Never make a film with kids or animals and never set your film on a boat.

These are words for filmmakers to live by due to the high level of difficulty each one offers.

Kids and dogs must be trained and their children. high level of difficulty each one offers.

Kids and dogs must be trained and they're easily tired or distracted and their performances

rarely seem authentic.

Boats on the other hand are their own unique complication.

Their movement is affected by forces that no filmmaker can control

and therefore you're fighting to keep your angles and lighting correct

as your set moves under your feet. You have safety problems,

you have a very limited set of tools for stabilizing and lighting shots and moving your

camera and your cast and crew can get seasick.

Maybe consider writing a nice story about a soldier in an army and save yourself some trouble?

No.

Evil combat is something of an obsession for us on this show in part because of the challenges inherent to doing it right and in part because of the fascinating limitations the sea imposes on combat itself.

As new technologies like CGI boats and drone cameras emerge to reduce some of the barriers to filming on the water,

I'm hoping we get more and more of these films.

But even with these advancements, it's still much easier to set a naval warfare film on a modern naval vessel.

Rare is the film that allows us to explore the finer points of naval combat prior to World War II.

Once in a blue moon, a master and commander comes along and gives us a glimpse into a more blessed timeline,

where movies like this are made all the time, but in our

doomed reality, Master and Commander, despite being a perfect film, was not financially successful

enough to spawn its deserved cavalcades of sequels and images. was not Hollywood, and one of the most successful films to ever be released there is a film about a naval

...