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MillimeterTrue Lies: Titanic Proves Nothing Is Unthinkable
Jan 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Michael Mallory
The Captain calmly stands watch as the great iron hull of the Titanic pierces the placid surface of the ocean. The deck around him teems with life: people duck into and out of doors, men shake hands, a woman picks up her baby, two boys play soccer, there is even a deck-board fistfight. And not one bit of it-the ship, the sky, the water, the seabirds, or the people-is real. This entire world has been created inside the computer.
Titanic, the long-awaited $200 million epic jointly produced by Paramount and 20th Century Fox, is unlike any other film from writer/director and effects guru James Cameron. Cameron's previous pictures, including The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, have raged with fanciful, cutting-edge digital effects. The morphing conceit he created for T2 swept across the effects and animation marketplace like a minor tidal wave. By contrast, much of the innovative work created for Titanic by the pixel wizards at Digital Domain, Cameron's Venice, California, based effects shop, will fly right by the average moviegoer. This is animation and effects that set a new level for photorealism.
While some critics have cried indulgence, building an entire ship, crew and passengers, sea, and sky in cyberspace was necessary to fulfill the director's vision, which was in turn predicated on audience expectations. "We needed to get camera moves and helicopter shots of the ship at sea, based on the fact that in our consciousness now, we've seen a ship at sea before, we've seen cruise footage," says Digital Domain's Rob Legato, visual effects supervisor for Titanic. "There is actually no rig you could create to do a repeatable pass for everyone standing on the deck."
The digital Titanic was built in large part by D2's Fred Tepper, who worked on an NT platform, rendering the ship in NewTek's Lightwave, and was textured by Richard Payne, who used the production's 45-foot practical model as guide. The result appears in roughly 60 shots, most frequently as extensions to the full-sized deck mock-up Cameron had built in Rosarita, Mexico, a task that required much digital finessing.
"There's not a very exact match between a movie set Titanic and the scale model on the stage," notes Mark Lasoff, digital effects supervisor for the picture. "They were quite different, so you would massage the digital hull to fit the particular extensions that we needed."
These digital extensions were seamlessly joined to the live action with the help of D2's proprietary camera tracking software, Autotrack. For three shots, though, the complete ship is used as the principal actor. D2's digital wizardry was also employed to combine model shots of submarine pods examining the wreck of the Titanic with shots of the actual ship filmed by Cameron, using a special underwater camera probe he helped to design.
One of Titanic's most notable innovations is its use of photorealistic digital water. In order to create a thoroughly convincing ocean, D2 hired a Burbank company called Arete, which created still mock-ups of water for Waterworld.
"Because they studied water so much, this software they created factors in wind speed and time of day and how much the ocean absorbs the water, how much it reflects off it, how much each reflection reflects the peaks and values of the wave next to it, so if you do all these calculations you will get realistic-looking [water]," says Legato. What the software was not, however, was a production tool.
"It took months and months of our people working with them to create a tool that could be used," Legato says, "and now I can say, 'okay, it's three in the afternoon, I want this particular sky, the ship's going this way; I want to change the light during the shot because I changed the light on the model, and here's the motion-control movement I shot on the stage.' I have all this control." Control, though, came at tremendous computation time, according to Legato. "Some frames could take up to 12 hours if you let them." (The production employed a 160 CPU DEC Alpha renderfarm, running Digital Domain's internal compositing system, called Nuke.)
What is bound to place Titanic in film textbooks, however, is its pioneering use of "synthespians," completely digital extras, stunt players, and-in certain shots that were logistically impossible to capture with a camera-fully recognizable stand-ins for the film's leads, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
For the shipboard business extras, D2 technicians motion captured about 40 people, performing commonplace movements individually or in groups (Legato's young son was the basis for the deck-side soccer players). Clothing was texture-mapped and faces were scanned in, but CG animators, working in Softimage, were still required to spend weeks on each character to refine the movement.
"You get to about the 50-to-70 percent point very quickly, and from that you have to take very talented animators to take out the error and rip stuff out that might need wholesale replacement," says Lasoff. "It requires a painstaking amount of animation, but for that price you get very nuanced human subtlety that would be extremely hard for an animator to come up with from scratch." This action was then replicated, redressed and time-offset all over the ship to create literally hundreds of moving, camera-approachable figures. The shadows of each moving figure were rendered in Mental Ray.
For static bits, such as lying in a deck chair, to the more extreme stunt work, such as 300-foot falls into the water, the characters were free-hand animated. For the spectacular, Oscar-assuring sequence of the ship's break-up and sinking (the most populous scenes in the film, using some 1,000 digital extras), stunt coordinator Simon Crane was invited to work with the digital artists, and asked to come up with spectacular bits of action he had always wanted to see on screen, but knew were impossible.
In addition to its other achievements, Titanic seems destined to become known, at least within the industry itself, as the film that finally reached the ceiling in terms of technology.
"We've really come to the end of the line where you can recreate anything, given enough time and money," states Legato. "If you want to do a film in a year, you might not be able to do certain things, but if you have enough time and money, you can do anything."
Even if people do not know that James Cameron's latest effects-travaganza, Titanic, is a Romeo and Juliet-ish love story set against the spectacle of history's greatest maritime tragedy, even if they do not know that the plot runs on parallel time tracks, one in 1912, one in 1997, they probably know the film's price tag.
Titanic's titanic cost, which conservative (i.e., studio) estimates place at the $200 million mark, has been publicly hashed over for months. But for those who worked on the project, the controversy is moot, and for a very simple reason.
"People equate that $200 million to solving world hunger, when it was actually earmarked for making more movies," states Rob Legato, Titanic's visual effects supervisor. "You're not going to do anything else with it. That money is there to make movies."
In fact, looking at it from a moviegoer's standpoint, Titanic is the deal of the year. "According to Jim Cameron, it's pretty much a bargain at $7.50," Legato states. "You're spending $7.50 for a movie that costs $60 million and $7.50 for a movie that costs $200 million. With a $200 million movie, you get a lot more for your buck."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.