verbinski to employ a lot more hand-held camera-work than he would've been able to otherwise, making the scenes with Jones feel all the more natural and not pre-planned. ![]() In a 2006 interview with Entertainment Weekly, visual effects supervisor John Knoll revealed that director Gore Verbinski shot his Davy Jones-centric "Pirates" films, "Dead Man's Chest" and "At World's End," so that, "when we're in tight, if the CGI doesn't turn out to work well, be able to use Bill's real eyes." However, thanks partly to Verbinski's practical-heavy approach, Knoll and his team were able to create believable CGI eyes and a whole lot more for Jones using Nighy as a reference only.Īs silly as Nighy surely felt in his "bizarre Devo jumpsuit" (as Knoll also called it) with dots on his face, his gear was essential in aiding the films' visual effects artists in tracking his body movements and facial mannerisms for the CGI Davy Jones during post-production. On the topic of Davy Jones' eyes - as convincing as they are, they're not actually Nighy's. Even as his eyes well up with tears as thick as the slime coating his skin, you find yourself feeling oddly emotional towards this all-too-peculiar sea-man. He makes random popping noises with his lips, cocks his head at strange times, and at one point raises an eyebrow like he's the mischief-making hero in a DreamWorks animated movie. Nighy's turn as the once-mortal buccaneer in the " Pirates of the Caribbean" films - warped into a twisted cross between an octopus, a human, and a crab by his years of servitude as captain of the Flying Dutchman - is enthrallingly quirky. It's not just the milestone visual effects that continue to impress, either. ![]()
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