After fabricating almost every major mechanical feature on the deck of the Titanic, VCU turned their work over to DD's modelers, who spent a total of 12 weeks painting and finishing the ship, a job which included the placement of small photographic TransLight interiors behind each cabin porthole. "It's insane, but I think you'll see it," Jacobs says. "The idea was that they were going to get right on top of this stuff with the camera. Typically, when you build a miniature, you build three sides just the stuff you'd see. In this case, the model had to be beautiful from all angles, because Cameron wanted a perfect, museum-quality miniature."
Once VCU had finished the detailing, they thought their encounter with the legendary ocean liner was over. "We said, 'Man, if we ever see another Titanic we'll throw up,'" Jacobs laughs. "But CBS was doing this Movie of the Week about Titanic, and they asked us to build some scale setpieces to work with water. When we were finally done with that, we said, 'Great, no more Titanic stuff.' Of course, we immediately got a call from Lightstorm [Cameron's production company], who asked if we wanted to build some engine-room pieces."
Cameron wanted to dramatize the moment where the Titanic's massive engines went into full reverse to avoid colliding with the iceberg, but "we didn't have time to build a big, bitchin' engine-room miniature," Jacobs explains. "Instead, someone came up with the brilliant idea of shooting the engine room aboard a Liberty ship, a real World War II troop transport moored in San Francisco. Its engines are very similar to the Titanic's, but one-third the size, so they decided to shoot that real engine room as a miniature. The only way to sell that was to put things in there that forced the scale. We actually took out all of the catwalks, gauges, dials and lightbulbs in certain areas picking our angles carefully and replaced them with 1/3-scale versions. Then VIFX composited people onto our 1/3-scale catwalks and stairways to give you a sense that the engine room was much bigger than it actually was."
This was another task which initially sounded deceptively simple to Jacobs and company: "We didn't realize that the temperature in the engine room of an old Liberty ship can reach 140 degrees! Because of that, we had to make everything out of silver soldered brass, because plastic would have sagged and melted. The [effects unit] had to get those shots in the can and prepare to composite the people in, so we had one week, literally, from the time we got the designs, put them on a truck, drove them to San Francisco and installed them on the ship. We were sure it would be impossible, but we did it. We had 16 people working around the clock."
Jacobs brought five modelers to San Francisco to dress the Liberty ship's engine room. "We had something like twelve 6'-long catwalks with handrails, and maybe eight stairways, which could be put together to create different layers. We also had big gauges and dials, along with 20 or 30 red caged lights, and we had to haul the stuff down 10 decks. The engine room was an old, greasy, nasty place, and it was very small. There wasn't a lot of extra room, and 1/3 scale is just huge. Also, since everything in the room moved, we couldn't attach any of our stuff to anything. We had a little latitude outside of frame, so we'd hang our C-stands there. It was really precarious and really hot.
"Our guys got there on Saturday night and dressed the room on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. We then got in the ship, drove it out to sea, and cruised around the bay shooting these shots for a couple of days. They actually stopped the engines and reversed them for real. I thought it was very clever to do the scene that way, and in the long run, it probably saved the production the cost of building a big elaborate set. In addition, the subtle nuances of the real engine room would have been impossible to duplicate. The shots are very convincing."
Jacobs and his partners in VCU unequivocally call Titanic "the most challenging work we've ever done. Everything we did on this show was a hassle. There was never an easy task, but I think the work we did is going to pay off."
