In Brian Duffield’s adaptation of Daniel Kraus’ survival thriller Whalefall, Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) is swallowed by a sperm whale while scuba diving and has to desperately fight to escape its gullet. It’s a wild concept, but Kraus and production designer Ramsey Avery sell it by making Jay’s plight as realistic as possible. That involved building a 35-foot-long whale head and four different stomach sets that could be jostled, climbed, and filled with goop simulating digestive juices.
That means Austin’s body is responding to real action in real time.” One set was built on a rig to create a rocking motion, while another was part of a cylinder akin to a washing machine so Austin could be tossed around. Another was constructed on a seesaw so it could be tipped to soak Abrams in methylcellulose, an organic slime that simulated the whale’s stomach acid. Puppets were used for the giant squid that grapples Jay, pulling him into the whale’s mouth.
Giant kiddie pools were set up to keep the stage from flooding. It's even harder than snow. Water goes wherever water wants to go.
You cannot really truly control water.” Filming was a claustrophobic affair. Abrams, two cameras, a sound boom, and the puppeteer operating the tentacles all had to be in a six-by-eight-foot space. Rocheron added extra tentacles with VFX because not everything could physically fit in the space, which was based around scientific measurements of an 80-foot sperm whale.
We did multiple scale tests of the squid to see which was the right size that worked best in the stomach with a guy who was the size of Austin.” While he was building the set in New Zealand, Avery consulted with Dr. Joy Reidenberg, a comparative anatomy research scientist and Society for Marine Mammalogy fellow. They would meet for 6 a.m.
Zoom calls, where Reidenberg would take Avery step by step through the whale dissections she’d performed and explain how their bodies worked. She guided Avery and his team through the construction of a six-foot-long whale tongue and the teeth that Jay climbs to try to escape. Avery also consulted with marine biologist Dr.
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