Gore Verbinski's second Pirates of the Caribbean film handed Industrial Light & Magic two problems at once: a lead villain who had to be fully digital, and a sea monster big enough to take the Black Pearl down with it.
Davy Jones was built around a CG beard of some forty living tentacles, each with collision detection and friction simulation so they never intersected and could carry the performance. Bill Nighy played the part on set in a grey motion capture suit, shot with a new portable single-camera system rather than on a multi-camera stage, and his performance was fitted to a full-body CG model. Even the eyes were rendered, with lip sync hand animated afterward. For the Kraken attack, ILM rigged a near full-scale ship with blue-screen pylons standing in for tentacles, then composited miniature masts, sails, actors, water and slime around the crushed hull. The show ran on roughly 7,000 render-farm processors and moved close to a petabyte of data in a day.
The work took the 2006 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and six categories at the 5th VES Awards, among them Outstanding Performance by an Animated Character for Davy Jones and Best Single Visual Effect of the Year for the Flying Dutchman sequence.