On Titanic, Legato didn't have enough time and money to build a gantry, or the inclination to fly Mir subs on wires, which would have made lighting difficult and control even more so. Still, he liked the in-camera quality of Dream-Quest's approach. His solution was elegant, simple and cost-effective. "Rob said, 'What if we just hang the shipwreck from the ceiling? Then we could do everything else on the ground, and we wouldn't have to hang the subs from wires,'" Nash recalls. That way, the model-moving rigs could be used for other applications afterwards.
Legato's "inverse gantry" was set up in another part of the same Hughes Aircraft hangar where the 45' Titanic was shot. The detailed 1/20-scale shipwreck miniature was hung upside-down from the hangar's ceiling, while the 1/20-scale Mir subs, built by Tony Meininger, were also mounted upside-down on two model-movers running along track on the stage floor. To program the moves of the Mir subs and the camera, which was itself mounted upside-down on a third grounded model-mover, Jim Rider, Titanic's dry-for-wet motion-control operator, juggled 24 axes of motion (eight for each mover). The models and camera, working in close proximity, were constantly in danger of running into each other in the dark, smoke-filled stage. And with the shipwreck, subs and camera upside-down, Nash and company had to constantly be thinking in reverse.
Sometimes, the hangar itself created problems. The tin structure tended to "breathe," causing the shipwreck model to "sway in the breeze," according to Nash. "Nothing gives a shot away quicker than seeing this wreck that's supposedly planted on the ocean floor moving in front of camera, so we braced the model off to the floor with steel pipe to keep it from swinging."
To make matters worse, the spotlights on the mini-subs, actually focusable Mini Mag-Lite flashlight bulbs and reflectors, were relatively dim; consequently, exposure times routinely stretched to 30 seconds per frame, which meant that some passes took six hours to shoot. Unfortunately, the bulbs weren't designed to run continuously for six hours in smoke, and they would often go out in the midst of the long passes. "Depending on the situation," Nash recalls with a sigh, "we'd either replace all of the bulbs and start over, or back up a few frames, replace the bulbs and pick it up again, hoping that we wouldn't lose any more of them."
Kodak's high-speed Vision 500T 5279 stock, which worked so well for the night shots of the 45' Titanic, presented problems on the smoke stage. "It's got a few quirks in the blue layer," Nash explains. "There's a magic spot on the curve of the film that gets incredibly grainy at a certain density in the blue layer. Above that it's fine, and below that it's fine. There were so many variables with the dry-for-wet work in terms of smoke density, blue fill and the little sub lights that sometimes, even after we'd done tests and gotten a shot approved, we'd shoot it and it would be grainy beyond belief."
The greatest challenge for the effects team was matching their dry-for-wet shots with 35mm two-perf footage of the actual Titanic wreck. Cameron commandeered two Mir mini-subs down to the wreck in the summer of 1995, and shot the footage himself. "That real footage is going in the movie," Nash says. "We're just augmenting it. The camera was on one sub, but both subs are in the movie; we're doing all of the shots that feature both subs, as well as the wide shots Jim couldn't get because it was pitch black down there. Because he's using real footage, ours has to match impeccably. He's going to be cutting back to back, so there's nothing to hide behind. It's been a long haul just establishing the methodology."
Often, it's the almost invisible details that make for effective effects. After studying Cameron's footage of the actual wreck, Legato realized that the images had a specific blue haze which suggested the immense volume of water; after some tests, he learned that it was impossible to re-create that same look on the dry-for-wet stage with lighting alone. Legato's solution was to flash the film in-camera, during lengthy motion-control moves. "We did the flash in one light pass on the blue layer of the film," Legato explains. "We used a blue-and green-gelled Kino Flo backlight that was maybe six stops underexposed, so dim that it couldn't register on film if photographed separately. Although you couldn't see the flashing itself, it broke the inertia of the film in the blue layer, and with the addition of white light in the foreground, where the mini-subs' lamps were, it was enough exposure to register the blue layer and create the illusion that as the white light falls off in depth, it naturally becomes deep blue. The effect looked perfectly natural and was a dead match to the real underwater footage."
The final shots were achieved almost entirely in-camera. The rods supporting the subs were removed digitally by DD's CG artists, who also added digital particles, only visible in the subs' lights.
Titanic is a memory piece told from the point of view of a centenarian survivor of the wreck, played by actress Gloria Stuart, a veteran of another special effects landmark, 1933's The Invisible Man. As Stuart's character watches the Mir subs exploring the sunken Titanic on video monitors, Cameron uses flashbacks to tie past and present together. As the mini-subs travel over the shipwreck, the image subtly brightens as the rusticles retreat, revealing the Titanic reigning above the water in 1912. Conversely, shots of the ship underway suddenly turn ghostly as rusticles form along the bow, the passengers slowly disappear and the ship transforms into the sunken wreck it is today. "Psychologically, when we look at the wreck of the ship, we almost automatically imagine what it would be like in all its glory," Legato opines. "We therefore used that idea to make seamless transitions that fill in the details in your mind, and transform the wreck into what it was like when people were walking down the stairs and everything was in perfect condition. On the other hand, when you see something as grand and cool as the Titanic underway, you imagine what it looks like now. But we're not steering you in that direction, you're heading there already. It's just human nature, so when we actually go through this transition, it seems natural, and not 'effecty.'"
To ensure that these majestic fantasies would appear to be absolutely real, Legato used "a combination of every trick in the book. We used morphs to transition from the ship to the wreck and back just to get them to align properly, not to show off the fact that they were changing. The transformation involves very gentle reveals of the rusticles starting to form on the outside of the ship, and then a portion of it appears as if it were shot underwater. When we were going the other way, we brightened the wreck as if it were being shot in broad daylight. Then we mixed both ends against the middle to create the final look. It's very subtle, which is something I learned on Interview with the Vampire: audiences look twice at certain subtleties was it real or not real? and those shots, when pulled off correctly, evoke a subliminal feeling and leave people with something haunting."
Legato's eerie sleight of hand extended to the Titanic's passengers as well: "As the ship with the people on board is fading away to the blue underwater look of the wreck, the people themselves don't just dissolve off, they dissolve to a ghostly state, as if they're still standing on the deck of the wrecked ship, lit by the Mir subs. They have this almost transparent, hazy quality. It was very creepy to see these ghosts walking around on the deck of the sunken Titanic before they eventually dissipate. It creates a very haunting feeling."
Of course, that's something nearly everyone involved with Titanic experienced while filming this tragic tale of man's hubris in the modern age. "Every once in awhile when we were filming scenes in the water with the lifeboats, we'd realize that we were the same vantage point as some of the victims of the wreck," Legato says. "The difference was that we could say 'Cut' and just walk away. We realized what we were depicting that this had really happened and it was staggering."
