Prior to the moment when the R.M.S. Titanic grazes an enormous iceberg, which cuts a mortal wound in the "unsinkable" ship's side below the waterline, director James Cameron and Digital Domain's visual effects supervisor, Rob Legato, employed an ethereal, reverential approach to the sequence. Legato used the same technique with brilliant results when orchestrating the launch and pre-disaster space sequences in Apollo 13. But, as in that film, things changed aboard Titanic once disaster struck. "The sinking of the Titanic basically became a full-on action sequence", Legato says, promising audiences will be holding their breath throughout the gut-wrenching ordeal. "You've never seen anything like this before."

Shots of the approaching iceberg looming over the ship were composited by artists at Light Matters (Volcano). The catastrophic rendezvous itself was achieved using a large-scale miniature of the iceberg which was physically rammed into a lead miniature of the side of the ship shot at high-speed in real water. "We had a pickup truck in the parking lot pulling a 1/4" cable which went in through the stage door, up through pulleys, then connected to the underwater dolly the iceberg rode on," Legato explains, "because nothing was strong enough to yank this thing at high speed and actually pierce this metal hull we built. Our Arri-35 III camera, which was shooting at 48 fps, was riding in an underwater camera housing with the iceberg as it impacted the hull."

The problems endured by visual effects director of photography Erik Nash when shooting the 45' Titanic model with motion control paled beside the difficulties of shooting underwater. "Water is such a pain in the butt." Nash attests. "We had to keep the water clear but not too clear, and keep bubbles off the iceberg because as soon as it started to move, the bubbles would give away the scale. Then, when the iceberg split the seams in the lead plates on the hull, Jim wanted to see chunks of ice splintering and falling off. So we were working with this elaborate iceberg that was rigged to break apart, but which had to look like one piece before it hit the hull. Consequently, the model shop had to resculpt the iceberg for each take and mask all the cracks where it would break on impact. Lastly, we were photographing an event that took place on a moonless night, so we had to take some creative license -- in reality it was pitch black out there. We had to light the scene so the audience could see what was going on, but it couldn't look lit or look like it was daylight above water because we had to cut above water in our next shot."

That next cut, showing water pouring through tears in the side of the ship from within the cargo hold, was also achieved practically. "The model shop built a 1/4-scale cargo hold interior which we shot at high speed out in our parking lot at night," Nash recalls. "To create the effect of water bursting through the hull at high pressure, Mark Knoll built three firehoses into a manifold resembling a mail slot, so we could focus the water to hit the exact spot on the outside of the miniature set. The actual interior walls on Titanic were made up of overlapping steel plates, so the modelshop replicated these plates in soft lead. When the water -- which was pouring through the manifold at 10 gallons a second -- hit the outside of this miniature cargo hold, it ripped the seam in the lead plating and burst into the set."

"That was an 18-frame shot," Legato adds, noting the effect's brief screen time. "By shooting it for real at high speed, we bent the metal, broke the iceberg, pieces went flying, and it looked like what it was supposed to be. We have about 20 different shots in that collision sequence, but many of them ended up being double cut."

Cameron's dives to the actual Titanic wreck have revealed that the damage caused to the ship by the iceberg alone was, ironically, very minimal. "The iceberg just bent the hull in a little bit, then the rivets popped and the water just leaked into one too many of the watertight compartments," Legato recalls, noting that the barriors separating the compartments did not run entirely to the ceiling, which would allow water to pour over into each subsequent compartment. A serious design flaw. "As the water filled the sixth compartment, it caused this chain reaction that basically sank the ship. The front sank first, which caused the back to pitch up in the air, well beyond the stress levels that the structure could take, and the ship physically broke in half. It was as if you picked up a model and broke it over your knee."

Of course, that's not exactly what Cameron wanted the Titanic to look like at the climax of his film. The director shot as much of the sinking sequence as possible using the 774'6" ship set constructed in Tank Two at Fox Studios Baja (see on-line story: Epic Effects Christen the Titanic). Set on a gimbal, the entire ship was actually able to tilt and "sink" a staggering 8 degrees with the bow section attached. "For those shots, you'll see real people running from the sunken area around the wheelhouse all the way up to the poop deck in one shot," Legato promises. "The only effects there were finishing off the part of hull that wasn't built and putting in the horizon glow of stars."

