I was hired at Digital Domain initially to texture paint a junk ship called the Hai Peng. At that time the studio would leave Matte Paintings to the end of a project. I developed a Zbrush pipeline for displacement maps for the highly detailed ship, using a combination of photo extraction and hand sculpting. 

A highlight was traveling to Palmdale north of Los Angeles where the studio was shooting action sequences on an Air force base. Production had built a scale replica of the Black Pearl and a partial set of the Hai Peng mounted on a big gimbal rig to simulate the ship rocking and eventually tipping over. I spent an entire day shooting reference imagery of all the props and details for our 3d asset and spoke with the weapon master who showed me the amazing prop swords and guns from the the film and the incredibly hand detailed maps and books they had created. The day we visited they were filming explosions and debris with background extras for the final ship battle.  I was surprised to discover that most of the 'cannon' were incredibly realistic foam replicas, built to save the actors from serious injury. During filming foam wooden plank chunks and splinters were fired from air cannons to provide 'safe' in camera debris. 

Towards the end of the project I was asked by the vfx supervisor to provide several concepts of the giant waterfall that marked the Ends of the earth. I layered in imagery from Niagara falls and shots of space. 

Finally I designed a 2.5 projected Matte environment Arctic ocean environment for a sequence of shots. I built this in Nuke as a virtual environment we could move around in real time, adjusting iceberg sun and iceberg placement for maximum visual interest. I then presented several shot options to Gore Verbinski, the films director for approval.