|
To add more realism and life to a pair of shots within the wreck of the sunken liner, BFTR created and composited 3D digital fish into the scene, matching the movement and shifting lighting of the underwater shots with a CG version of a swimming Macrourus berglax. Artist Jordan Harris created the fish element in Softimage on the SGI, and composited the shot in After Effects on the Mac, with texture maps created by fellow artist Frank Vitale.
|
At left is one of our two digital fish shots. We modeled and animated this Macrourus berglax in Softimage with different light passes and composited it using Adobe After Effects on the Mac.
©1997 Paramount/Fox
|
|
One of three star-addition shots by BFTR, which involved rotoscoping and hand-tracking a starfield into the black sky background of the footage.
©1997 Paramount/Fox
|
While the majority of the sinking and aftermath shots requiring digitally-added stars were done by VIFX and Cinesite, a trio of long (average length: 200 frames) modern-day shots featuring Old Rose (Gloria Stuart) on the fantail of the Keldysh were done by BFTR. Using a common digital starfield
image and horizon element provided by Digital Domain, artists Brian Holden and Yukiko Ishiwata tracked and rotoscoped the black sky areas in the live action footage, which was then composited and color-corrected by Van.
The tracking and roto not only had to account for the myriad of pipes and railings in the scene, but also had to incorporate a realistic rising and falling motion to create the sense of the ship at sea. One major challenge for all the houses on these star shots was that the stars had to remain visible, even when they were logically out of focus in the background. This required some dramatic license in the look of the stars against the sky.
Many small but necessary digital tweaks to TITANIC shots were performed by BFTR in a short time period: we painted out a boom microphone from a shot of Jack and Rose running down a flooded hallway; using an animated element created by DD, we sweetened a large-scale miniature shot of the ship splitting in two by adding a flailing passenger falling into
A digital hull replacement in which a salt-rusted and incomplete hull on the practical set was transformed into a more appropriately shiny new hull, courtesy of ElectricImage and After Effects.
©1997 Paramount/Fox
|
the breach; a wrinkled seam in the night sky backdrop--which passed through a halated light glow during the camera move--fell prey to BFTR's digital surgery in the Rose suicide sequence.
A spectacular live sunset shot of Jack and Rose at the ship's bow was marred only by a cresting beach wave on location-- breaking inappropriately in what was supposed to be an open ocean--which was digitally removed by BFTR.
For a lengthy crane shot of the live action ship set, we were asked to simply minimize the incongruity of some set damage cause by the salt air at the Rosarito studio; instead of a simple paint-out, artist Steve Walker tracked and replaced the salt-rusted and peeling ship's side hull with a more appropriately pristine CG one using ElectricImage and After Effects.
BFTR was also called upon to perform a digital "actor removal" when a narrative editorial change necessitated the removal of a character from a flooding set. In the original cut, evil bodyguard Spicer Lovejoy (David Warner) pursues Jack and Rose further down into the ship, passing through the flooding First Class Dining Room. When this piece of action was omitted --but the shot of the flooding room by itself was needed-- we had to remove the actor from the handheld shot.
|
Losing the actor but saving the set meant digitally erasing poor David Warner from the shot and adding additional creeping water elements.
©1997 Paramount/Fox
|
|
In addition, we added some creeping water elements to show the water level rising faster, and we stabilized an inappropriate camera roll in the Steadicam shot. continued...
Banned From The Ranch Entertainment Home Page
General Information: info@bftr.com
|
