After the 3-D digital team diligently added the missing 10 percent to the full-scale Titanic set, and placed the landlocked ship in the midst of a highly believable CG ocean, those disparate elements were composited by artists working under 2-D digital effects supervisors Mike Kanfer and Mark Forker, another pair of Apollo 13 veterans. Cameron and Legato hoped that by keeping DD's Apollo team together, shots of the doomed Titanic set against the immensity of the sea would achieve the same majesty and mythic power as shots of the Apollo capsule lost in the vastness of space. "The Titanic is a major star of the film," Legato says emphatically. "It's treated lovingly, and is pampered in the way it's photographed. When we put the Titanic miniature into our background re-creation of the Southhampton dock, our concept was to make the buildings smaller and the other boats in the harbor less attractive. We treated the Titanic as if she was a female movie star: you don't surround her with other beautiful women, you make her the focal point. The Titanic is the star of any one shot. We're in awe of this ship."
Consequently, visual effects cinematographer Eric Nash, yet another Apollo 13 alumnus, employed some striking beauty lighting on the Titanic miniature, particularly for earlier scenes of the majestic vessel in motion. At 45' long, DD's Titanic model was bigger than some real boats, which created a number of photographic challenges. Nash allows, "The bigger the miniature, the more it alleviates depth-of-field problems, but the downside is lighting them, especially in a space that really isn't big enough. That was one of the things we struggled with from the outset on the 45-footer. As soon as we put that 45' ship in that big hangar at the Hughes Aircraft site in Venice, and tried to put our keylight far enough away that it looked even and the shadows fell naturally, we quickly ran up against the ceiling or the wall. In the confined spaces we had, it was next to impossible to light the Titanic evenly, so we used multiple keylights for practical and aesthetic reasons. Cameron wanted to play up the majesty of what was, at the time, the biggest, grandest ocean liner in the world. We were creating a kind of ode to the Titanic.
"Since the ship was the lead character in the movie, it had to look better than it really would have looked in single-key daylight, so we took some license. For example, the foredeck looked best when it was sidelit with long raking shadows falling across it. If we applied that same direction of keylight to the funnels, though, they looked flat and uninteresting, so for those we cheated the keylight more around the back. Tony Anderson, my gaffer on the big ship, came up with some clever ways of making three 18K HMIs look like one keylight. We tried to do it judiciously, but there's no shot with a single keylight where you see a significant amount of the ship. I'll be the first to admit that anyone with any kind of an eye for lighting will be able to tell that the Titanic's miraculously lit from two or more positions. But during the flow of the scene, I don't think most people will notice."
Nash shot the 45' Titanic using four-perf Mitchell cameras rolling in Cameron's preferred Super 35 format. Night scenes were shot on Kodak's Vision 500T 5279 stock, while daylight scenes were shot on EXR 5245, "because that's what the first unit was using," Nash says. "5245 is a [50 ASA] daylight stock, so it's very slow which, combined with the small aperture we were using for depth of field, stretched our shooting times into hours, especially when we did close-ups. There are some shots where we are way closer to this miniature than anybody in their right mind would get, but Cameron likes to push the envelope."
The director had decided that the full-scale Titanic would be employed mostly in tight shots of people on deck, while a miniature would be used for longer shots of the entire ship underway. "The full-scale set was designed to be used for shots looking across the deck, toward the real ocean behind the ship," says Legato. "We even used camera moves to suggest that the Titanic was actually underway, not just sitting on a beach against a stationary background, which was a very effective tactic."
Meanwhile, Cameron mandated that Legato and Nash devise elaborate means to put his human stars on the deck of the 45' miniature. "Jim thought it would be cool to start on a close-up of Leonardo DiCaprio at the bow, and then go back the entire length of this 900' ship to show that it's basically teeming with life a thousand people walking and talking, guys in steerage having a fistfight, parents picking up their children and pointing out how big the smokestacks are," Legato says. "This is the glory moment, but it also sets up the rest of the story."
During the sequence, the camera begins on a two-shot of protagonist Jack Dawson (DiCaprio) and his shipmate, Fabrizio (Danny Nucci), standing on the bow and the camera circles around them to the starboard side, pulling back along the Titanic's entire length in one continuous helicopter-type move. The shot rises up over the bridge, past two of the funnels, then crosses back to the port side, dropping down almost to the waterline before ending on a distant view of the liner leaving the European continent forever. In tackling this sweeping move, Nash decided to shoot the miniature first once he figured out how to do it. "Part of the problem was where to lay the motion-control track, and how to configure it on stage so we could hit all of these key frames along the way that Jim felt were really important," Nash recalls. "In the end, we put the camera on a crane-arm motion-control system. It was a fairly involved process just programming the shot and getting it to have that smooth helicopter feel. It's the first time you get a really good look at the whole ship both in close-up and in long shot."
As far as Nash was concerned, the camera position at the start of the move came "ridiculously close to the model, but after we shot a test, Cameron said, 'Get closer!' Our model crew chief, George Stevens, and his team did their finest paint job. They begged us not to get any closer, but the model held up amazingly well."
The finished shot which was later optically flopped was over 1,000 frames long. "We couldn't even shoot the beauty pass in one piece because it required different lighting and flagging setups for different portions," Nash says. "We actually had two shifts shooting that shot, and we had to choreograph overlaps as we transitioned from one setup to the next, being very careful about shadows not changing and flags not crossing. Once it was programmed and approved, it took 60 hours of continuous shooting from the time we started rolling the first pass till we were finished 2 1/2 days, with a 10-man crew at all times. No individual pass lasted more than a couple of hours, and most of the work was changing setups and mattes. When it was all said and done, they had to scan 9,000 frames of film for all of the various pieces and that was just the miniature portion."
Nash then had to come up with a way to shoot the talent and lock them onto the bow of the ship during this incredibly intricate continuous shot. "That was one of the big challenges that Rob hit me with early on," Nash admits. "I said, 'How are we gonna do that, Rob?' and he said, 'Oh, you'll figure it out.' He had a broad idea about doing something we played with when we were both working on Star Trek: The Next Generation, using rotation in the subject to replace a big translational camera move. The problem Rob laid on me was to figure out the math to translate this huge sweeping motion-control helicopter move into something that we could shoot full-scale on the talent in real time knowing that there wasn't a motion-control machine in the world that could do this move as it was done on the miniature, at full size and 24 frames per second."
DD didn't even have a fast, steady real-time motion-control rig, so Nash worked out the broad strokes of the design, then asked Scott Salsa, who heads DD's machine shop, to engineer it. In order to scale up those sweeping motion-control "helicopter" moves on the 45' Titanic miniature, Salsa's real-time equipment had to move very quickly. "This thing had to scream up and down the track, sometimes moving 10 feet per second, and be steady as a rock," Nash says. "Otherwise, we couldn't have pulled this shot off. Scott's rig worked like a champ."
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