The more dramatic sinking shots, where the rear poop deck rises up to a full 90 degrees in the air, involved much more elaborate sleights of hand, combining the 1/20 scale 45' miniature ship and the full-scale setpieces. "The entire Titanic set could only go up about 8 degrees relative to the water as a complete ship," Legato reiterates, "but the full-scale Poop Deck section was broken off and mounted on a hydraulic riser that could actually go up a full 90 degrees during a shot. Since any live-action shots with the ship's stern elevated between 8 degrees and 90 degrees could be done only with our full-scale poop deck minus the front of the ship, we used miniature extensions to add the missing front section of the boat in those shots where we wanted to show the entire Titanic sinking. We then populated that miniature deck with computer-generated people, which we used to tie both portions of the shot together, and who did many of the more dangerous stunts. When an actor in the live action foreground would tumble down the deck, once he reached the model portion of the shot, he'd be transformed into a CG stuntman, hit other computer-generated people on the miniature, and then fall into CG water."

In reality, the Titanic's poop deck rose not once, but twice, before the ship finally sank. After the bow filled with water, the stern raised some 45 degrees before the stress on the metal literally caused the ship to split in two, sending the poop deck crashing back onto the surface while the bow plunged to the bottom. This sequence, wherein the stern with its gargantuan propellers rises out of the water, hovering over the lifeboats and floundering passengers, was dubbed the "boot heel of God." Much of the sequence was shot with huge 1/8-scale miniatures in a water tank built just outside of Palmdale in Actin, California. "We shot in Actin because we needed a place where we could build a big, below-ground tank to shoot large water effects with a clean horizon at night with no city lights," Legato explains. "We never had a whole 1/8-scale ship. Since it broke very close to the waterline, we built the stern half and just a little bit of ship on the bow side of the break, so anything that was under water didn't exist. We also had a separate bow piece that got pulled straight under, which we shot from two angles. We put our 1/8-scale stern on a hydraulic rig. As it was lifted out of the water, we shot the props rising out of the ocean at high speed, around 60 to 72 fps, which became the background for the rowboats and people swimming."

Closeup shots of the hull breaking were done using the large scale stern pieces in DD's indoor tank, and demanded Mark Knoll's biggest practical gag. "Mark's guys had to support the 1/8-scale stern just back of the breaking point at a 45-degree angle, then let it go," Legato says. "When the ship broke, the hydraulic rig dropped the stern in the water and made a huge splash. We shot that event in real time using the new, fast-moving, high-speed motion-control rig that Erik Nash designed, which we set up alongside our big swimming pool here. If we wanted to move the camera on any one of these shots that involved big practical events, we had to move it quickly because we were overcranking to scale the water, so that gave us another reason to build this rig."

The final spectacle of the poop deck rising up 90 degrees and sinking was handled with Cameron's characteristic aplomb. "While it's pitched up in the air, we did these 'helicopter moves' around it as the hydraulic rig sucked it underwater," Legato says proudly. "To do those moves, we had to create a mobile camera that could go anywhere without any physical limitations." The problem was the only way to do the shot was with a crane, whose arc would impose its own restrictions. "We realized if we could use two cranes, and operate one against the other, we wouldn't be limited by the arc of the crane, so the grips put a Lennie arm on top of a Titan crane and that did the trick. That shot took us about a month to shoot."

The 45' Titanic model was also cut in half to enable Legato and company to shoot the stern rising up both the first and second time. Those long shots then had digital water added to complete them.

But Cameron wasn't content to just show the Titanic going down from afar. He wanted audiences to know just how it felt to go down with the ship. The director mounted his camera just above the very back rail of the poop deck, where our heroes are clinging for dear life, and mercilessly rode the behemoth with them as it plunged into the icy depths. The effect was created fairly simply by placing the actors on a full-sized poop deck setpiece surrounded by greenscreen, which was match-moved and composited with the 45' model.

The shot's impact is unforgettable, thanks to Cameron's unique choice of vantage point. "Jim's really gifted at that sort of thing. He goes for the coolest shot he can find," Legato says admiringly. "But the interesting thing I noticed as I watched him shoot is he does things very simply, much simpler than I thought. He sets up action so it's very easy to follow pictorially. The screen direction is never broken, he knows exactly where something's starting and where it's ending, and he does a great job of setting it up so when he cuts it's not jarring. And this particular shot [from the poop deck] tells an important portion of the action story. "When other filmmakers imitate Jim's style, they use a bunch of really fast cuts that disorient the audience -- but it looks like action. Jim doesn't do that. His action scenes are very simply told. And while somebody else would cut out a day or two early and not get every piece to make a sequence work pictorially, Jim has the guts to shoot all these different angles to make the visual story work."

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