"We always wanted at least one piece of 'reality' to work with," says co-visual effects supervisor Ed Hirsh. "Sometimes, it was a single plane, other times one ship. With this as a basis, we would figure out how to extend the reality and make our work indistinguishable from reality." Considering the picture's historical significance, that was no simple undertaking. Many of those viewing the final cut of Pearl Harbor have seen newsreel footage, the massive amount of printed material, or have even been near or on some of the real vessels that ILM was tasked to create. "Keeping that in mind, we still had to make our own calls. There is quite a difference between the real and cinematic realities.

"As David Nowell will attest to with his constant struggle in capturing the live footage of the planes, what people think they see and what they really see are far different. Just as David did, we were in a constant discovery stage when we were supplementing the aerial footage. As we placed our planes in the air, we were always looking at performance - how much wiggle and crab [in the craft's lift], the currents and colors that would best work in the environment and other little details.

"There were certain pet aspects that we needed to concentrate on, that would make the shots real," he continues. "Michael insisted on and constantly pushed us to watch the quality of reflections in the glass and on the metal of the planes themselves. That is what would make things real. It wasn't enough to copy the planes themselves -we also had to make our planes live on the screen."

Sometimes, Hirsh and crew (along with visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig and associate visual effects supervisor Ben Snow) created CGI planes, or occasionally utilized models in a miniature set. "We just finished a shot of the hero's B-25 doing a hard landing as he runs out of gas over China," Hirsh explains. "We used a large practical model that was 1/6th scale. It was about ten feet long with a ten-foot wing span. Our job was to make it look like the real plane was crashing at 90 miles-per-hour." The ILM team ran their model at about 40 miles-per-hour, shooting their VistaVision camera at 72 frames-per-second on Kodak's SFX 200 emulsion. "Michael loves to move the camera, so the shot was designed to capture the plane as it hits the ground, skids, bounces and turns and stops a foot from the camera - with the camera in motion. To light this on our stage and with our blue screen, we placed ten 20Ks raking across the set and added a lot fill light. This matched what was shot on the post-crash set at the Disney ranch."

"What Michael wanted, and what is missing in most 'war' movies, is that sense of scope," Hirsh expounds. "They all have a few big shots, but everything else is small. Here, we were asked to generate a lot of big shots in a lot of different geographical configurations. Michael and Randall Wallace based the script on the big attack - that was a key element to the whole story. Michael talked to veterans and survivors. We all read as many sources as possible. He came up with the concepts like the blowing up of the Arizona and the Oklahoma rolling over. We even had a shot where we had to create the Japanese pilots' point-of-view as they flew down battle ship row.

"For all these shots, we had pre-visualized animatics. They mapped out where the locations where, the positions of the ships, everything we needed. As the helicopter pilots flew over the location to be used, they had buoys marking where the actual ships would be. We then took that reality back to ILM and started adding boats, then replaced the water around them, making the water as choppy as it would be in reality. Then we worked on the splashes, adding fire to the land, and taking out what shouldn't be there [modern buildings] and adding what was there but destroyed.

"The shear dimension of the shots is what is staggering about our work on this picture. Michael wanted major scope. So we were constantly making the shots bigger and revealing more elements of the tragedy. Sure, sometimes it was relatively simple shots like establishing a harbor full of boats before the attack. This is the shot where our heroine arrives on a ferry crossing the harbor. We had a practical boat, with the actors in it. Then, we had to add 40 other boats that were supposed to be in the harbor at the time. Each one had to have it's own detail and dimension.

"Then there were the more complicated shots where we had to build on almost nothing. We would take the elements shot by our helicopter cameras [with the buoys for markings] and begin building. We added boats, then planes, at times, people walking around [via motion capture] and in some shots we then had smoke and then flames. Yes, the smoke came before the flames. That is probably the biggest thing that we had to do on the whole project. The huge volume of smoke is staggering. It is an ephemeral element. Everyone knows what smoke looks like, so we had to make it real.

"Whether or not they know the specifics, people can see [and feel] the difference between real smoke and artificial. They may not 'know' that smoke at the top moves slower than smoke at the bottom, that the edges of the top are softer than the other edges, and that the big shapes are internal. They just know that smoke is part of a complexity and chaos associated with mass destruction. To get this element right, we had to lay in the smoke portions, then fit the fire that generated the smoke into the dimensions of the shot after that element satisfied us."

"Because Michael wanted everything as real as possible, he shot a lot of 'modern' location footage, asking us to take things out when we were working on the shots. We painted out the big elements - like modern hotels. Then, instead of wasting time with so many details, we looked at things like the quality of light on structures that weren't there in Hawaii in the 1940s. Sometimes, we would 'darken down' some of the elements. Other times, if we knew there would be massive explosions that would catch the audience's eye, we would concentrate on that. If we'd attacked every element in a shot, we'd have been at this project for years, and spent an awful lot of money doing it. When doing a project like Pearl Harbor, you are often asked to make a judgement call. Half the battle is knowing when to push something and when to let it go. It is not about being sloppy, but rather about putting your creativity to work where it really counts."