Your SFX Primer

Continued from page: 1

Thursday, January 02, 2003

A Titanic Effort

In 1997, Titanic won an Oscar for achievements in visual effects. That may sound strange. Titanic has none of the high-speed chases or the dramatic action that is commonly associated with visual effect-heavy movies. It doesn’t quite fit the genre of a James Bond or a Spiderman. Then what was the award for?

The fact is that Titanic has some of the most realistic SFX working for it. But, unlike action movies where effects are the key to holding the audience, in Titanic, they are in the background, often lurking just at the periphery of the viewers’ vision. This adds that extra touch of realism to the movie, making it different from the rest of the SFX movies.

Take, for example, the dolphins that follow the Titanic at sea. Some of those dolphins were shot separately and then digitally composited in. And some of the dolphins, particularly the close ups, do not exist in real life. They exist only inside computers and are nothing more than CGI images, digitally created and composited in. Many of the crowd scenes are peopled by animations, created through motion capture.

Perhaps the most famous shot in the movie is the one of Jack and Rose at the bow of the ship—Rose with her arms stretched wide, Jack holding her, and both leaning perilously out into the ocean. The fact is that there was no real ship. They did not stand at the bow and, in all probability, the water that you see also did not exist. So, how was that dramatically romantic shot done? This is nothing but compositing, rotoscoping and green-screening at their best.

The actors acted out the sequence on a green-screen stage. The camera movements from this sequence were repeated on a miniature model of the Titanic (1/20 scale model). The two were then composited using software, with the effects of smoke and water thrown in. Remember, that the shooting is in 3D space, and there is movement in both the sequences (ship and actors). To seamlessly combine the two into one synchronized video, computerized rotoscoping comes into play.

Some of the other breathtaking computerized effects in the movie include the transitions between scenes, like from the grand ship at sea to the later day rusted sunken one towards the end.

Page(s)   1  2